Collection, 1881–2021 Vol. I
José Lino Vaamonde Valencia, inside the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, Paris, 1937 (pictured: Joan Miró, Payés catalán en rebeldía or El segador [Catalan Peasant in Revolt or The Reaper], 1937)
Collection, 1881–2021
Vol. I
Contents
11 Communicating Vessels I
Manuel Borja-Villel
Episode 1
33 Avant-Garde Territories: City
Rosario Peiró
83 Paper Fortifications: The Defense of Madrid and the Proliferation of the Press during the Civil War
Jordana Mendelson
119 Avant-Garde Territories: Magazines
Rosario Peiró
167 Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s (Wassily) Chair: Modernity and Iconicity in the Pages of the Spanish Press
Jordana Mendelson
173 Avant-Garde Territories: Architecture
Fernando Marzá and Francisco Rojas
199 Introduction to the Statistical Monograph on Barcelona’s Working Class in 1856 (1867)
Ildefonso Cerdà
Episode 2
225 The Lost Thought
Rosario Peiró
275 The Stateless and the Savage: The Third Perspective of the Iberian Exiles
Germán Labrador
Episode 3
293 Campo cerrado
Rosario Peiró
323 CONFIDENTIAL: Do not publish (Notes on the reception of the Spanish Pavilion at the IX Triennale di Milano, 1951)
José Antonio Coderch
Episode 4
329 Double Exposure: Art and the Cold War
Rosario Peiró
391 … and Colonial Rogelio López Cuenca
Episode 5
399 The Enemies of Poetry: Resistances in Latin America
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
433 The Sanction of Déjà Vu: Chilean Art and Memory of the Transition
Lola Hinojosa
463 Walter Zanini and the Utopia of the Museum-Gesture in Brazil
Cristina Freire
José Lino Vaamonde Valencia, outside the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, Paris, 1937 (pictured: Julio González, Montserrat , 1936–37)
March 4, 2018 . One news story has captivated the media and social networks in Barcelona: the removal of the statue commemorating Antonio López, Marquis of Comillas. The offi cial act is celebrated with abundant fireworks, live music, and public festivities, as a prelude to a participatory process to rename the square. The reason is obvious: the nobility exalted by the effi gy cannot cover up the Marquis’ slave-owning past. A diverse group of activists and associations advocating for the renaming of the square had proposed the name of Idrissa Diallo, a young man who had died in the Zona Franca Immigration Detention Centre. Gerardo Pisarello, Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, described it as “an act of reparation for all those who were aggrieved by the City.” 1
The cult of monuments that has characterized much of European modernity is now going through turbulent times. Cities are full of these monuments. Their purpose is to celebrate history’s winners, but their effectiveness is not guaranteed. Every victory hides a defeat, and at some point the cries of the vanquished come to life. 2 Greek tragedies tell us that the dead return to the world of the living if they have not been properly buried or if their death has not been adequately symbolized. The rise in references to the figure of Antigone comes as no
1 “Barcelona retira la estatua de Antonio López por ‘esclavista,’” La Vanguardia , Barcelona, March 4, 2018. For a discussion of this issue, see Jorge Ribalta, “Demano la restitució del monument a Antonio López,” El País – Quadern , June 18, 2022.
2 Juan-Ramón Barbancho, Arte y posmemoria. El arte como preservación de la memoria tras el conflicto (Madrid: Brumaria, 2020).
Manuel Borja-Villel
surprise. Artists as varied as Elena Asins and Grada Kilomba have revisited the dilemma of Creon’s niece: Should Antigone, the protagonist of Sophocles’ tragedy, follow human law and leave her brother unburied, or obey the higher divine mandate to bury him? At the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century these silenced and excluded voices return, along with their rightful claim to a place in history. As in classical theater, their demand is met with rejection by those who do not tolerate dissent and seek to impose a univocal narrative.
In this sense, neoliberalism has tried to make us think that conflict does not exist. Everything—any criticism or dissent— is tolerated as long as it is framed within the institutional apparatus. The role of the established discourse is to ensure that shifts and ruptures are ultimately reconciliatory and do not unmask the violence of the system or reveal that history and art are contested terrain. This engineering of consensus—ubiquitous during the 1980s and 1990s in Spain—which rules out any real possibility of change, is today being called into question. Now the neoliberal principle of growth evokes ruin and the future is associated with dystopia. For years, advocates of globalization promised it would generate prosperity for all. But in fact there has been an exponential increase in inequalities, reaching levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The pandemic, war, and the belief in impending ecological collapse have heightened feelings of insecurity and distrust. Many people who resent their situation are looking to the past. Faced with the uncertainties of the present, nostalgia for a lost utopia has taken hold in parts of society. According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, this suggests a retreat to the notion of the “tribe,” which brings together contradictory political positions—from neoliberal anarchism to xenophobic nationalism—and is defi ned by its opposition to the “other.” Everything is fi ne with us, the enemy is outside. 3
In this context, tradition and heritage acquire the status of a brand; the past, like everything else, is not immune to the widespread commodification of life. Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers
3 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 49.
Communicating Vessels I
expressed this admirably when he turned Napoleon’s image into a brandy bottle label in his 1975 fi lm La Bataille de Waterloo (The Battle of Waterloo). While Karl Marx explained in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) that revolutions often need garments of the past to cover their own contradictions, Broodthaers’ fi lm reveals how today’s counterrevolutions devour history, and, in doing so, empty it of content. In a consumer society, Jacques-Louis David’s 1901 painting Napoleon Crossing the Alps advertises an alcoholic beverage.
We wear the clothes of the past. But are they the right ones? A function of the contemporary museum is to bring to light that which has been excluded or left in the shadows by the prevailing narrative. But museums must also question the validity of their operational categories and study the conditions in which artists, critics, and institutions deliver and construct their statements, and how they are interpreted, shedding light on the rules that govern them and the difficulties they conceal.
Memorials are a hot topic, both their construction and their demolition. However, memory is not history. Memory tries to position itself in an ideal non-place, while history is located in specific zones where there are dominators and dominated. The rehang of the Reina Sofía Museum Collection, under the generic title Communicating Vessels, starts in now-time. 4 It interprets past events with a view to imagining possible futures rather than going back to distant times. Which is why it is necessary to approach history as genealogy, in the sense that Michel Foucault, following Nietzsche, used the term: as something that disrupts the idea of belonging. While the grand narrative invents a continuous linear identity and yearns for the consistency of already known facts, genealogy explores its provenance and pullulates through zones that seem like dead ends—lost acts that can bring clarity to what we think we are and what we could have been and never were. It points to that which we are not aware of,
4 Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Manuel Borja-Villel
pushing us to think beyond what we know. 5 As Leda Maria Martins argues from a different perspective, genealogical time is not chronological—time is not linear but a spiral, it shapes an ontology, “a landscape peopled by the childhoods of the body, a path prior to any notion of progress and a way of predisposing beings in the cosmos.”6
The museum’s Collection questions historical canons, and also the temptation to replace them with new ones. As such, it is not intended to become a pantheon of illustrious fi gures: what matters is not the number of artists who are included or left out of its galleries, but the events and works that are interwoven within it, the paths that open up, the questions that are raised. In Communicating Vessels we fi nd fi gures and events—such as Ángeles Santos, the 1937 Pavilion of the Spanish Republic, and Seville Expo ’92—that are not presented in order for visitors to recognize or identify with them, or to explain some higher order. On the contrary, the aim is to introduce elements of rupture or discontinuity in the realm of the familiar. Similarly, the grotesque and bizarre—prisms that distort reality and erode pre- established opinions and certainties—are also recurring elements, which can be seen, for example, in the paintings of artists as diverse as José Gutiérrez Solana and Miriam Cahn.
During a discussion of the work of Mario Merz at the Museo Reina Sofía on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition Time is Mute, 7 a member of the audience asked about the Turin-born artist’s legitimacy in “appropriating” the igloo, an architectural typology that the questioner associated with Inuit culture. The question did not take into account the fact that for Merz these structures were not identity-based—on the contrary, they
5 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rainbow (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 76–100.
6 Leda Maria Martins, Performances do tempo espiralar. Poéticas do corpo-tela (Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2021), 21. I owe this reference to Hélio Menezes.
7 Mario Merz: Time is Mute, Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, October 11, 2019 – August 30, 2020.
suggested a relationship with the tents of many nomadic populations, especially those of the Roma people who camped in Alba (a town near Turin) in the 1950s. It also ignored the relationship between those igloos and the geodesic domes that enjoyed some popularity in the mid-twentieth century. But above all, the comment highlighted a common methodological error: that of projecting contemporary ideas and formats onto other times, without acknowledging the different contexts and signifiers and the fact that many of our points of reference did not exist then. In response to this approach, some artists such as Rogelio López Cuenca and Ines Doujak use deliberate anachronism in the opposite sense, that is, with an awareness of their own frame of reference.
Museums seem to be caught between two opposing forces. The fi rst revolves around an evolutionist and teleological vision, which has prevailed in modern historiography and often ends up reduced to a list of names. The second arises from what Edward Said described as exoticism, through which unexamined prejudices and cliches are devised for others. 8 For example, it is often argued that in the Greco-Persian wars, the “soft living” of oriental empires had led to their defeat and dissolution in the face of the Athenians’ prudent disposition. This ignores the constant exchanges between the two cultures for centuries, and the fact that Greek culture was porous and indebted to the East. The idea is not, however, to shy away from critiquing the past or to turn a blind eye to the ways in which oppression is perpetuated. It is essential to unravel how property and state-based brutality has persisted over the centuries. To this end, we must examine the conceptual frameworks that our predecessors operated in and question why, at certain times, they failed to consider issues that are now inescapable.9 Don’t the epistemological paradigms of
8 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
9 For instance, in a conversation with Stuart Hall, bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins) laments that Angela Davis did not come to the forefront as a feminist, but for her subordinate presence in relation to the thinking Black man. bell hooks and Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue (New York and London: Routledge, 2018).
Manuel Borja-Villel
every period have shadowy areas that need to be studied? And shouldn’t we be on the lookout for the new conditions of invisibility and oblivion?
In order to address these questions, Communicating Vessels adopts an aesthetic of reception: What devices were used at each particular moment? What expectations did they reflect? To what degree were they accepted and how did they fluctuate over time? At the same time, the exhibition also accommodates discussion around the most pressing problems of today. The reconstruction of exhibitions (such as those organized around Spanish art in New York in 1960), 10 and a new look at the 1982 Documenta in Kassel, are presented alongside rooms dedicated to the crisis of 2008, the 15-M (Occupy) Movement, and the March 8th International Women’s Day (IWD) demonstrations. The contrast between these two areas of study allows us to understand, for example, the complex and contradictory role played in Spain by artists and intellectuals who clearly opposed Franco’s regime while it lasted, but then, with the arrival of the fi rst democratic governments, were key to the institutionalization of the art system, forgetting—and even disowning—alternative poetics. Offi cial culture in Spain was forged through the work of a generation that brought about the Transition and laid its foundations, but failed to recognize that Franco’s regime lived on in their bodies and desires.11 Over time, that cultural framework has collapsed. Now, cases such as the actions of those who questioned the governmental silence on AIDS, Donna Haraway’s writings on cyborgs, and the underground scene of the 1980s
10 In 1960, after a series of negotiations of a political nature, two Spanish art exhibitions were held in New York. The first, Before Picasso; After Miró, opened in June at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, organized by its director James Johnson Sweeney. Barely a month later, the second, New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, curated by Frank O’Hara, was held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Both exhibitions are reflected in the new presentation of the Collection, in “Episode 4. Double Exposure: Art and the Cold War” (Sabatini Building, Floor 4, Room 420), under the title 1960: New York Exhibits Spain.
11 Germán Labrador, Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968–1986) (Madrid: Akal, 2017).
and 1990s, take on renewed relevance and significance in light of the challenges, sensibilities, and demands of the present.
In this aesthetic of reception, the city, architecture, and magazines—spaces of socialization that feature in “Episode 1” of the Collection—are accompanied by a look at the exhibition as the privileged space of modern art, when it comes to both spectacular formats such as World’s Fairs and Expos and more introspective shows in galleries. Whatever the scale, exhibitions, like artworks, are never isolated spaces; they are immersed in and conditioned by the reality they inhabit and they reflect specific intentions. This means that they alter the way we see each work. For example, Guernica was created for the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the 1937 Paris International Exposition and is now the cornerstone of the Museo Reina Sofía. On its long journey to Spain, the painting played an important role in biennials, museums, and other activities. Not to mention the countless occasions on which its image has been at the head of protests and used in causes of various kinds. As a result, there have been numerous interpretations of the painting, many of which are at odds with each other.
How does a museum deal with presenting exhibitions and public interventions? By reconstructing them at one- toone scale? By reducing them to the existing documentation? In Communicating Vessels we have chosen a different path: recreating their performative aspect—that which changes the public’s perception. In the 1970s, Italian critic Enrico Crispolti developed the concept of “environment” as a form of social confi guration.12 For him, exhibitions are situations offering opportunities for agency and insights into how a community comes together through its surroundings, relationships, hierarchies, and processes. Such an environment can be generated through the group of works included in an exhibition, by choosing some significant but neglected aspect of it, or by highlighting gestures
12 Enrico Crispolti, “L’ambiente come sociale alla Biennale di Venezia,” in Arte visive e partecipazione sociale, vol. 1: Da “Volterra 73” alla Biennale 1976 (Bari: De Donato, 1977), 292–310.
Manuel Borja-Villel
that suggest its aesthetic or social impact. This is then anchored in the present through documents, which draw attention to the fact that the display is a recreation, thus generating distance and avoiding the temptation of nostalgia.
Although the American philosopher Fredric Jameson 13 probably never read Crispolti, his essays on affects expand on the Italian theorist’s concept. Jameson argues that affect— which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with the music of Richard Wagner and the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert—is distinct from emotion, which has to do with subjectivity and hermeneutics, that is, with the realm of signification. On the other hand, affect is elusive, it cannot be compartmentalized into impermeable categories. Rather, it fluctuates, taking on different intensities and enveloping readers and audiences. In this sense, affect disrupts the traditional narrative, and directs our attention toward the interaction between bodies and the space they generate through their movements and actions. Implemented in the museum’s galleries, this approach highlights the way exhibition space is produced, operates, and changes affectively; in other words, through the interaction between bodies and objects.
