C A N T A B R I A   U N I V E R S I T Y
 
 
   
 
  TWENTIETH CENTURY ART IN CANTABRIA    Twentieth Century Architecture
Twentieth Century Sculpture
Modern Painting
 
Twentieth Century Sculpture.  
    José María de Pereda monument (Santander)   During the whole of the twentieth century the more important cities were adorned with public monuments dedicated to the most significant events of their history. In 1911 the José María de Pereda monument was unveiled in Santander in the Pereda gardens, as picturesque rememoration of some of his costumbrista (social-realistic) novels. In the modernist tradition, the monument to Menéndez Pelayo was erected, created by mariano Benlliure and situated in the gardens of the library that is also dedicated to him in Santander.

The Palencian sculptor Vitorio Macho stands out for combining modernism with the Baroque tradition in his sepulchral monument to Menéndez Pelayo in Santander cathedral, and in a bronze Christ in the parish church of Los Corrales de Buelna. But it was the sculptor José Villalobos, of Castro Urdiales, a follower of Constantin Brancusi and Jacques Lipchitz, who broke with nineteenth-century tradition and initiated a more modern current that sought a pure sculpture, without the use of cast-moulds, returning to straightforward cutting and chiselling. He made the monument to the poet José del Río Saínz at La Magdalena (Santander) and the sculpture at Santo Domingo de la Calzada in the valley of Toranzo.

 
   
 
Monument to Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (Santander's cathedral)
 
   
   
 
   
   
                               
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