Eclectic Modernity Spanish Art During the Second Republic
During the 1930s, artists found ways to extend the artistic practices that had begun in the 1920s by continuing to build artists groups around magazines, exhibitions, manifestos and the regular staging of national and international exhibitions. Friendships and polemics alike were the building blocks of artists groups that extended from the capital to the Canary Islands. Emboldened by the political changes of the Second Republic, and inspired by international events, many artists saw in the new decade an opportunity to position innovation in the arts alongside social reform. The groups that formed throughout Spain to support the creation and display of modern art, from ADLAN (Amics de l’Art Nou) in Barcelona to Eduardo Westerdahl’s Gaceta de Arte in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, were characterized by an unlikely yet wide spread blending of art and commerce, artists and entrepreneurs, galleries and publishing houses, polemical gestures and government support, national dialogue and international outreach. Some initiatives like the SAI (Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos, 1920-1936), were open to a range of artistic trends in painting and bridged the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera and the Second Republic, while others were more closely bound in chronology and mission, like the architectural collective GATEPAC (Grupo de Artistas y Técnicos Españoles Para la Arquitectura Contemporánea, 1931-1936). The diversity and eclecticism found in the pages of the magazines published by these groups were sometimes at odds with the more exclusionary tone of their editorials and manifestos. However nothing less characterized the most notable “isms” of the period outside of Spain as well, which made of that space between rhetoric and fact, ideal and practice, the very matter that constituted modern art.