Art as such is an enigma. For the spectator, its meaning remains open-ended and incomplete.14 It has a life of its own that makes it irreducible to a single narrative or mediation device. The enigma intervenes whenever the course of events, or their place in the flow of causal logic, is interrupted; in other words, when it becomes difficult to identify the narrative reason behind the elements that are presented. We never fully understand it, and its certainty comes before and after discourse. Artists such as Mapa Teatro, Andrea Büttner, Hito Steyerl, and Daniel García Andújar
13 Fredric Jameson, El postmodernismo revisado, ed. David Sánchez Usanos (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2012).
14 Timothy Morton, Spacecraft, Object Lessons series (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).
work with this potential of the enigmatic: they are aware that narrative always contains a projection of things to come, even though, inevitably, it can only spring from what we know.
Three almost consecutive rooms of the Collection devoted to the historical avant-garde contain a series of works that were chosen by three critics working in the fi rst half of the twentieth century: Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille, and André Breton. Each had selected a constellation of artists that they identifi ed with to varying degrees throughout their career. Among them were three painters, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, who differed in their political positions as well as their aesthetic strategies. The three critics saw themselves reflected in each artist. For example, Dalí represented the integration of art and life that was so central to Einstein, which led him to write about African art and its social role very early on, and to enlist as a volunteer in the Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War. For Breton, on the other hand, Dalí’s work was a very lucid expression of the link between dreaming and waking. And Bataille was interested in works such as Los esfuerzos estériles (Sterile Efforts, 1927–28) for the opposite reason to Breton: for him, the images of headless bodies, emphasizing fluids and the elements that make up the basest and most carnal aspects of human beings, reaffi rmed the impossibility of reconciling reason and matter, the rational and the irrational. What is fascinating about these interpretations is the fact that they are all genuine. Their inclusion in the Collection does not reflect an eclectic impulse or the fact that the artistic practices of Dalí, Miró, or Picasso were malleable, it reflects the enigmatic nature of their art.
The museum’s galleries are specific environments. Some of the transitions from room to room seem natural, others are less straightforward or suggest a break in the narrative thread. But beyond their formal dissonances and anachronisms, the galleries, to put it in Timothy Morton’s terms, have “contours” and are “creamy,” serving to interconnect them.15 To wander through the Collection, following one of the suggested paths or making
15 Ibid., 60.
Manuel Borja-Villel
up your own, is like looking at a Mobius strip and trysing to fi nd the twist that suddenly takes you to the other side. There is no simple answer, because the twist is everywhere. There is no “other” side because the entire strip is the twist.16 This paradox inspires the critical approach that has shaped the discourse of the Collection, which is based not only on the political content of the works in it, but also on the connections between them—on the “twist” that they produce together. In Communicating Vessels, individual works or authors are meaningless, even if they have their own context, because they are in constant correspondence with other works and authors. The 145 or so rooms in the current hang are not isolated case studies, even though they often focus on specifi c facts. They are relational exercises. It is through these countless connections and contradictions between works, contexts, and paths that other worlds can be glimpsed. A critical approach and the ability to generate unexpected associations that cannot be reduced to an automated economy is crucial in an age when algorithms can manipulate and predict our desires. It is not surprising, then, that the title Communicating Vessels is a reference to the book published by Breton in 1934, which Diego Rivera illustrated in Mexico in 1939: a text in which the French poet emphasized the connection between dreaming and waking states. This relational approach, which is echoed in the Collection, never depletes our discernment—it expands it in multiple and infi nite directions. This is why the result of what museum visitors read, see, hear, and interpret does not materialize as an end object that can be appropriated. Knowing something is not owning it. No one should assume that they own what they know; knowledge is always collective. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney would say, learning is an act of possession and dispossession.17
16 Ibid., 47.
17 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 110.
On entering the fourth floor of the Sabatini Building, visitors are faced with a choice: to continue viewing “Episode 2. The Lost Thought,” which traces the Spanish diaspora after the Civil War— covering what those who had to leave the country described as “the ontology of exile”— or to explore “Episode 3. Campo cerrado” (Enclosed Field), which examines the grim era of Franco’s autarchy. There is no possible synthesis between these two worlds, nor can one absorb the other. Historical conflict exists, even if, as we said earlier, neoliberal logic denies it. The spectator must choose. Years ago, Homi K. Bhabha pointed out the connection between nation and narration.18 It would seem that only peoples with their own state have access to history. As a result, exiles are the forgotten people. The famous Art Brut exhibition assembled by Jean Dubuffet at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris in 1948 presented works by people with mental health problems alongside those of several Spanish expatriates, such as Joaquim Vicens Gironella and Miguel Hernández. Dubuffet had pulled off the double feat of joining the in-itself-dubious concept of the mentally ill with that of the exile. The French artist saw them as the same thing, both were outside the norm.
The contemporary condition is marked by exodus. The displacement caused by the global war in which we fi nd ourselves, together with the migration flows caused by famine and ecological catastrophes, affect a substantial part of humanity and are the permanent state of entire populations. The inclusion in the museum’s Collection of the work of Spanish artists who had to rebuild their lives in Mexico, Argentina, France, and the Soviet Union is based on a desire for historical restitution. It also serves to illuminate our time. Exiles are trapped between two cultures: the culture of origin, which has often ceased to exist as a collective form, and the adopted culture, which always remains other.
The pain of separation is latent in the poetics of these artists. They are aware of the impossibility of translation and of
18 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1–7.
the need to create images that inhabit in-between spaces. One of the authors to best defi ne this contemporary border status was Chicana poet and activist Gloria Anzaldúa: “Can I belong by not belonging? To be a citizen, yes, but a second-class citizen. Is this belonging by not belonging, or belonging by pretending to belong? These two positions in tension that should be mutually exclusive, and yet they are two positions whose overlapping shapes a social identity.” 19 Ideas, languages, and bodies intertwine in the space of which Anzaldúa speaks—a territory in which even the languages are borrowed. A territory which one is both part of and absent from.
The presence of the issue of exile in the Collection also invites us to reflect on the places from which history is conceived and written. For example, when we talk about the spaces of art— the spaces where art happens and is shared—we often do so from the point of view of the geopolitical North. This perspective leaves out other realities, such as that of Latin America during the long period of dictatorships. During those years, artists and cultural producers organized regimes of visibility and distribution in which the boundaries between techniques and materials, exhibition spaces and the street, and authorized and banned activities were neither clear-cut nor exclusive. Thus, the unofficial representation of Chile (then under Pinochet) at the 1982 Paris Biennale combined Carlos Leppe’s marginal work in a Parisian public toilet with the open and collective activities of the group C.A.D.A. 20 In this case, the Chilean political situation called for the construction of new narratives. In other words, it was
19 Gloria Anzaldúa, quoted in Martha Palacio, Gloria Anzaldúa: Poscolonialidad y feminismo (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2020), 67–68; translated to English in Manuel J. Borja-Villel and Vasıf Kortun, “Proposal for Documenta 16,” e-flux journal, no. 141 (December 2023), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/ 141/580399/proposal-for-documenta-16/.
20 C.A.D.A. (EACH) is the acronym of Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, a group formed by visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, writers Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita, and sociologist Fernando Balcells. Through its practices the group, active in Chile between 1979 and 1985, questioned the boundaries between art, the city, citizens, and poverty, as well as the actual spaces of artistic creation.
necessary to change the scale of artistic actions in order to show that they contained more stories than the national epic narrative, drawing on the very thing denied them: the opportunity to talk about what had been omitted. In Communicating Vessels, the uninterrupted succession of dictatorships from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s in Latin America, as well as the production of knowledge in the region, are considered an integral part of the world system, not an anomaly. The Museo Reina Sofía approaches its reflections on coloniality and colonialism through this lens. It is eye- opening to realize that, contrary to claims from some academic circles, Latin American art during that quarter of a century was not one step behind. In fact, it heralded what was to come. Thus, the artists of the Chilean Escena de Avanzada (Advanced Scene) were not responding to the spirit of the 1960s a decade later, but to the neoliberalism specifically designed for Chile by the Chicago Boys, led by economist Milton Friedman. And we can follow this critical and revolutionary thread right up to the present day: the exhibition Nelly Richards curated for the Museo Reina Sofía in 2019, titled Unfinished Timelines: Chile, First Laboratory of Neoliberalism —which is included in “Episode 8” as a coda—highlighted the relationship between the opposition to the government established by Pinochet’s coup d’état and the shock doctrine on the one hand, and the IWD protests of March 8, 2018, on the other. One of the banners in the feminist march summed it up: “The Chicago Boys are shaking. The feminist movement lives on.”21
The eighth episode of the Collection also challenges a temporality that, as Françoise Vergès writes, considers liberation only in terms of unilateral “victory” over the dominant forces. Vergès argues that this approach shows an enormous condescension of posterity toward those who are defeated. “Writing history
21 Nelly Richard, “Memories of Neoliberalism in Chile: Incomplete Pasts, Presents, and Futures,” in Carta(s): Unfinished Timelines (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2020), 1–16. The banner referred to was seen during the feminist occupation of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Santiago de Chile, in Chile, in May 2018.
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this way turns the story of oppressed peoples’ struggles into one of successive defeats, imposing a linearity in which any setback is taken as proof that the fi ght was badly conducted (which is, of course, possible), rather than one that exposes the determination of reactionary and imperialist forces to crush any dissent. This is what songs of struggle—Black spirituals, revolutionary songs, gospel songs, songs of slaves and colonized people—recount: the long road to freedom, a never-ending struggle, revolution as daily work.”22 This is the temporality in which Vergès situates decolonial feminism, which goes beyond gender equality and is also key to the Collection’s approach. This means that no matter how critical our narrative is, it cannot be centered in the North: it must encompass all the other struggles that have revolutionized the world order, as well as preventing the erasure of paths and exchanges that take place in the South. Ignoring the South–South circulation of people, ideas, and emancipatory practices preserves the hegemony of the North and reflects back a biased, incomplete, and prejudiced image.
For Baudelaire, artistic experience is inseparable from the city. In Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil , 1857), he used the term “ennui” to refer to the fatigue and tedium resulting from the overstimulation of the modern city. This brings about a kind of anxiety that seeks refuge in bohemia, in cabarets and the circus, where fantasies and stories are shared, and positivism is completely rejected.
The metropolises of the early twentieth century gave rise to utopian images, particularly through their architecture— such as the towers and skyscrapers under construction captured by Horacio Coppola in Buenos Aires and Paul Strand in New York—and portraits of subaltern individuals and groups, such as Lewis Hines’s photographs of the American working class, and Isidre Nonell’s paintings of Roma women in the case of Spain.
22 Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism, trans. Ashley J. Bohrer with the author (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 5.
The city is the place of marvels and of antagonism. A perusal of fi n de siècle newspapers ( Le Petit Parisien and Tierra y Libertad ) reveals an era of numerous protests, revolts, and assaults, and their corresponding repressions. Not surprisingly, the art salons reflected this unrest and hosted plenty of representations of executions (Ramón Casas’s Garrote vil [Garrote], 1894), imprisonments (José María López Mezquita’s Cuerda de presos [Chain Gang], 1901), and police raids (Antonio Fillol’s La noche de San Benito. Recuerdo de las pitas a Martos O’Neale [The Night of Saint Benedict: Memory of the Whistling of Martos O’Neale], 1903).
In this sense, over the last century and a half art has oscillated between hegemony and the lumpen. Flamenco is a paradigmatic example of this. Artists such as Juan Gris, Natalia Goncharova, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso were fascinated by it, as can be seen in the room The Spanish Night, located near Guernica in “Episode 1” of the Collection. In flamenco—as in jazz and other expressions of popular culture—artists discovered a subculture outside of the grand narrative. Art historian Georges DidiHuberman reminds us that the European avant-garde turned to this Andalusian gitano art form and was moved by it. In other words, it stepped outside of itself, transformed. 23 He demystifies its claims to purity and insists on remembering that myths and ghosts are not just nightmares or failures of history, but heuristic and symbolic constructions. 24
From the interest in flamenco in the 1920s, we jump to punk in the 1990s and activism in the twenty-fi rst century. These cultural forms often embody a defense of minorities and a critique of nationalism and offi cial discourses. And today, with the age of the cognitariat in full swing, they are also a reminder of the need to rethink the social status of cultural workers. However, when alternative or independent expressions are reduced to a style, they cease to denote an “outside” of mainstream culture. A visit to Art Basel Miami Beach and satellite
23 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Idas y vueltas ou la politique du vagabondage,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, no. 154 (Winter 2020–21): 14. 24 Ibid., 16.
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events in 2020 confi rmed this: racism was questioned and raciality was defended at various stands, but often while adhering to established patterns that affi rmed rather than challenged the context that enables racism. The racialized depiction of a recumbent Christ, as in Kehinde Wiley’s painting Sleep (2008), does not imply a paradigm shift—the machinery of domination remains in place. It is necessary to take the reflection further, to the devices, conditions, and frameworks that surround the making of art, and that are inextricably linked to our shared ecosystem.
Every society favors certain means of expression over others in order to interact with and represent its own time. The Italian quadro predominated in the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries, the novel in the nineteenth century, and cinema in the twentieth century. So far in the twenty-fi rst century we have witnessed the birth of new formats such as social media, but also the rise and enormous growth of a medium that is not exactly new but characterizes the present moment: the television series. 25 Unlike the grand narratives of the nineteenth century, series lack a center. The narrative is fragmented and immanent, there is no single resolution. The events unfold in a series of recurrences, or branch out in a constellation of lines of flight. Scripts are created and recreated many times, often on the fly, and there is no need for a pre-established ending. Furthermore, episodes can be viewed separately, even if the production followed a certain criterion. The Reina Sofía Museum Collection, presented in eight episodes, follows this formula.
