From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In November 1936, still in the early months of the Spanish Civil War, General Franco’s rebel planes dropped incendiary bombs on Madrid, scoring a direct hit on the Palacio de Liria. Five years earlier, after the king of Spain was deposed and the Second Republic proclaimed, the Duke of Alba, the most titled aristocrat in Spain and a descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots, had decamped to Claridge’s in London. His 18th-century neoclassical palace, built in the French style by Ventura Rodríguez and rivalled only by the Palacio Real de Madrid, was appropriated by a communist battalion. The Loyalists, keen to show that they were protecting the country’s heritage, and to counter perceptions of mobbish iconoclasm, transformed his palace and its vast art collection, the result of 500 years of collecting, into a ‘Museum of the People’.
There is film footage from 1936 of the smouldering ruin: only the four facades remained of the building that one writer had described in 1928 as ‘the epitome of chic and coveted Mecca of snobbery’. However, Communist soldiers and the duke’s remaining staff valiantly saved most of the priceless art collection from the flames. Works by Titian, Van Dyck, Velázquez, Rubens and Goya, treasures such as the desk of Napoleon III, Meissen porcelain and Gobelins tapestries, as well as trophies including elephant tusks and a stuffed polar bear, were strewn over the lawn of the English Garden. The duke’s confiscated spoils were transported for safekeeping to Valencia, where his collection was shown in the open cloisters of a 17th-century seminary in a propagandistic ‘Exhibition of Artworks from the Palacio de Liria Saved from Fascist Barbarism by the Communist Party’.
Installation view of ‘Flamboyant: Joana Vasconcelos at the Liria Palace’ in 2025. Photo: Juan Rayos
Before going into exile, the Duke of Alba had removed his very ‘best paintings’ to the British Embassy in Madrid and the Bank of Spain, leaving the walls of the Liria with strange gaps. The duke supported Franco’s coup and, after the Nationalists took power, served as his ambassador in London. He deposited his art collection at the Prado, where it filled five rooms, but resigned his post in 1945 when it became clear that Franco did not intend to restore the monarchy, as he’d hoped. He returned to Madrid to rebuild his palace along plans drawn up by the British architect Edwin Lutyens, who had been a frequent guest.
While the works were underway, the widowed duke lived with his reclaimed collection and his only daughter, Cayetana, in another building that he called the Museíllo, or Little Museum. He died in 1953 and the project was completed by Cayetana, the new Duchess of Alba, a few years later. She had been born at the Liria Palace in 1926 and moved to England when she was five, leaving behind a portrait by Ignacio Zuloaga showing her on a small pony, with the family dachshund and an unsettling Mickey Mouse doll. She declared the faithful reconstruction of the palace the ‘most difficult task’ of her life. It was inaugurated in 1959 with a large charity fashion show by Yves Saint Laurent for Dior with 2,000 guests.
The duchess, a society beauty and jetsetter, friend of Jackie Kennedy and Grace Kelly, was photographed by Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon, and graced the covers of Time and Harper’s Bazaar. She identified with Goya’s Duchess of Alba in White (1795), which hangs in a room of the Liria Palace dedicated to the artist. The painter and the duchess were long rumoured to have been lovers: The Naked Maja (1958), a film starring Ava Gardner, was predicated on this affair and the supposition that the duchess was also the subject of Goya’s clothed and naked Maja pictures, which now hang in the Prado. Apparently, Picasso asked to paint Cayetana in the same pose, but she refused because, a committed monarchist, she feared being identified too closely with someone so left wing.
Installation view of ‘Flamboyant: Joana Vasconcelos at the Liria Palace’ in 2025, with Goya’s portrait of the 13th Duchess of Alba in pride of place on the wall. Photo: Juan Rayos
The eccentric duchess, a keen flamenco dancer and aficionado of bullfighting, was widowed in 1972; she went on to marry her Jesuit confessor and then, at the age of 85, a handsome man she met at the cinema who was 25 years her junior, jeopardising the inheritance of her six children. She preferred to live in another of the Alba palaces, in Seville (in the 18th century you could supposedly walk from Portugal to France on family land). With her frizzy hair and cosmetically modified face, her loud floral dresses and fishnet tights, she increasingly resembled a cross between Barbara Cartland and Jocelyn Wildenstein, or a ‘Pekingese with Botox’ as one newspaper cruelly put it.
Having been briefly a ‘Museum of the People’, the Liria used to have a three-year waiting list for visitors wanting to join one of the occasional public tours. However, since the duchess’s death in 2014, at the age 88, the present duke now welcomes the proletariat into his home, Tuesday to Sunday. The arsenic-green hall, malachite library, pink silk walls and copious gilt convey something of his mother’s exuberant personality. The interiors, crammed with masterpieces, are themselves facsimiles, and there is an uncanny perfection to the pristine procession of rooms, each styled as if a theatrical set from a different era of family history and patronage or, perhaps a legacy from the Prado’s hang, according to art-historical regions.
Installation view of ‘Flamboyant: Joana Vasconcelos at the Liria Palace’ in 2025. Photo: Juan Rayos
There is the Stuart Room, with tapestries of the Trojan War dating to 1485, presided over by a 16th-century portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots; another is devoted to the 3rd Duke, who was painted by Titian and Rubens (‘I have no enemies,’ he said on his deathbed. ‘I have hanged them all’); and a room is devoted to the duke’s great-great-aunt, Empress Eugénie de Montijo, who was married to Napoleon III and died in the Liria Palace in 1920, leaving her portraits by Winterhalter and Aubusson tapestries to her nephew. Every surface is covered with silver-framed family photos and trinkets, reminding you that this is still a private home.
The duke has also invited the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos to create kitsch interventions in his state rooms that seek to create a bridge between high and popular culture. In ‘Flamboyant’ (until 31 July), titled in homage to the late duchess, Vasconcelos has crocheted grand pianos and outsized animal sculptures in funereal black, as if they were shrouded in the lace mantillas that she liked to wear. There is a huge pussy-bow created from Dior fragrance bottles, a huge chandelier made from cheap plastic earrings and a pair of colossal stilettos fashioned out of stacked saucepans. Though worth an estimated $3bn, Cayetana liked to style herself ‘the people’s duchess’. ‘I have a lot of artworks,’ she said, ‘but I can’t eat them, can I?’
Installation view of ‘Flamboyant: Joana Vasconcelos at the Liria Palace’ in 2025. Photo: Juan Rayos
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.