Sancho Panza in the 20th Century, one of six panels that comprise the Don Quixote murals painted by Luis Quintanilla in UMKC’s Haag Hall.
The KCUR podcast A People’s History of Kansas City released an episode this month devoted to the Luis Quintanilla murals in UMKC’s Haag Hall. The murals, which were recently restored by the Spanish fresco restoration specialists Beatriz del Ordi and Iñaki Gárate Llombart, were painted in 1940 by Quintanilla during his brief tenure at UMKC (then the University of Kansas City) while in exile from fascist Spain.
Quintanilla had been appointed by the university’s president Clarence Decker to serve as resident artist, training apprentices and using UKC students, faculty, and staff members as models for the murals. Six large panels comprise the Haag artwork: Don Quixote in the Real World, Sancho Panza in the Real World, Don Quixote in the Ideal World, Sancho Panza in the Ideal World, Don Quixote in the 20th Century, and Sancho Panza in the 20th Century.
The podcast episode covered the history of the murals and of Quintanilla’s activities in Kansas City, featured interviews with UMKC faculty members and the restoration’s principal investigators Viviana Grieco, Ph.D., and Dr. Alberto Villamandos, Ph.D., and detailed the various styles employed by Quintanilla in the murals, including buon fresco, classical Renaissance and Baroque-style painting, a grotesqueness akin to that of Francisco Goya, as well as a modernist rejection of traditional ideas associated with European art.
The restoration is just one of many initiatives made possible by the Kansas City Monuments Coalition, which was created by UMKC after the university was awarded a $4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. KCMC supports preservation and commemorative organizations across Kansas City, such as the Fort Osage National Historic Site, Missouri Town, and the Wornall-Majors House Museums.
Quintanilla’s murals were also the subject of a recent event on campus, “Making the Imaginary Real: Luis Quintanilla’s Don Quixote Murals.” The event was a lecture featuring Patrick Lenaghan, a scholar at the Hispanic Society of America, and Christine Kierig, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Berkeley. The lecture covered the challenges faced by artists attempting to illustrate Don Quixote and concluded with a guided tour of the murals.