Communicating Vessels is structured around micronarratives that juxtapose dissimilar exhibition models and eliminate the fi gure of the single narrator. “Episode 4. Double Exposure: Art and the Cold War” includes a recreation of New Images of Man , the exhibition of European art organized by historian and
25 Gérard Wajcman, Les séries, le monde, la crise, les femmes (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2018).
curator Peter Selz at MoMA in 1959, which used the white cube approach. The representation and the very materiality of the paintings and sculptures were intentionally kept apart and at a distance from visitors and their surroundings by means of a pristine and aseptic environment: an exercise in depoliticization and appropriation, in which the works displayed are stripped of content and context. In contrast to the primacy of the visual in Selz’s show, the adjoining room, “The Body and the House,” is tactile in nature, a taut liminal space that collapses perceived distance. Louise Bourgeois’s portfolio of prints, He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), presents a construction that is both protective and threatening, and the soft surfaces of Dorothea Tanning’s Étreinte (Embrace, 1969) were designed to be caressed, albeit virtually. If New Images of Man sought to conjure up an ideal, heroic image of the male artist as an encapsulation of the human condition, the works in “The Body and the House” appeal to the feminine and concrete, to autobiography, pain, and the possibility of reparation.
Other episodes of the Collection use anachronisms and jump forward and back in time to consider vanishing points, continuities, and contradictions. One example is the section of “ Episode 7” dedicated to the Potosí Principle, an exhibition organized by the Museum in 2010 that draws parallels between works by contemporary artists and motifs from the viceregal painting of Peru and Bolivia. Sonia Abián Rose’s Aparatoángel (Angel Apparatus, 2008–09), for example, revives the iconography of harquebusier angels, armed like Spanish soldiers. These juxtapositions reflect the persistence of the colonial process and its many offshoots. Harun Farocki’s The Silver and the Cross (2010) and the intervention by María Galindo/Mujeres Creando highlight the relationship between the extraction of silver from the mines of Potosí—through the slave-based mita, or forced labor— and contemporary forms of exploitation. In both “Episode 4” and “Episode 7,” art holds an ambiguous position: it is an instrument at the service of the apparatus of power as well as a space of resilience. And in this contention, the exhibition device is key.
Manuel Borja-Villel
Does it make sense to restructure the Collection? Is it feasible to put a new spin on the repository of the Museo Reina Sofía? Or will this new variation become like Lampedusa’s paradox, with everything moving so that nothing changes? One of these questions is crucial to our purposes: Is the exhibition device still valid? It depends on what we do with it, on its not being a space of representation but the result of a negotiation that prioritizes exploration and process over result. It is important to vary the aesthetic experience, and to shift the relationship between the public and the museum away from the idea of a mere visit and toward the desire to inhabit it and make it their own. This is the spirit behind the vast scale of Communicating Vessels, which demands a slow pace and aspires to go beyond the hurried glance of the hyperactive consumer in favor of a long-term, complex, and situated historical approach.
Finally, the timing of this rehang is not arbitrary. The Collection is being restructured because the conditions under which the previous presentation was produced in 2010 have changed. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the neoliberal model based on the primacy of markets over politics, and on an individualistic conception of life, spread on a global scale. It seemed impossible to go beyond this model, to imagine alternatives. The end of history was proclaimed, insofar as history—understood as the result of ideological struggles and disparate ways of seeing the world—had come to a dead end. But the fi nancial collapse of 2008 put the system in jeopardy. Suddenly, the entrepreneurial individual that supposedly dwelt within us became an indebted and disenfranchised citizen. The conceptual framework that had defined the world for decades crumbled. Slogans such as “We are not commodities in the hands of bankers!” and “They do not represent us!” began to be heard on the streets and squares of many cities, calling for a transformation of society and for new models of governance. In contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative,” those who occupied the squares in 2010 and 2011 imagined a fairer tomorrow arising from an alternative narrative of reality and from making “legible” the ideology of neoliberal domination that insisted we had lived beyond our
means and now demanded austerity. Institutionalizing practices were put in place, with the understanding that criticism alone was not enough. Occupy/15-M, IWD, Black Lives Matter, and other social movements embodied the exasperation and general uprising of an indignant multitude. These and other developments triggered a change in many people’s values. Thus the need to rewind history, to insist on semantic devices, to decolonize thought, to embrace other voices, to acknowledge the place of enunciation, and, in short, to relibidinize life.
Episode 1
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We cannot speak or think about modernity without urban space. Since Charles Baudelaire, the cultural production of the modern era has been linked to the consolidation of the modern city. Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin—two of the most insightful thinkers of the city—argued that cities played a central role in establishing and strengthening the modern phenomenon and mentality, not only as a medium, but also as the stage where it unfolds. The metropolis is both a symbol of modernity and a generator of modern traits.
In 1859, Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s urban renovation of Paris established the façade as the boundary between public and private space. This key gesture determined how social actors relate to space in modern times: on the one hand, houses, offices, and meeting places, where private life unfolds, shaped by customs; on the other, city squares, streets, and sidewalks, where everyone mingles anonymously. The bourgeois public sphere came into being, mentally and spatially, in the exchange of information and the sociability that followed. Thus, modern urban space is the public and political space—the space of opinion—grounded in the notions of freedom, rationality, and progress. As José Ortega y Gasset put it, “Above all, the city is the square, agora, discussion, eloquence. In fact, the city does not need to have houses; façades suffice.” 1
1 José Ortega y Gasset, “Sobre la muerte de Roma,” El Sol, August 22 and 25 and September 2, 1926, quoted in translation in Pavlos Lefas, Architecture: A Historical Perspective (Berlin: Jovis, 2014), 172.
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And like modernity itself, this new urban space contained within itself its own contradiction, that is, the keys to its dehumanization and irrationality. The modern city is a space of freedom, but also of coercion. It is a contradictory space in which the interests of capitalist systems coexist with those of private life: comfort and privation, participation and exclusion, side by side. 2 This duality can be seen, on the one hand, in the kind of urbanism that approaches the city as a sick patient to be healed with a positive, rational, modern project—where modern and urban are synonymous, and represent progress and the future (as advocated by GATEPAC and L’Esprit Nouveau)—and on the other, in the city as a space of conflict, complexity, and dissent. In contrast to the bourgeois order, for workers the city is the quintessential site of confrontation and social struggle, of disorder against the bourgeois idea of linear progress, as expressed in social photography and housing, and in the birth of cinema and anarchist publishing.
The sociability produced in large modern cities was embodied in the act of frequenting cafés, clubs, and restaurants of a new “modern kind” where a vital exchange of information took place. Ramón Gómez de la Serna wrote that “the café [such as the Café de Pombo] is the inner life of the city as a city,”3 a complex space of socialization-isolation, action- contemplation, a “stage for the word but also a theater of the gaze.”4 He described cafés as polyphonic spaces—like academies, cultural associations, salons, and galleries—where modern art is not only shown, but also comes into being. The bourgeois public sphere also produced the periodic publications that gave rise to public information as another space of modernity. The pages of gazettes, newspapers, and magazines—which were made available to customers
2 See Wolfgang Abendroth et al., Capital monopolista y sociedad autoritaria (La involución autoritaria en la R.F.A.), ed. Claudio Pozzoli (Barcelona: Fontanella, 1973).
3 Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Pombo. Biografía del célebre café y de otros cafés famosos (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1941), 14.
4 Antoni Martí Monterde, Poética del Café. Un espacio de la modernidad literaria europea (Sant Feliu de Llobregat: H&O editores, 2021).
at cafés—became a key space of modern culture. They were used profusely by artists as a place for action, contemplation, and information, in which the private and individual realm breaks down to be absorbed into the multitude.
Finally, if the city is a topos of modern thought, we need to look more deeply into its origins. As Walter Benjamin saw it, the modern individual and his environment are one and the same, and modern subjectivity is fulfi lled through “wandering” in the city (in his case, Paris and Berlin) as a spatial exercise, in which images prevail. It is not, however, an indulgent exercise of identifying and recognizing, but rather a critical strategy of destabilization. It encourages us to lose ourselves in the city and thereby “unlearn” urban space, to resemanticize, reclaim, and create images that portend social change. This approach, grounded in critical discursivity, echoed the ontology of some avant-garde groups; indeed, the relationship between Benjamin’s method and Surrealism is widely known: André Breton, for example, said that “The street [is] the only valid field of experience.”5 Meanwhile,
5 André Breton, Nadja (1928), quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Marseilles,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 131.
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in Mexico, poets and artists left Mexico City and founded a new “Stridentist” city, Stridentopolis, with dreamlike technological images intended to forge a revolutionary Mexico. Our aim is thus to present a critical narrative of modernity that analyzes the city—modernity itself—without inserting it into “a cultural continuum that affi rms the present as its culmination.”6
The liberal revolution of 1868 marked the beginning of modernity in Spain. Its effects were felt throughout the country, with the implementation of social and economic reforms that organized life under a single market economy. In the late nineteenth century, industrialization established Barcelona as the country’s economic center, while Madrid was consolidated as the capital and administrative center. From 1900 onward, economic and urban growth reflected a change in demographic patterns, with reduced mortality rates—leading to an increase in population—and large-scale migration from rural areas to urban centers. Madrid and Barcelona followed in the footsteps of other European cities such as London and Paris, with population hubs developing around the city centers. Throughout the fi rst third of the twentieth century, the new metropolitan model required transport networks to be implemented beyond the city limits: trains, trams, metros, buses, and automobiles began to circulate in Spanish cities. Advances in medicine and health care, stronger workers’ rights, and some architectural projects improved the habitability and lives of people in industrial and working-class neighborhoods. The expansion of cities brought about profound social change. As industrialization progressed, the gap between the private and public spheres in urban society widened, leading to the gradual separation of place of residence from place of work. The social circumstances of families became increasingly diffi cult given that many women worked outside
6 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989), x.
Avant-Garde Territories: City
the home, even though this fact was underreported in offi cial records. Likewise, the growth of the service sector led to the emergence of new urban classes whose value systems and social, cultural, and leisure practices were, together with the workers’ movement, the standard-bearers of modernity.
The cultural scene in Spain, and in Europe, was marked by the fi n-de-siècle ideological and spiritual crisis—which entailed a change in the perception of reality—and by the aesthetic revolution of the avant-garde, which sometimes went hand in hand with social and political revolutions. In Spain, this turn-ofthe-century crisis was framed by the collapse of the remains of the colonial empire in 1898 and the birth of Regenerationism, an intellectual movement that brought together the country’s cultural elites around a broad and fluctuating reformist project. Its cultural allies included the Generation of 1898 and the institutionalists, who believed in the need to overhaul the educational system in order to bridge the gap with Europe. The so-called Generation of 1914, led by Ortega y Gasset, encapsulated this view in their conviction that the solution to Spain’s backwardness lay in opening up to the new European schools of thought and science.
From the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris had increasingly attracted artists from all over the world who wanted to discover the latest developments and to achieve commercial success and international renown. It was a culturally and scientifically dynamic city, full of experiences and curiosities that were disseminated through universal expositions. The proximity and political and cultural ties, as well as the large number of academies, studios, salons, galleries, and dealers, made visiting Paris de rigueur for Spanish artists. Looking to Paris implied rejecting outdated Spanish culture, but, ironically, for Spanish artists who needed to make a living it also meant taking up Spanish themes, or the exaggerated “Spanishness” in vogue in the French capital.
Pablo Picasso traveled to Paris for the fi rst time in the fall of 1900, staying at Isidre Nonell’s studio. He and his traveling companion Carles Casagemas socialized with other Paris-based
Spaniards, thanks to whom he made initial contacts allowing him to exhibit his work alongside that of Francisco Iturrino at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery the following year. Over the next few years, Picasso divided his time between Madrid and Barcelona, with occasional visits to the French capital. Parisian subjects and the influence of artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri de ToulouseLautrec, and Vincent van Gogh can be seen in his paintings of this period, such as Woman in Blue (1901). In 1904, Picasso settled in Montmartre and, together with his friends Ricard Canals i Llambí and Joaquim Sunyer, frequented the large colony of Spanish artists. His works, like those of many French artists, focused on the portrayal of social alienation in line with the naturalism of Émile Zola and anarchist politics. All of them revolved around the city, reflecting his fascination with bohemia and with Parisian streets, cafés, and cabarets.
On their return from Paris many Spanish artists continued to work with Parisian subjects, challenging society and the artistic status quo. Nonell’s stark portrayals of the
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most disadvantaged sectors of society stand out, particularly his portraits of Roma women—an image clearly at odds with Catalan society’s image of itself and its aspiration to become the benchmark of bourgeois capitalism in Spain. Nonell’s obsessive repetition of that subject matter also highlights his desire to boldly deconstruct the typology of the bourgeois portrait, not only through the sculptural and monumental treatment of the fi gures—the twisted, improbable positions and faces hidden in thick darkness—but above all by stripping them of the sitter’s personality, that is, of history.
While Barcelona was the capital of industry and modernism, Madrid became the nerve center of the state—the country’s services, political, and communications capital. It gradually acquired more modern cosmopolitan cultural airs over the years, becoming a hub for universities and cultural institutions, a flourishing publishing center, and the headquarters of the major newspapers. Madrid was a pilgrimage site for artists and writers from the provinces. They met in the cafés that proliferated around the Puerta del Sol, where writers, hangers-on, and casual onlookers gathered day and night in the literary tertulias . These gatherings included established authors from the Generation of 1898 and younger writers from the Generation of 1914 who were starting to make a name for themselves, as well as artists and cultural agitators who identified with bohemia. Through their marginalization, these bohemian fi gures—led by the inimitable Ramón Gómez de la Serna—dramatized their rejection of salon culture and the institutional spaces of art. The cafés, the streets of the historic city center, the slums, the racetrack, the Círculo de Bellas Artes, the Ateneo, and so on, became meeting points for these artists and intellectuals who turned Madrid into their studio. For Gómez de la Serna—man of letters, performer, illustrator, and cultural agitator—cities were the pinnacle of human civilization, and Madrid was the main character in his work. His “madriles” drew on the traditional old-style city and also on its modern expansion, and both were the source of metaphors and suggestion. It was not a real city, but one of his own making, a collection of images,
Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Greguerías ilustradas (Illustrated Greguerías), for Blanco y N egro , 1930–34
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objects, and fragmented and contradictory experiences, set in Madrid’s most emblematic sites. Ramón Gómez de la Serna was a n observer, the Spanish version of a flâneur, who turned wandering into a theatrical, performative act, paying attention to evocative subjects and places. He dedicated many of his works to Madrid’s open-air flea market, El Rastro, a place/collage of objects, people, and geographies that shaped his way of thinking. Another flâneur, José Gutiérrez Solana, shared Gómez de la Serna’s interest in images and in El Rastro. He wrote several works about it, which appear to be a metaphor for his way of understanding painting—a place of accumulation beyond the immediate time and place.
Given the centrality of the working class in cities, its images featured strongly in the visual culture of the 1900s. The portrayal of workers as an urban subject in factories, meeting places, dwellings, and so on became the poetics of the modern proletariat, characterized by anonymity and dispossession. Photography and film—which, from the start, had been used to document reality and addressed the new modern subject—played a key role in the portrayal of the working class, turning its image into a public consumer good.
The key precedents for understanding the image of modern urban space and its relationship with the working class are, on the one hand, the photographs of Eugène Atget, who documented a series of itinerant trades that were disappearing due to industrialization (thus offering a reflection on the social roles of his subjects and their relationship with the public space of Paris); and on the other, the fi rst fi lm by the Lumière brothers, showing workers leaving a factory. Although not intended as a documentary, the mechanization of this scene echoes the mechanization of the workers’ bodies, epitomizing capitalist modernity. After the turn of the century, the photographic documentary genre took on more importance thanks to technical advances leading to smaller cameras, which were easier to carry and to use. Photographers could move more freely through
Strand, “Photograph—New York,” in Camera Work , no. 49–50, July 1917
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the city, which was portrayed as a place of exclusion and exploitation, in which the most disadvantaged classes are victims of a system in need of an overhaul. This kind of photography sought to bring about social change and to denounce the injustice that the wealthy classes preferred to ignore. A notable example is the work of the American Lewis Hine, a sociologist by training who saw photography as a means of education and social reform. His photographs for the National Child Labor Committee were used in posters and publications to highlight and denounce the injustices and risks of child labor conditions. They were distributed at protests and became part of the city’s political space. Hine’s influence—through the dissemination of his pictures and his teaching at the Ethical Culture School—was far-reaching. In 1915, street photographs taken by his student Paul Strand made a strong impression on Alfred Stieglitz, who described them as “brutally direct. Devoid of all flim-flam; devoid of trickery.”7 Stieglitz invited Strand to join his 291 gallery in New York, and published his photographs in the last issues of the journal Camera Work , which had until then been the preeminent vehicle for pictorialism.
7 Calvin Tomkins, Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs (New York: Millerton, 1976), 20.
Social urban public space—the territory of social photography—was in contrast with the institutional space of academic painting, which also portrayed the new urban subject but did so from the perspective of the private sphere. In turn-of-thecentury Spain, academic painting addressed social issues as a way of connecting with society and breaking with old-fashioned history painting. It found its place under the umbrella of naturalism, depicting the urban proletariat that had been missing from Spanish painting until then. Unlike the French salon painters of the time, however, there was no explicit criticism in the work of these Spanish painters who depended on the Academy and the bourgeoisie for their survival. Nonetheless, the national fi ne arts exhibitions and the tests for artists applying for a subsidy or grant from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando were full of works portraying the reality of their surroundings, featuring images of workers. For example, the exercise set for painters applying for a grant from the Spanish Academy in Rome in 1889 was “The anarchist’s family on the day of his execution”—for which Julio Romero submitted Conciencia tranquila (Conscience at Ease, 1897)—although the works were still required to demonstrate mastery of the formal academic aspects of painting (verisimilitude, composition, modeling, and color). Moreover, the large size specified for submissions encouraged dramatization, with rhetorical and sentimental works that produced a sense of falseness, according to some critics of the time. 8 They were works aimed at the bourgeoisie, seemingly intended to warn and preserve the status quo of the ruling classes, given that they produced a sense of alarm, fear, or paternalism in response to the supposed strength of the working masses and their leaders. There were, however, some rare exceptions to this situation, in which paintings broke the rules of the salon. One example is the small sketch-like work in which Antonio Fillol Granell—a Valencian painter with progressive ideas who regularly participated in the national exhibitions—portrayed the
8 Jacinto Octavio Picón, “La Exposición de Bellas Artes (Impresiones) [parts 2 and 3],” El Imparcial (Madrid), June 7 and 13, 1897.
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protest of Valencian students that was broken up by police on the night of San Benito in 1903. Fillol recorded the events with rapid brushstrokes and a use of color creating a dynamism akin to Futurism. Another example is Ramón Casas i Carbó’s Garrote vil (Garrote, 1894), which depicts the public execution of a prisoner that took place in Barcelona in 1893. Contrary to the Academy’s specifications, the painting used an elevated perspective—a legacy of photography—and an empty space in the center that draws attention to the real focus of the work: the crowd around the scaffold. In both cases, the protagonist is the street, the city where the modern spectacle plays out.
It should be noted that modern anarchism—which was introduced to Spain with Giuseppe Fanelli’s arrival in 1868 to recruit members for the First International and organize a Spanish chapter—soon took hold all over Spain thanks to the rapid dissemination of his ideas in the anarchist newspapers that
Avant-Garde Territories: City
Ramón Casas i Carbó, Garrote vil (Garrote), 1894
(The
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proliferated as the most effective means of propaganda. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchist publications (such as Revista Blanca in Madrid and Acracia and Natura in Barcelona) flourished, becoming the medium of choice for workers’ self-representation. It could be said that proletarian culture developed exclusively on paper, and that these publications took hold as an alternative to the bourgeois space of institutions and the market. Anarchism—which attached great importance to education and culture on the road to revolution—advocated the idea that art should be made by anyone who wants to. The anarchist artist is a worker or a peasant, motivated by their social development, who returns art to its popular roots. He or she rejects formal perfection and authorship, as well as the professionalization and private ownership of art, and above all, the art market. Against the elitist capitalist conception of art, anarchism offered an egalitarian alternative: a non-professionalized, collective, affordable, mass-distributed art—an art in the form of newspapers, publications, photographs, posters, and stamps, with subject matter depicting social struggles, work, and poverty, featuring vulnerable children and workers in factories, committees, streets, and social centers as well as caricatures of the bourgeoisie and government leaders.
In its enthusiasm for new technologies for mass dissemination and its search for new, non-bourgeois spaces of representation, anarchism took an early interest in fi lm and sought to appropriate it as its own space. One of the fi rst proletarian fi lm ventures was born in 1913: Le Cinéma du Peuple, a modest and artisan al cooperative founded by anarchist workers in France that sought to “make cinema by the people, for the people themselves.”9 Its mission included “looking to history, to everyday life, and to work struggles for dramatic scenes that will, fortunately, compensate for the fi lthy fi lms that are served up to working-class audiences every night.… We will fi ght with
9 Laurent Mannoni, “28 octobre 1913: création de la société ‘Le Cinéma du Peuple,’” 1895. Revue d’histoire du cinéma, special issue “L’année 1913 en France” (1993): 100–107.
all our might … against stupid chauvinism, against inept bourgeois morality.” 10 Their fi lms, like many anarchists’ materials, were characterized by amateurism and by insufficient funding. On March 28, 1914 (the anniversary of the Paris Commune), Le Cinéma du Peuple presented La Commune, directed by Spanish anarchist Armand Guerra. 11 It recounts the fi rst proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie—which strongly influenced later social uprisings in Europe—featuring the people and the city of Paris, which played an active part in that revolution. As a tribute, several communards appear in front of the Musée du Louvre at the end of the fi lm.
With the advent of World War I, some artists became more critical of bourgeois and capitalist society, and many moved away from the traditional art scene in search of alternative spaces in which to continue their work. Mass reproduction and distribution became essential for the most socially committed artists. Such was the case of George Grosz, who virtually stopped painting during the 1920s in order to produce satirical drawings
10 Ibid.
11 Pseudonym of José María Estívalis Calvo.
and print portfolios that were published by Malik 12 and massdistributed. For example, his Ecce Homo portfolio brings together lithographic prints of a hundred drawings made between 1915 and 1923, exploring life in the metropolis of both splendor and misery that Berlin had become. They depict grotesque scenes peopled by prostitutes, civil servants, the unemployed, the warwounded, and speculators, which take place in bustling cafés, music halls, brothels, and private homes. It is a depraved urban space, a symbol of capitalism, where commercial transactions and violence reign.
The social, political, and economic crisis following the SpanishAmerican War in 1898 led Spain to remain neutral in World War I. Despite this neutrality, an ideological battle was waged between the two warring sides, with the participation of the Spanish cultural world. Spanish artists and writers generated opinion pieces and images and organized events and exhibitions such as the Exposición de Legionarios (Legionnaires Exhibition, Madrid and Barcelona, 1917), in support of the Spanish volunteers fighting for the Triple Entente. 13 It featured artists such as Luis Bagaría i Bou, with politically charged illustrations and satirical caricatures that he published in the magazine España; and Daniel Vázquez Díaz, with a series of drawings on the harshness of war and its consequences for the civilian population. Barcelona’s port and its proximity to France made it an economic, political, and cultural hub during the war, culminating the process of urban transformation that had begun in the late nineteenth century. Its population almost doubled.
12 Founded in 1917 by Wieland Herzfelde, Malik was the most important publishing house of the German progressive left. It was known for its connection to the Berlin Dada movement.
13 Mª Isabel García García, “La Gran Guerra, sus repercusiones y la dictadura (1914–1931),” in Arte y política en España: 1898–1939, ed. García García and Javier Pérez Segura (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, 2002), 54–69.
Luis Bagaría i Bou, La retirada alemana. Una mala digestión
(The German Retreat: Bad Digestion), 1914–18
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Exiles, politicians, pacifists, and artists gave the city a cosmopolitan veneer that intensifi ed with the revival of its cultural and nightlife: cabarets, music halls, and sophisticated bars replaced the typically bourgeois social spaces of the nineteenth century. The city’s internationalism was also reflected in the flourishing of publications driven by the growth of advertising and graphic arts, with open-minded contributors who accepted the avant-garde. The importance of Italian culture in Catalonia (through Noucentisme), was based on its defense of Mediterraneanism in European culture, against the “Germanic barbarism.” Catalan newspapers reported on the Futurist ideology and published poems and articles by writers associated with the movement, influencing local literature and cultural projects such as the literary magazines Un enemic del Poble, founded by the poet Joan Salvat-Papasseit, and Troços , directed by Josep Maria Junoy, whose poetry was based on “words in freedom.” 14
14 Juan Manuel Bonet, “Palabras españolas en libertad,” in Imagen en el verso. Del Siglo de Oro al siglo XX, exh. cat. (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 2008).
Other key events in twentieth-century art and culture also took place in Barcelona: the exhibition of French art in 1917 (which included works by Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, and Edgar Degas, among others);15 a production of the Ballets Russes’ Parade (with set and costume design by Picasso, music by Erik Satie, libretto by Jean Cocteau, and choreography by Léonide Massine); and the boxing match between the Dadaist Arthur Cravan and former world champion Jack Johnson, to name just a few examples. Many artists settled in Barcelona to escape the war—Albert and Juliette Gleizes, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Marie Laurencin, Olga Sacharoff, and Cravan, among others—creating an anarchic and eccentric colony in keeping with the spirit of the city. Although in most cases their stay was short, some of them used Barcelona’s art scene to organize exhibitions, publications, and other projects, in which Josep Dalmau played a key role. A frustrated artist and professional cultural entrepreneur, Dalmau opened Galeries Dalmau on Carrer Pi in 1911. He later added a new branch on
15 The exhibition, which opened on April 23, 1917, at the Palau de Belles Arts in Barcelona, hosted and “replaced” the Paris salons suspended due to the war: Salon des Artistes Français, Salon de la Societé Nationale de Beaux Arts, and Salon d’Automne.
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Carrer de la Portaferrissa, which opened with an exhibition by Joaquim Sunyer (in itself a declaration of the avant-garde nature of his project), 16 enlivening Barcelona’s cultural life with his international focus. He supported bold and radical collective projects—such as the magazines Troços and 391—and young artists such as Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, also helping to promote them abroad. Dalmau knew that to be successful he had to build a network of international relations, which were, in turn, key to the survival of Spanish art. In its early years, the gallery presented the Exposició d’Art Cubista (Exhibition of Cubist Art, 1912)— one of the most significant avant-garde events in Spain, which included Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier, n o 2 (Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912)—and exhibitions dedicated to Polish art and to artists such as Kees van Dongen and Albert Gleizes. After the war, in 1922, Dalmau presented fortyseven previously unexhibited works by Francis Picabia, juxtaposing contrasting machinist and flamenco-inspired images.
16 Sunyer, like Dalmau, had gone on a journey of discovery to Paris and approached the Catalan landscape through the lens of Paul Cézanne.
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The exhibition, introduced by André Breton and accompanied by a catalogue published exclusively in French, was intended to establish Dalmau on the international scene. Dalmau created a space for the international avant-garde in Spain, while showcasing the country within international modernity.
Marshall Berman wrote that New York City was conceived “to demonstrate to the whole world what modern man can build, and how modern life can be imagined and lived.” 17 Thus, the city established itself as the great modern utopia, always looking toward a promising future. Ellis Island became the gateway to the “new world” for more than twelve million people from 1892 to 1954. An international, industrial, and economic touchstone, New York was a hybrid city, a “city-world” that expanded its urbanism, architecture, and transport to accommodate all those dreams. It grew vertically for lack of space, increasing the height of its buildings as technology progressed. The skyscraper became the central icon of American art and literature, coming to represent the vernacular, documented mainly by photographers and fi lmmakers who, with their increasingly technologically advanced cameras, emulated the architecture they captured. With the support of 291 gallery and Alfred Stieglitz and his magazine Camera Work , a generation of photographers—such as Paul Strand (pioneer of “straight photography”), Berenice Abbott, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Edward Steichen—focused their lenses on New York architecture and urban spaces. Straight photography started out with a pictorialist aesthetic, 18 but its adherents gradually started working with direct, unmanipulated images that sought to
17 Marshall Berman: “In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York,” in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York and London: Verso, 1983), 289.
18 Pictorialism is a romantic style and movement that seeks to distance itself from reality so that photographs are pure images, not mere reproductions of reality. For this reason, it deliberately uses blurring or a soft-focus effect.
encompass the whole of reality, even everyday life. Among them, Strand stands out as the photographer of a New York of great beauty. His abstract images of contrasting lights and shadows and his strong interest in machines capture the city with its modern life and the anonymous multitude who live in it. In his short fi lm Manhatta (1921)—with intertitles of excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass —the photographs of the working masses stand out as an example of the human aspect of his work and his search for beauty in the ordinary people of the promising American civilization.
The European fascination with New York was the catalyst for German architect Erich Mendelsohn’s best-selling photo book Amerika (1926), consisting of images taken on his study trip to the United States a year earlier. His aim was to illustrate the new vision of the contemporary city, a model for future urbanism around the world. Gradually, the modern image of New York prevailed over that of the cities of old Europe, and some artists made their journey of discovery to America, bypassing Paris. Many were Latin American, such as Mexican artist Marius de Zayas, who moved to New York in 1907, exhibited at 291 gallery, and traveled to Paris several times, thus bridging the American and European avant-gardes. Another was Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García, who went to the American metropolis in 1920 to embark on an industrial
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toy-making enterprise. Once there he explored abstraction, and the city’s urban landscape became the main subject of his work. New York was his “poster city,” a mechanistic universe of speed and advertisements that no doubt helped him establish the formal and structural matrix that he later incorporated into abstract compositions, with recurring symbols of man, space, and time based on fi gures, rulers, clocks, and so on. The development of communications, technology, and the economy in America during the 1920s fueled the growth of the most important major cities in North and South America (Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, etc.). This growth was characterized by chaotic urban and demographic expansion, which further exacerbated social differences. Modernization did not improve preexisting structures or fulfi ll the ideal of progress, and this
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generated a climate of violence and social struggle that resulted in a postrevolutionary and nationalist atmosphere in some countries, such as Mexico. In art, the gap between modern ideas and conservative practices triggered a strong experimental impulse that challenged traditionalism and enthusiastically celebrated modernity, while continuing to support the struggles of the working classes, which were increasingly taking center stage.19 The search for a specifically Latin American modern space also influenced visual production. The return of numerous artists from their journeys of discovery to Europe or the United States made them more aware of the contradictions of modernity in their countries of origin. Many of them looked back to the precolonial heritage—to popular and collective culture—as a way of reformulating modern contradictions. This can be seen in the works of Diego Rivera, in the texts published in the Peruvian magazine Amauta , and in the photographs of Machu Picchu by Quechua artist Martín Chambi, which present a collective and racialized image of the continent.
19 The modernist movement in Brazil, the Ultraist movement in Argentina, and the movement that formed around the magazine Amauta in Peru testify to this.
After the turbulent revolutionary decade, the 1920s in Mexico was a time of national reconstruction in which the country tried to move away from old colonial structures and build its future. Urban growth accelerated and cities began to modernize, with wider avenues and residential areas for the middle classes. The renewal and experimentation affected most sectors, especially culture. In December 1921, Manuel Maples Arce plastered his manifesto—published in the fi rst issue of the magazine Actual —all over the streets of central Mexico City, turning it into a Stridentist space. The manifesto called for action against the old and championed art that showed the beauty of the twentieth century.20 With this gesture, the city became the quintessential space for Stridentist action: a place of confrontation in which to display the movement’s hyperbolic poetics. The Stridentist city, based on reproductions of New York skyscrapers, consciously broke with European colonial imaginary, but at the same time its excess and theatricality made it impossible to execute—a nihilist gesture similar to those of some of the avant-garde movements of Europe. Made up of writers, poets, cultural provocateurs, and artists, Stridentism mostly engaged in collective, subversive, and iconoclastic projects and actions in public spaces (exhibitions, publications, radio broadcasts, cafés, schools, and trade unions), with the intention of shocking the conservative society. Visually, Stridentist works evoke the modern city by highlighting technology applied to everyday life: electric poles, automobiles, factories, skyscrapers. They feature black-and-white or red-on-white compositions, with jagged or diagonal lines and revolutionary graphic design, as can be seen in Ramón Alva de la Canal’s works, most of which were produced for publications, the Stridentist medium of choice. Irradiador (1923), the magazine co-directed by Maples Arce and Fermín Revueltas, was one of the movement’s most interesting projects. It included poetry, art, cultural criticism, and politics,
20 “Comprimido estridentista de Manuel Maples Arce,” Actual. Hoja de vanguardia, no. 1 (December 1921), available online at http://artespoeticas. librodenotas.com/artes/1571/manifiesto-estridentista-1921.
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and was emblematic not only for what its title suggests (technology, communication, movement), but also for its explicit reference to Salvat-Papasseit and his work L’irradiador del port i les gavines (The Port Irradiator and the Seagulls, aka The Port Beacon and the Seagulls, 1921). 21 Meanwhile, the poem Urbe (1924), published by Maples Arce with the subtitle super-poema bolchevique en 5 cantos and dedicated to Mexican workers, was translated into English (City: Bolshevik Super-Poem in 5 Cantos) and published in the United States by John Dos Passos. The poem does not stop at exalting the workers, it also criticizes
21 Although influenced by the Futurist avant-garde, Joan Salvat-Papasseit, who was of working-class background, focused on his context and surroundings, creating spaces of cultural subversion, experimentation, and political action (as did Irradiador).
the bourgeoisie and politics. Maples Arce explores the relationship between art and politics, describing a complex emotional landscape—a world of kaleidoscopic images that structures the narrative and, like a prism, splits the unity of the self. It is a “song throbbing with hope and despair.”22
Stridentism’s real involvement in politics took place in 1926 in the city of Xalapa—thereafter known as “Stridentopolis”— where several Stridentists moved to in order to work with the governor of Veracruz, Heriberto Jara. 23 The magazine Horizonte (1926–27), published in Xalapa, was this group’s most important editorial project, with a mission to become a “platform for the modern political, social, philosophical, and aesthetic doctrines”24 in line with Stridentism. Directed by Germán List Arzubide and designed by Ramón Alva de la Canal and Leopoldo Méndez, Horizonte was notable for the literary contributions of members of the group. Its covers, featuring illustrations and photographs of workers, peasants, Mexican landscapes, and factories, set the visual tone. Supporters of Stridentism such as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Miguel Covarrubias, and José Clemente Orozco reported on life in Xalapa, discussed its politics, and disseminated pre-Columbian history. When Jara lost offi ce in 1927 the movement disbanded, although some of its members later participated in other like-minded groups, such as ¡30-30!, with a strong anti-academic stance.
The modern city, linked to the proletariat, was also the subject of many Argentinean artists such as Benito Quinquela Martín. Like their Mexican counterparts, these Argentineans made extensive use of printmaking and murals as a way of popularizing their work. Celebrating the modern transformation of cities was a favorite subject of photographers such as Grete Stern
22 Elissa J. Rashkin, La aventura estridentista. Historia cultural de una vanguardia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015), 185.
23 During his term in office (1924–27), Jara led a modernizing government, with new architectural public spaces and a program for rural education and the promotion of art and culture, implemented with the help of the Stridentists.
24 Horizonte. Revista mensual de actividad contemporánea, no. 1 (April 1926): 3.
Horacio Coppola, Así nació el Obelisco (This is How the Obelisk Was Born), 1936
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and Horacio Coppola. Their classical, modern, creole style can be seen in the book Buenos Aires 1936, which Coppola published on his return from Europe with the collaboration of Stern and Attilio Rossi. Around the same time, an almost seventy-meter obelisk was being built in the heart of Buenos Aires, and Coppola decided to document it in a fi lm, Así nació el Obelisco (This Is How the Obelisk Was Born, 1936). Its similarities with Manhatta are not just about the use of modern strategies (high-angle and lowangle shots, oblique vanishing points, a focus on workers and on construction materials), but also about the romantic and mythical nature of the two fi lms—seeking a synthesis between nature and technology, the individual and the masses, reality and fantasy, characteristic of the modernity of the American continent.
Numerous modernizing experiences also took place in Madrid, the country’s capital and political and cultural center. And while they differed from those in Barcelona, they were just as important for Spain’s artistic renewal after the start of World War I. Some important exhibitions, such as Los pintores íntegros (The Integral Painters) at the Salón de Arte Moderno (1915), Celso Lagar’s exhibition at the Galería General de Arte Moderno (1917), and the Exposición de los pintores polacos (Exhibition of
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Polish Painters) in the courtyard of the Ministerial Headquarters at the Plaza de Santa Cruz (1918), created a proto-avant-garde scene in Madrid. At that time, the Ateneo hosted a series of activities and events organized by voices at odds with the official culture. Added to all this was the arrival of international artists such as Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Rafael Barradas (Rafael Pérez Giménez), Jorge Luis Borges and his sister Norah, Polish artists Marjan Paszkiewicz and Władysław Jahl, and, above all, Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, who would play a key role in the development of the avant-garde in Spain. During his fi rst stay in Madrid, Huidobro frequented Rafael Cansinos Assens’s tertulia at Café Colonial, where he gave public readings of his poems and organized literary evenings for a select group of local and international cultural fi gures. In Madrid, he published four of his most important books— Poemas árticos (Arctic Poems), Ecuatorial (Equatorial), Tour Eiffel , and Hallali —and presented his innovative Parisian publication Horizon carré (Square Horizon) . All of this made him the Madrid representative of the international avant-garde movements, which were voraciously absorbed by a new generation of poets who acknowledged his influence in founding the Ultraist movement. 25
This fi rst Spanish avant-garde movement was described as a “cocktail”26 of strategies borrowed from Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism. In reality, it was the convergence of various agents seeking a modern literary and artistic aesthetic based on the city as a symbol of modernity. Ultraist visual art and poetry emerged almost simultaneously, as one would expect in a literary movement based on metaphor and on experimenting with the layout of poems and the use of typography. The birth of Ultraism 27 coincided with the birth of modern Madrid, and
25 Eva Valcárcel López, “Vicente Huidobro y el creacionsimo en España,” in Huidobro homenaje 1893–1993, ed. Valcárcel López (A Coruña: Universidade da Coruña, 1995), 25.
26 Bonet, “Palabras españolas en Libertad,” 38.
27 The Ultraists only made themselves known as such on a few occasions between 1918 and 1923, but the movement did have a certain international impact.
the new Gran Vía, the recently opened subway system, and the audaciously modern Segovia Viaduct with its tragic associations, took center stage in Ultraist compositions as a kind of visual mythology of the city. Unlike the silence and darkness of Madrid’s modernist night, the Ultraist night was full of noise, artificial light, jazz, and film. Like the Futurist works disseminated in Spain by Gómez de la Serna, the Ultraists glorified technology and machines. Accustomed to working on interdisciplinary projects, the international artists who lived in Madrid supported the work of this heterogenous group of artists, writers, and critics who eventually made up the Ultraist scene. As well as participating in their soirees, the Delaunays and Jahl transcended the traditional boundaries of art, opening interior design boutiques in Madrid (Casa Sonia and the Taller de Arte Decorativo Ultraísta, respectively), and providing an intimate setting for Ultraist Madrid. The Delaunays also designed the interior of the Petit Casino and worked on the Ballets Russes’ Cleopatra .
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The illustrations of Barradas, Norah Borges, Paszkiewicz, and Jahl for Ultraist magazines and publications were also notable in this international milieu. Their images, featuring urban subject matter and influenced by German Expressionism, share certain features that were taken up by artists Francisco Bores and Daniel Vázquez Díaz, whose drawings of jagged, geometric, and modern cities were published in newspapers of the time such as La Voz . Rafael Barradas’s paintings were also crucial to the movement, given that his vision of the modern city and modern life was already very similar to the Ultraist view, even before he moved to Madrid. His fragmented, multiple, simultaneous compositions and his use of vivid colors create an illusion of movement and vibration, and perfectly capture the speed of the modern urban world and the cafés in which the Ultraists socialized, specially the one at Plaza de Atocha where he met up with friends such as Alberto Sánchez. Ultraist art continued to influence a generation of younger artists, including Gabriel García Maroto and Dalí. It was an early unifying experience
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for the “new art” 28 group that formally presented itself with the Exposición de la Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos (Exhibition of the Society of Iberian Artists) in 1925. 29
Meanwhile, the modern city also paved the way for the modern woman— a “mobile and active” subject who was necessary for the image of the new century and became a social phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s.30 In the big cities, women from the less wealthy classes had already joined the labor market on a fairly large scale in the nineteenth century. The phenomenon of the “modern woman” differed in that it involved women from the upper-middle classes, some of them with access to higher education. It was a small group of young women whose lives did not conform to the expectations imposed by others and who, not without difficulties, embarked on a personal path that necessarily involved emancipation and professionalization. The image of this new, dynamic, and energetic independent woman was reflected in her appearance: garçon-style short hair, loose-fitting clothes, and pants, following the fashion in fi lms, advertising, and magazines.
Beyond their physical appearance, modern women were aware of the importance of education in female emancipation. The need for specifi c educational facilities led to the creation of the Residencia de Señoritas (Residence for Women Students, 1915–36)—along similar lines to the Residencia de Estudiantes
28 “The term ‘new art’ became widely used in Spanish artistic circles prior to 1936, with the implication that, in the Spanish version of the Modern Movement, there were ‘avant-garde’ positions and positions that, although ‘current,’ were not avant-garde. Hence the need to use the label ‘new art’ to encompass them all.” Eugenio Carmona, “El ‘Arte nuevo’ y el ‘retorno al orden’. 1918–1926,” in La Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos y el arte español de 1925, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1995), 49.
29 For more on Ultraism and its later offshoots, see Isabel García García, Orígenes de las vanguardias artísticas en Madrid (1909–1922) (Ph.D. thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2023).
30 In Spain, this image coincided with the changes in urban labor markets and the expansion of a middle class of skilled professionals whose living standards, consumption habits, value systems, practices, and social expectations were the standard-bearers of modernity.
(Student Residence)—an educational project directed by women which aimed to promote higher education for women in order to transform their role in society. Other initiatives followed, such as the Lyceum Club Femenino (1926–39), a private association that became their space for reflection, discussion, and culture. It is impossible to think about the active role of women in Spanish modernity without these two institutions in which women developed the necessary sociability (meeting, talking, learning, exhibiting, and publishing) to take their place in the cultural scene of the time.
There was no institutional or social framework for the professional development of women artists in Spain until well into the twentieth century.31 Women’s contribution to the history of Spanish art consists of a series of exceptions: women whose social status (belonging to a family of artists, the upper middle class, or the liberal aristocracy) or even physical circumstances (as in the case of María Blanchard, whose kyphoscoliosis barred her from the traditional female role and allowed her to devote herself to painting) gave them the freedom to work as artists. Blanchard, for instance, traveled alone to Paris, as her male counterparts did as a matter of course. She presented La comulgante (Girl at her First Communion, 1914) at the Salon des Indépendants in 1921. The painting portrays the conditions of the women of the time, trapped in a system of symbols in which their role is to be looked at. As a result of changes in society from the 1920s onward, an increasing number of women sought a professional career as artists. Ángeles Santos’s painting Tertulia (The Gathering, 1929)
31 For more on this, see “Las mujeres en el arte” (Women in Art), the title of the 1923 survey published in issues 16 and 17 of Revista de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 1921–23), in which women artists were interviewed with the understanding that their work was “amateur” and far removed from the work of professional male artists. Along these lines, Pilar Muñoz López writes that the catalogues of the National Exhibitions of Fine Arts referred to women as “hobby painters,” i.e. amateurs; see “Mujeres españolas en las artes plásticas,” Arte, Individuo y Sociedad 21 (2009): 82–83. Available online at https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ARIS/article/ view/ARIS0909110073A/5759.
reflects the spirit of sisterhood at the Residencia de Señoritas, where Santos lived and exhibited her work. The artist (one of the three figures portrayed) calmly looks out at the viewer while chatting with friends who smoke and read in modern dress and hairstyles. It is interesting to note the proliferation of self-portraits in the work of women artists at the time, suggesting their unprecedented need for self-representation.32 However, even in the feminist Residencia de Señoritas, it was considered advisable for women artists to focus on typically feminine genres such as decoration, costume and set design, textile art, illustration, and, above all, the imaginary universe of children. This can be seen in the significant number of scholarships to study abroad awarded in these genres, and in the number of exhibitions of these kinds of materials. For example, the I Salón de Dibujantas (1st Exhibition of Women Illustrators, 1931), conceived by Alma Tapia and organized by the Unión de Dibujantes Españoles at
32 Patricia Molins, “La heterogeneidad como estrategia de afi rmación. La construcción de una mirada femenina antes y después de la Guerra Civil,” Desacuerdos, no. 7 (2012): 72–73.
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Delhy Tejero, Las brujas con Delhy Tejero (Witches with Delhy Tejero), 1929; sketch for Las brujas y sus cualidades (Witches and their Qualities), 1928–29
Avant-Garde Territories: City
the Lyceum Club Feme nino, was a signifi cant milestone that brought together the work of professional women illustrators published in the major newspapers of the time. As can be seen from the twenty or so artists in the show, illustration was a livelihood for many women. Delhy Tejero, Francis (Pitti) Bartolozzi, and Rosario de Velasco are some of the artists who regularly produced this kind of work, which traditional historiography downplayed as secondary or commercial and which is now highly regarded.
Spanish cities played a central role during the Civil War. Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona marked the different phases of the conflict, but Madrid stands out due to the harsh circumstances it faced during the thirty-two months it was besieged. The battle, siege, or defense of Madrid (November 1936 – March 1939) refers to a series of military strikes that took place in the capital during the war and caused significant changes in its urban fabric. From the fi rst battles, civil architecture was transformed into military architecture. For example, the Ciudad Universitaria campus was the fi rst stable front line, and the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts became the headquarters of the 11th International Brigade under the command of General Kléber. The function of many other buildings also changed, as space was needed for hospitals, to house refugees, and for other wartime infrastructure. This conversion of buildings and private houses for defense purposes also altered the appearance of the city under siege. Barricades and parapets destroyed streets and avenues, making daily life diffi cult. The constant bombardment destroyed many strategic and emblematic buildings. The rebel army wanted to lay waste to the city, but also to demoralize its inhabitants with images of destruction.
The Republican side also used images of destruction as a propaganda tool: feature articles by Spanish and international photojournalists such as Juan Miguel Pando Barrero, Alfonso, and Walter Reuter were published in magazines and newspapers
Kati Horna, Umbral . Semanario gráfico en huecograbado
(Umbral: Weekly Graphic Publication in Photogravure), 1938
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covering the conflict. Pictures of citizens going about their daily lives apparently unconcerned in the midst of destruction and photos of the popular barricades became a symbol of resistance, while images of people rushing to air-raid shelters improvised in subway stations came to represent the violence against civil society.
Wartime Madrid was also a city in which walls and façades, plastered with posters, made proclamations, provided information, and spread propaganda slogans. The city “became a showcase for wartime print culture.”33 Images of some of these walls,
33 Jordana Mendelson, “Fortificaciones de papel: la defensa de Madrid y la proliferación de la prensa durante la Guerra Civil,” in Madrid. Musa de las artes, exh. cat. (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 2018); reprinted in this catalogue, “Paper Fortifications: The Defense of Madrid and the Proliferation of the Press during the Civil War,” pp. 83–92, here p. 83.
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José Bardasano Baos, ¡Salud! Heroicos aviadores (We Salute You, Heroic Airmen!), 1936; Libertad, justicia social ¡De ti depende! (Freedom and Social Justice Depend on You!) 1937; Madrid vive de nuevo horas heroicas (Madrid is Living Through Heroic Times Once More), 1937; ¡Obreros! Madrid, Madrid, Madrid vuestro trabajo es salvarle (Workers! Your Job is to Save Madrid, Madrid, Madrid), 1937
with overlapping layers of information, transformed ways of seeing, especially in the city center. Perhaps this is why in 1938 the government decreed that the walls of Madrid be cleaned.34 The use of “wall newspapers,” in the city and the front, was a very effective propaganda tool because it created collective information sites, in addition to the newsstands lined with horizontal and vertical publications that looked like open-air exhibition spaces.
Madrid under siege needed to motivate the population to continue the resistance. The streets and squares became the stage for agitprop events—collective actions brought directly from revolutionary Russia by Spanish intellectuals who had witnessed their effectiveness there. Associations and groups of amateurs and professionals emerged and adapted these Russian experiences to popular Spanish traditions such as street cavalcades, processions, carnivals, and other public events. These actions involved a convergence of different media—rallies, parades, loudspeakers, agitprop theater, sets and ephemeral structures, 35 proletarian choirs, and radio broadcasts—which became elements of resistance against the military uprising by attempting to saturate public space, change the appearance of the city, and create an atmosphere in which it would be impossible for citizens to remain indifferent to the events of the war.
34 Ibid.
35 They sometimes included portraits of the leaders and heroes of the Republic alongside figures caricaturing the enemy, displayed in the streets and squares as large, urgent public sculptures.
Eli Lotar, Espagne, quatrième voyage: Les élections à Madrid (Spain, Fourth Trip: Elections in Madrid), 1936
The
Jordana
Sometime during the first week of August 1936, a young woman is photographed standing in front of a street- side kiosk in Madrid, collecting donations for the Socorro Rojo Internacional (SRI). The photograph, one of thousands taken in Madrid during the Civil War, is conserved in the archives of the newspaper ABC , the only serial to be published simultaneously throughout the war both in Loyalist-held Madrid and rebel-controlled Seville. The photograph shows a common scene of rearguard daily life, one featured prominently in the urban press: every day citizens going about seemingly everyday tasks like buying a newspaper or donating to a good cause. However, in this picture, the suddenness and immediacy of the war’s impact
on urban daily life collides with ongoing habits of volunteerism, consumption, and sociability. Papered behind the young SRI volunteer are layers of posters, peeling off and covered over with fresh announcements. Even at this early stage in the war, posters covered the surfaces of the city’s buildings and were used daily to announce proclamations, information, and wartime slogans. Madrid, like Spain’s other major cities and smaller towns, became a showcase for wartime print culture and paper became one of the most relied-upon tools for mass communication.
In this photograph, the two most prominent forms of wartime print culture—poster and newspaper—share equal parts of the reader’s attention, and the midline of the image cuts vertically almost equidistance between the woman holding the donation can and the man making his donation. Indeed, in the micro -story of this one photograph what binds together the page of the newspaper and the posters on the wall—the circulation of the press and the monumental visibility of the poster—is the human agency of the city’s inhabitants. The changing story of daily life in Madrid is foretold
in this photograph by the prominence of print culture in the documentation of a city in war.
In this particular vignette, it is women who bridge the space of the page with that of the street. Behind and to the right of the young volunteer hang an array of the city’s illustrated press, with two displayed most prominently: an issue of Estampa from August 1 and two copies of Crónica from August 2. Both issues feature milicianas on their covers. The women on the covers face the camera directly and hold their weapons firmly ready to join the armed forces in defense of the city. Composed as the photograph is, the female soldiers surround and frame the young SRI volunteer, sending a clear message about the role of women on the front and in the rear guard, and their dominance as subject in the daily press. They also illustrate together, poignantly, Madrid’s status as a front line of war, even in the scenes of daily life. From the first moments of the war, Madrid was both rear guard and front line, and the proliferation of its wartime press is a testament to the role of paper as a tool for the fortification and defense of the city throughout the war.
The abundance of press published in both Loyalist- and Nationalist-held territories during the Civil War, is well documented. 2 In his Cuadernos bibliográficos de la guerra de España (1980), Vicente Palacio Atard catalogued “1,3 46 wartime periodicals, most of them published in Spain.” 3 In 1992, Mirta Núñez DíazBalart dedicated a three-volume study
to the “prensa de guerra” published on the Republican side during the war; she catalogued 454 serial publications. 4 Not included in her study are those magazines published in the Republicancontrolled zones that were not explicitly dedicated to wartime propaganda. Over three years of violent civil war, somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 periodicals were published. Multiply this number by the individual issues edited of each title, and it becomes quite apparent that cities like Madrid were littered with thousands of highly visible, widely circulating, and far-reaching publications. The landmark exhibition Madrid en Guerra 1936–1939 (1981) catalogued that in Madrid alone over 280 titles of “prensa de Guerra” or war periodicals (bulletins, newspapers, gazettes) and 30 titles of general press (of which Crónica and Estampa were included) were published and conserved in the Hemeroteca Municipal. Most of the press categorized as war periodicals were published by brigades, battalions, divisions, and other army units as well as local or specialized wartime industries, unions, or political parties. Nearly every military unit had its own publication and the concentration of forces in and around Madrid meant that the participation in the production of wartime periodicals was abundantly shared among Madrid’s combatants, who were enlisted to both create and sustain periodicals as well as actively read and disseminate their contents.5 The variety of wartime press was guided not only by differences among
military units and political parties, but also by the artists and wr iters involved in the production of the serials. Both trained and untrained combatants contributed pictures, texts, editorial skills, and opinions to their fabrication, and serials were distributed often for free on the front. Makeshift presses were located within trucks, set up in trenches, and issues were printed both regularly and irregularly, depending on access to expertise, paper, inks, and machinery. The economic investment and artistic or editorial skill dedicated to any publication ranged from typed small editions that were likely shared primarily among the members of a unit or brigade, to more professionally produced, multipage serials, like those designed with contributions by Madrid-based artist José Bardasano, which were printed in more than one ink color, sometimes appearing periodically for months during the war and distributed widely across Loyalist Spain. 6
Artists like Bardasano left an indelible imprint on civil war publications in Madrid, and his impact was visible in posters, magazines, and the covers of innumerable frontline publications (his illustrations were often reprinted and circulated widely within and beyond Madrid’s military units). He led a workshop that designed posters and did design work for several publications, including frontline magazines like Choque. Portavoz de la 34 División and Bardasano’s own satirical magazine No Veas. Photographs from the period in the Biblioteca
Nacional’s collection document Bardasano’s workshop, in which artists are shown drafting posters and the masthead for the periodical Juventud . The caption reads: “The studio of renowned artist Bardasano, where his followers produce some interesting propaganda work.” 7 As Miguel Sarró explains, Bardasano founded and directed the workshop La Gallofa that was formed by the communist Sección de Artes Plásticas de las JSU (Juven tudes Socialistas Unifi cadas). 8 Among the other artists who collabo rated with Bardasano and his wife Juana Francisca were Desiderio Babiano, Ufano, Peinador, and Enrique Martínez de Echevarría (Echea)—all of whom designed posters as well as contributed to such civil war magazines as Tierra, Mar y Aire, Crónica. Revista de la Semana , Hierro. Órgano de los Batallones de Enlace, Tren. Boletín Oficial de Información del 4 Batallón Local de Transporte Automóvil , Milicia Popular, and Muchachas . In Madrid, several groups and military units led the organization of literary and cultural activities that placed the production of a regular magazine or newspaper at the forefront of their outreach to soldiers on the front and in the rear guard. The Alianza de Intelectuales para la Defensa de la Cultura published what has become a canonical example of a civil war literary magazine by bringing together a push for literacy among soldiers with a dedication to both popular and progressive forms of poetry and drama. The Alianza’s El Mono Azul. Hoja semanal , which was edited by
Jordana Mendelson
Rafael Alberti and Maria Teresa León, was promoted heavily in posters, distributed freely, and praised among the intellectuals involved in the wartime defense of the Republic. With its large format and poster-like covers, El Mono Azul was among the most visible of the literary magazines to circulate in Madrid and on the front lines. It featured the work of Spain’s leading poets and artists from the Generation of ’27 like Miguel Hernández, Luis Cernuda, and José Bergamín and exemplified the application of progressive ideas around art and culture that had been rehearsed during the Second Republic. Alberti and León had already introduced their readership to an activist brand of Soviet-inspired literary culture with their magazine Octubre. Escritores y artistas revolucionarios (1933–34). They had both traveled to the USSR and both contributed essays about their travels and participation in international congresses. As is well known, during the war both Alberti and León took on leading roles in the political organizations of the government and helped direct the salvage of the artistic patrimony. Among the many publications to which León contributed, her early editorship and contributions to the SRI’s Ayuda. Semanario de la Solidaridad are notable, and the covers of Ayuda made abundantly clear the relationship between a defense of Madrid and the production of a robust literary, cultural, and political press. Within its pages, the magazine often referenced its own publication history and its production
value was quite high, regularly featuring photographs, illustrations, and contributions by well-known authors. For the cover of the November 18, 1936 issue, the illustrator YES contributed a striking montage that equated the resistance to fascism with the fortification of the city. It is not hard looking at illustrations like this to associate the brick and mortar of building façades and the stacked sandbags of barricades with the tons of paper used to blanket the city with messages of political resistance and unification. In this case, out of a fortified skyline a raised fist supports the slogan: ¡Madrid, trinchera del antifascismo mundial! (Madrid, the global anti-fascist front!).
During the war, the recognition of paper as a crucial tool for building a
defense against fascism was highlighted in the celebration of the city’s leading literary, cultural, and artistic institutions. Already mentioned was the role Alberti and León played in the efforts to save the works of art in the Museo del Prado and other collections in the city. However, even before efforts began to safeguard the nation’s artistic patrimony, attention was already paid in the press to the need to recognize the historical value that literary culture (its space of production, exchange, use, and conservation) held for Madrid’s residents, both those experiencing the war as well as future readers who would look to the printed page to reconstruct the war’s history. In the May 20, 1937 issue of Ayuda, Juan José Moreno wrote about “what the Ateneo de Madrid contributed to the war.” 9 Recall ing the flurry of activity arising in the Ate neo during the early moments of the “fascist uprising,” Moreno lamented the relative quiet of the revered institution: “Little by little, as the war dragged on, the Ateneo grew empty and its members disbanded, only to meet again on the fronts or in the rear guard: wherever the fight against fascism was waged in some way.” The library, while quieter than in the past, was now open to all soldiers to use when they were home from the front, and its shelves were filled with “technical military books and magazines.” Moreno closes his article looking toward the future when “a new generation of young Spanish intellectuals will have found ‘their home.’” Throughout the city, previously exclusive spaces
for reading and cultural meetings were opened up for use by the public and by soldiers (as was the case in the Ateneo). For example, the Agencia EFE archive conserves a photograph of a “Biblioteca del ‘Llar del Combatent Català’” (Library of the Home for Catalan Combatants), which was installed on the calle Serrano for those Catalan soldiers fighting with the Ejército del Centro. Other reading rooms were established by political parties and labor unions; and on the fronts (even those on the battle lines in Madrid) the public sharing of newspapers, books, and magazines was celebrated.
The circulation of Madrid’s wartime serials expanded access to a range of information and sources among the city’s inhabitants. Likewise, soldiers on the front often maintained their subscriptions to a range of periodicals, and complained when they weren’t sent in a timely fashion. Pre-existing distribution services for the press, bookstores known to carry periodical literature, and shared reading rooms like the Ate neo, indicate a high interest among Spain’s citizens in both gaining access to regular updates in the press about the war but also in maintaining everyday practices around reading for instruction and leisure. Frontline periodicals shared with Madrid’s urban daily press an interest in publishing both relevant and timely information about the war as well as a more conventional variety of news stories, related to international events, popular culture, or reprints of articles and essays from before the war.
Conserving the growing stock of wartime publications became a fundamental concern for the city’s librarians and archivists. In a July 1938 article in Blanco y Negro, Juan Fer reported during a tour of Madrid’s Hemeroteca Municipal that “the catalogue of these war periodicals totals more than five hundred titles.” 10 After recalling General Miaja’s order that two copies of every serial publication be deposited with the Hemeroteca and acknowledging the function of the collection as a “historic document,” Fer observed the changing nature of periodicals during the war, something that could be captured by conserving the city’s full serial runs in the Hemeroteca: “Our companion shows us some magazines from the front, of which all issues are in the archive. We can see how the publication progressed from the first issues written in pencil to the current ones printed on glossy paper, which are a true display of workmanship.”
Understanding the parallels between the role of the city’s institutions (like the Ateneo and the Hemeroteca) in conserving a record of wartime print culture and the role of the press itself in creating its own retrospective account of the war is vital to drawing an analogy between the physical buttressing and defense of the city (something featured prominently on posters, in the press, and in the slogans printed and broadcast during the war) and the role paper played in creating another kind of register for defense: shared cultural experiences organized around the celebration of print
culture. Artists and writers involved in the production of the wartime press were also keenly aware of the importance of staging public exhibitions and contests to take stock of and record their achievements. In addition to their work with the Alianza, many of the artists and writers who contributed to El Mono Azul were also part of the Fifth Regiment and contributed to its magazine Milicia Popular. Diario del 5° Regimiento de Milicias Populares, which was published from 1936 to 1937. In 1937, the Regiment sponsored an exposition of their cultural work and published a commemorative book as a souvenir, which also marked its dissolution as a militia unit and the transition of many of its members to units within the Republican government’s Ejército Popular (Popular Army), which came to publish its own magazine that was very much modeled after the publications of the 5th Regiment.
The commemorative issue highlighted the Regiment’s cultural activities and is an example of the retrospective, archival function of the press to record its own history and the history of Madrid at war (which was then deposited in collections like the Hemeroteca). In the anniversary issue of Milicia Popular, space is given over to the history of the Regiment’s magazine, its posters, and its well-attended exhibition Documentos del 5° Regimiento, which was notable for putting on full display the Regiment’s work during the first part of the war; it introduced the pubic to the ways print culture could be used to educate and introduce
aspects of wartime policy. Through its embrace of publication and exhibition practices that had been rehearsed by many of the Regiment’s members during the Second Republic, the Fifth Regiment was able to demonstrate the relationship between an efficient organization of the press and a functional military unit (a model that it passed down to the Popular Army). Both Alberti and León formed part of the Regiment’s core group of artists (including Ramón Puyol, who contributed numerous illustrations to the covers of Milicia Popular), writers, and intellectuals who contributed to the reputation of the Regiment as the “Talent Battalion.”11
One of the tools for organizing and sharing print culture that was repeatedly used by the Fifth Regiment and other organizations like Cultura Popular from 1936 onward was the periódico mural , or wall newspaper. Dozens of articles about and photographs of wall newspapers were published from 1936 to 1939, making this particular form of propaganda one of the most widely discussed. In response to the repeatedly asked question “What is a wall newspaper?,” authors described the “periódico mural” variously as “the press in its simplest form,”12 the “true newspaper of the front,” 13 and perhaps most idealistically as “a gymnasium, an intellectual and artistic boot camp, where the cultural activities of our soldiers are expressed.” 14 Whether in the rear guard or on the front, wall newspapers became a tool that was put to use as a forum for
sharing ideas, a platform for disseminating information and focusing criticism, and a cultural artifact created by the full range of Spain’s citizens (from children in colonies and women in factories to men on frontline battlefields).
Contests and exhibitions of wall newspapers took place throughout Spain, but there was a significant concentration of activity related to the wall newspaper in and around Madrid; Cultura Popular’s wall newspapers were prominently exhibited in Madrid and traveled to Valencia, where they also met with praise. 15 Photographs in the Agencia EFE’s archive show a wall newspaper by the Asociación de los Amigos de la Union Soviética being transported down the paseo de la Castellana in commemoration of the nineteenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Other photographs that appeared in the press show military units huddled around a wall newspaper to review its contents, which were often the subject of articles in frontline periodicals. Understanding how to design a wall newspaper, assigning roles for its manufacture, and determining how often its contents should be updated were all aspects of the life of a newspaper that were now shared broadly, and announced vividly in the pages of Madrid’s serials.
Because so many wall newspapers were displayed in the city, the parallel between building the city’s structural defenses and supporting its serial publications became more than just a rhetor ical construction. Page and wall
Jordana Mendelson
were conflated; the defense of the city’s print culture became a defense of the city’s military and architectural integrity. Indeed, as the question of resources and priorities encroached more and more on the production of propaganda during the war, the presence of the wall newspaper in Madrid caught the attention of many writers. In June 1938, one author who mourned the government decree that removed the posters from Madrid’s walls wrote in Ayuda : “The capital of Spain, having lost its posters , now feels like a giant closed exhibition, while a wave of agitation and popular art [the wall newspaper] had penetrated the heart and guts of Madrid, in the immense depths of its factories and production sites.” 16 That which took hold of Madrid in the absence of the poster was the wall newspaper. And, although the author recognized that not all shared the same “artistic value,” according to Ayuda the medium functioned heroically as a creative tool for the people to participate in crafting their own images and slogans. The reciprocity that the wall newspaper engendered between the writers and editors of the press and its readers created a mechanism through which images and ideas crisscrossed between the rear guard and the front line of the city. Wall newspapers on the front often reproduced images from everyday culture that appeared in the heart of the city; soldiers cut out pictures from daily magazines and the popular press that were added to their military-themed murals and, conversely, women and children
making murals in their workplace or children’s colony included pictures of soldiers from frontline publications in their stories about rearguard life and the defense of the city. Creating shared wartime experiences that were designed, displayed, and circulated both within and outside select communities was key to the role print culture played in resisting the devastating and destructive force of the bombing of Madrid.
And yet, as a photograph conserved in the Biblioteca Nacional’s collection shows with brutal clarity, the press was no more protected from the devastation of the war than any other target. In the photograph taken by Foto Mayo, the printing presses of the newspapers Informaciones: Diario independiente de la noche and Libertad: Diario Republicano Independiente were decimated in a bombardment. The rubble that surrounds the machinery, the destruction rendered to the physical space of the press, makes all the more poignant the resilience of the city’s occupants to continue to manufacture their own handmade serials through the production of the wall newspapers. It makes it impossible, however, to look at a wall newspaper without thinking of the real and material devastation that accompanies its place within our historical record of the war.
Throughout the war, one of the constant themes captured by photographers were pictures of people holding copies of newspapers and magazines. In all of the archives consulted for this essay—the online archives for ABC and
Agencia EFE, the Biblioteca Nacional’s photo collection, and pages upon pages of serial publications in the Biblioteca Nacional and the Hemeroteca Municipal—there are conserved photographs of people on the frontline and in the rear guard of Madrid holding copies of newspapers and magazines. Some of those photographs appeared in the press, and served as publicity for the serial in which the picture appeared. Other times, these photographs take on a documentary quality, and form part of a larger visual anthropology of the Civil War that includes subjects like child soldiers smoking and reading a newspaper, women on the front line holding up copies of newspapers, men selling a variety of newspapers and magazines at kiosks, soldiers reading singular wall newspapers in and around Madrid, and women like the volunteer for SRI, who started this essay, who stand in front of and are framed by messages in the press. All of these pictures together send a strong signal about the value placed on the press during the war, and the significance these scenes held for photographers who were charged with the task of documenting Madrid at
war. The paper fortifications that were so important to build a unified defense of the city, keep up the morale of the rear guard, and capture scenes of devastation and resistance extended across a wide array of newspapers and magazines. Thanks to these paper traces and the institutions that conserved them, it is possible to gain at least partial insights into the many ways print culture helped madrileños understand the complexities of war as shown to them in the photographs that circulated widely in the hundreds of Madrid’s periodicals.
1 This text was fi rst published in Madrid. Musa de las artes, exh. cat. (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 2018), 145–53.
2 My observations in this essay are drawn heavily from my exhibition catalogue Revistas y guerra. 1936–1939 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofía, 2007).
3 Vicente Palacio Atard, “La prensa periódica durante la guerra civil,” in La Guerra Civil Española (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Dirección General del Patrimonio Artístico, Archivos y Museos, 1980), 56.
4 Mirta Núñez Díaz-Balart, La prensa de guerra en la zona republicana durante la guerra civil española (1936–1939), vol. 1 (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1992), 15.
5 Digitized versions of many of these war periodicals are now available online, in collections such as the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Hemeroteca Municipal, and the interactive website we designed to accompany the 2007 exhibition: www.revistasyguerra.com.
6 See Bardasano en Guerra (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 2011).
7 Fotografías Guerra Civil, Carpeta 54, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.
8 Miguel Sarró (Mutis), Pinturas de guerra. Dibujantes antifascistas en la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Queimada Gráficas, 2005), 53–59.
Printing press, Informaciones and Libertad , Madrid, 1936–39
9 Juan José Moreno, “Lo que el Ateneo de Madrid ha dado a la guerra,” Ayuda, year 2, no. 47 (March 20, 1937): n. p.
10 Juan Fer, “Como se salva un tesoro periodístico. La Hemeroteca Municipal frente a los obuses,” Blanco y Negro, year 48, no. 7 (July 1938): n.p.
11 Eduardo Comín Colomer, El 5 Regimiento de Milicias Populares. Historia de la unidad politicomilitar que fue cuna del Ejército Popular y del comisariado político (Madrid: Librería Editorial San Martín, 1973), 222.
12 “El periódico mural, portavoz gráfico de nuestro Ejército popular,” Acero, no. 1 (May 12, 1937): n.p.
13 “Nuestros periódicos murales,” Valor. Órgano de la 4 División, year I, no. 4 (May 15, 1937): n.p.
14 Jaime Fusté, “El periódico mural,” Tracción , epoch 2, year 2, special issue (January 1939): n.p.
15 E. Fornet, “Cultura Popular trae a Valencia los periódicos murales de Madrid,” Ayuda, year 2, no. 99 (July 31, 1938): 5.
16 “Periódicos Murales,” Ayuda , year 2, no. 91 (June 15, 1938): 6.
Holy Bohemia: Madrid, Paris, Barcelona
Holy Bohemia: Madrid, Paris, Barcelona
Barcelona, Neutral City
New York: Skyscrapers and Modernity
Avant-Garde Territories: City
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From the late nineteenth century, the development of new technologies such as the rotary press and linotype machine, together with access to affordable paper, led to the exponential growth of the popular press, magazines, and small publications, 1 even throwing the book form into crisis by pushing it into the background. To be modern was to be new, fast, and on a mass scale, and these were the intrinsic characteristics of the press. Publications grew so numerous and so important that the press became a prominent space of modernity in which culture was conceived, thought about, disseminated, and marketed. It was the topography of modern thought.
Aware of this, in 1874 Stéphane Mallarmé published La Dernière Mode (The Latest Fashion), a magazine that was ostensibly about fashion but was in fact an artistic project in which he experimented with all the possibilities of the medium. Mallarmé studied the changing practices of readers—especially the creative potential of “industrial literature” 2 —and “seized
1 In recent years, art historiography has acknowledged the importance of magazines, highlighting their key role in the birth and growth of the avant-garde. For more on the role of the visual arts in Spanish magazines, see Arte moderno y revistas españolas, 1898–1936 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, 1997); Revistas y guerra, 1936–1939 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Ministerio de Cultura, 2007); and Jordana Mendelson, ed., Magazines, Modernity and War (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía-Ministerio de Cultura, 2008).
2 In the mid-nineteenth century, various terms were used to refer to printed matter in book form, such as album, almanac, collection, and folio. Albums and almanacs were illustrated compendiums, often
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upon the medium’s capacity to visually convey the calibrations of thought.” 3 For Mallarmé, the printed page became a space of negotiation and creation in which to understand and act upon the world; a space that could acquire an “electrical charge”4 through the flow of text and images, with especial emphasis on the typography and illustrations. He thus opened up the key space of modern culture: “the page,” the architecture on which words are displayed, a bounded space in which the reader/viewer prevails. Although Mallarmé’s approach to literature was clearly the opposite of industrial literature, its strategies were similar: he combined images, text, and blank space and played with typography, inviting readers to a performative reading.
In cities, once the twentieth century was underway, professional specialization and new kinds of leisure and consumption led to a demand for publication formats that reflected the complexity of urban life beyond the immediacy of newspapers. Urban readers looked for a more polished, extensive, specifi c, and lavishly illustrated product: the magazine. Magazines became the printed medium of the moment, with some writers even speaking of a “magazine revolution” in the popular culture of the time, pointing out that magazines were the specific cultural object of modernism.5 The fact that magazines are periodical publications with a specifi c style and subject matter makes them multidimensional and thus collective spaces in which artists, writers, typographers, publicists, designers, and other creatives can coexist. Magazines are embedded in their place of production and linked to their context, but
with a mix of humorous drawings and short texts on specifi c subjects. Both categories were dismissed by Charles Baudelaire and other writers as “industrial literature,” a term formulated midcentury by influential critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. See Steve Moyer, “Playing Against Type,” Humanities 34, no. 5 (September–October 2013); available online at https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/septemberoctober/feature/ playing-against-type.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Mark S. Morrisson, Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), 4.
their intention is to reach other places, to expand their sphere of influence, and as such their guiding principle is circulation, large or small. Like any commercial publication, magazines are organs of opinion and influence the construction of the social, moral, and cultural values of the societies that produce them. The art world was not indifferent to the new possibilities of publishing. In the early twentieth century, specialist art magazines and journals multiplied and became professionalized and internationalized, as was the case with the Gazette des BeauxArts (1859–2002) and The Burlington Magazine (1903–present). However, these kinds of journals were too close to the status quo and did not cover the more contemporary expressions that were taking place outside institutional circles. For this reason, the aesthetic experimentation and political radicalism of some editorial projects survived thanks to “little magazines,”6 which shared many characteristics of the commercial magazines but had a different purpose and audience. They were noncommercial enterprises, edited by individuals or small interdisciplinary groups with the intention of publishing works or opinions that challenged the established schools of thought, and they became a forum for debate and controversy that attracted a small readership.
Small art and literary magazines were the most important medium for the spread of modern ideas: in order to be modern, you had to publish a magazine. If we see culture as an abstract system of connections and displacements, magazines became its best vehicle. Through them, we can follow and explore the hybrid nature of art movements, the dialogue between them, their diverse interests, and so on, telling a story outside of traditional art history. Beyond the particularities of individual authors and unique objects, magazines focus on the concept of ideological exchange and contradiction in modern
6 The term “little magazines” ( petites revues in French) refers to a set of literary periodicals published between roughly 1912 and 1939, characterized by their small readership, fi nancial fragility, and artistic innovation.
culture, highlighting the connections rather than the differences between schools, movements, writers, artists, and so on. Magazines take us into a complex, interdisciplinary, and plural vision of modern life.
Art magazines are also important in that they bear witness to the initial stages of an artwork, and the ways in which it is presented, accompanied, and received. In their pages we can see what the artists saw, and discover the collective imaginary of the time. We can explore the framework, the material around the work, which is often considered secondary but adds unexpected nuances. As Jordana Mendelson writes, “Magazines require us to re-imagine the location of modern art not solely within a single artist's studio or upon the walls of a gallery, but as the collaborative product of an editorial board or a print shop.” 7
For example, Cubism can be presented through its publications because the world of the press and printed matter was so important in the movement’s history and evolution. Cubism was the fi rst movement to physically incorporate the pages of newspapers and magazines in its papiers collés, and to paint them into its compositions, an innovation that aroused great interest in the mainstream press from 1908 to 1910. Exhibition reviews and satirical articles and cartoons in French newspapers suggest a generally negative response to Cubism, which is described as being cold, geometric, intellectual, lacking in color— and foreign! In light of this, some writers, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, felt the need to take sides. To counterbalance the negative press, they not only published positive reviews but also wrote seminal texts explaining the new vocabulary with which to appreciate Cubist painting, 8 sharing their knowledge through the texts they published. In their eagerness to explain and disseminate the new vision of Cubism, Apollinaire and his friends founded Les Soirées de Paris (1912–14), a small but indispensable literary magazine with around fi fty subscribers that supported Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and André Derain,
7 Mendelson, ed., Magazines, Modernity and War, 13–14.
8 In L’Intransigeant (1910–14) and Paris-Journal , for example.
Les Soirées de Paris , no. 21, February 15, 1914
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to name a few. The magazine’s commitment to the movement led to the inclusion of photographic reproductions of artworks in its pages, which was difficult and costly at the time.9 In 1913, Apollinaire published Les Peintres cubistes, a book whose texts are partly based on articles previously printed in Les Soirées de Paris . Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes followed suit with Du cubisme (1912), based on a key text by Metzinger that had appeared in Pan in 1910. Both books are foundational texts that served as the basis for the evolution of the movement and its subsequent dissemination. Les Soirées de Paris paved the way for other magazines, such as L’Élan (1915–16), SIC (1916–19), and Nord-Sud (1917–18), which were invaluable tools for learning and dissemination for artists of the time, as well as crucial documents in the history of Cubism.
9 For example, fi ve of Picasso’s Cubist compositions were published in Les Soirées de Paris, no. 18 (November 15, 1913), allowing his work to be seen further afield.
L’Élan , no. 1, April 15, 1915; no. 2, May 1, 1915
SIC , no. 1, January 1916; Nord-Sud , no. 1, March 15, 1917
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The reception of Cubism in France was a result of its internationalization, which is key to understanding how it became the dominant avant-garde movement of the fi rst third of the twentieth century. The exhibitions organized by young gallery owners and art dealers ( Exposició d’Art Cubista [Exhibition of Cubist Art] at Galeries Dalmau in 1912, to name one example) were key to this internationalization, but the proliferation of little art magazines published in and around Paris played an even more important role. The intention of all these publications was to “travel,” to leave the spaces of production, swap ideas, share opportunities for reflection, and create synergies between artists. They were a forum for knowledge that crossed physical and linguistic borders, even in times of crisis such as World War I. L’Élan , SIC , and Nord-Sud traveled all over Europe and America. In Spain, for example, Vicente Huidobro presented Nord-Sud to the circle of the writer, literary critic, scholar, and polyglot Rafael Cansinos Assens, and it became a key element for understanding the development of the “new art” in Spain. In other countries, Der Sturm , Camera Work , La Voce, and Lacerba served the same purpose: to expand the geographical scope of Cubism, making it a lingua franca. It is because of this mobility that we should understand Cubism as “a diverse, plural
practice, extensive in time, which generates multiple poetics from its own aesthetic core and reconciles nationalities and territories.”
10
The urban development of Spain and the idea of progress introduced by modernity were linked to the literacy, education, and pro-reading policies implemented by the Regenerationist movement. Reading was a good habit that became an aspiration for all social classes. Cities provided a new kind of consumer, far removed from the elites, for whom a large number of printed materials of all kinds were produced, reaching levels of circulation and consumption unprecedented in Spain. Newspapers, magazines, and books thus became a means to generate opinion and disseminate ideas and forms of life that intellectuals and artists then used in their own projects.
10 Eugenio Carmona, “Fondo y figura del cubismo y sus entornos,” in El cubismo y sus entornos en la colección Telefónica , exh. cat. (Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, 2004), 23.
Le Rire , no. 3, November 24, 1894
L’Assiette au Beurre , no. 476, May 14, 1910
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At the turn of the century, both the content 11 and form of Art Nouveau magazines reflected the French influence, with high-quality typography and image contributors (Picasso, Luis Bagaría, and Isidre Nonell). The relationship between Spain and France (to the detriment of Italy) was very close: intellectuals and the industrial bourgeoisie looked to the French capital, and artists made pilgrimages to Paris. French publishing projects, which were plentiful in the city centers—such as La Revue blanche, Le Rire, and L’Assiette au Beurre —were crucial for the development of modernism in Spain. Similarly, some Spanish magazines were known in France,12 and projects such as Revista Ibérica , Helios, Revista Nova , and Renacimiento worked with international contributors and published translations of key texts. Further into the twentieth century, one of the most significant projects in the transition from Art Nouveau to modern magazines was the social and literary journal Prometeo (1908–12),
11 Juan Manuel Bonet, “Las revistas madrileñas, del Modernismo a la Modernidad,” in Arte moderno y revistas españolas, 1898–1936, 44.
12 Ricardo Mas Peinado, “Gran Vía, 613. Santiago Segura y las revistas de arte en Barcelona,” in Arte moderno y revistas españolas, 1898–1936, 55.
directed by writer and avant-garde agitator Ramón Gómez de la Serna, which sought to breathe new life into Spain’s literary scene. Its pages included literary criticism and new work, essays on social issues, texts on art, and bibliographical notes, as well as translations of articles from international magazines. The most notable were the Futurist Manifesto in April 1909 (it had been published in France in January of that year) and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s text “Proclama futurista a los españoles” (Futurist Proclamation to the Spaniards) in June 1910, prefaced by Gómez de la Serna. It was book-like and did not use designer typographies—characteristic of the French magazines—or lavish illustration, giving it a classical and sober appearance typical of Noucentisme. This was Gómez de la Serna’s fi rst publishing project, which he later disavowed, saying “magazines must be effusive, or else they are miserly.” 13
After World War I, the thirst for the new was galvanized by the emergence of a new generation of poets and artists. After Cansinos Assens proclaimed that it was time to “do away with the past” and “be of this century,”14 a group of his young followers from the tertulia at the Café Colonial published “Un manifiesto literario. Ultra” (A Literary Manifesto: Ultra, 1919),15 which became the fi rst Spanish avant-garde movement in the “international style,” that is, using techniques and strategies of the European avant-garde, defi ant in attitude, and, above all, producing small magazines as a means of action and dissemination. Aside from a few incendiary and not very effective evenings, of which only a few anecdotes survive, Ultraism mainly played out in these magazines. Many of these were not created as Ultraist magazines, or could not be described as such, but they published Ultraist materials and avant-garde literature in general,
13 Ángel González, “Revista de revistas,” in Arte moderno y revistas españolas, 1898–1936, 15.
14 Gloria Videla, El Ultraísmo. Estudios sobre movimientos poéticos de vanguardia en España (Madrid: Gredos, 1969), 30.
15 In the literary magazine Grecia (Seville), year 2, no. 11 (March 15, 1919): 11; available online at https://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/hd/es/viewer? id=117a68fb-e74c-411f-ae15-c4c5670b6dfe.
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“Proclama futurista a los españoles” (Futurist Proclamation to the Spaniards), Prometeo , vol. 3, no. 20, June 1910
“Manifiesto ultraísta vertical” (Vertical Ultraist Manifesto), Grecia , no. 11, March 15, 1919
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and their bylines included writers who were associated with the movement, such as Cansinos Assens, Guillermo de la Torre, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio M. Cubero, Gómez de la Serna, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gerardo Diego, and so on. Notable examples include Grecia (the fi rst publication to embrace avant-garde attempts at a renewal of poetry), Cervantes (which was part of Ultraism as early as 1919), Cosmópolis (which published important critical articles and essays on avant-garde literature and more specifically on Ultraism), Tableros, and Perseo. In 1921, the magazine Ultra was founded in Madrid (after a magazine of the same name had appeared in Oviedo). It was a project conceived by the signatories of the Ultra manifesto, who had pledged to publish a magazine “which will bear the name Ultra, and which will only embrace the new.”16 Its intention was to become an international avant-garde magazine, and its twenty-five issues featured contributions from all the leading fi gures of the Ultraist circles. The magazine, which presented a careful selection of Ultraist materials, was notable for the synergy between form and content that characterized the movement, for its typography, and for its unique covers. It also established an ongoing relationship with the visual arts thanks to artists including Władysław Jahl and Marjan Paszkiewicz (from Poland), Rafael Barradas (from Uruguay), and Norah Borges (from Argentina), who illustrated it. Other magazines included Reflector, 17 Horizonte , Vértices , and Alfar, which de la Torre described as “the most worthy and perfected successor of the early Ultraist magazines, since it featured writing by the most admirable survivors of the movement.”18 Alfar looked very polished, with numerous reproductions by artists such as Barradas, Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Juan Gris, and Sonia Delaunay, among others.
16 Ibid.
17 Eugenio Carmona, “Tipografías desdobladas. El arte nuevo en las revistas de creación entre el novecentismo y la vanguardia. 1918–1930,” in Arte moderno y revistas españolas, 1898–1936, 66–69.
18 M. Ángeles Vázquez, “Las vanguardias en nuestras revistas, 3. Primeras revistas españolas de vanguardia,” Rinconete , February 7, 2005; available online at https://cvc.cervantes.es/el_rinconete/anteriores/ febrero_05/07022005_02.htm.
Ultra , no. 3, February 20, 1921; no. 4, March 1, 1921; no. 6, March 30, 1921; no. 5, March 17, 1921
In his famous interview in El Parlamentario , Cansinos Assens talked about the role of ultra-romantic art, claiming that the new aesthetics would “usher in universal brotherhood, erase borders, and unite hearts in a pure yearning and communion of art.” 19 In this universal aspiration of the avant-garde, Cansinos Assens emphasized the need to “mend the threads that were broken by the war, the threads of dissemination that had been cast and woven together from one end of the world to the other, like an apotheosis of crisscrossed ribbons.” 20 Indeed, Spanish Ultraists had close personal and literary ties with other European writers (Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Max Jacob), and they were quoted, translated, and sometimes contacted by foreign magazines, as in the case of Bulletin DADA , issue number 6, which published a list of sixty-seven presidents of the movement, including Cansinos Assens, Guillermo de la Torre, and Rafael Lasso de la Vega. Through their magazines the Ultraists aspired to share and create connecting paths on which Spain could participate and work collaboratively.
From the 1930s onward, the magazines shifted toward more popular formats in an attempt to reach wider audiences and have a greater social impact in order to ensure their continuity. Heirs to the little magazines, these publications played a more visible social role in aesthetic thought and generated debates beyond the sphere of the arts, giving rise to social change and upheavals. Aware of this, artists used them as a means of political confrontation through heterodoxy and dissent.
The example of Surrealism is enlightening in this regard, because as an artistic-literary group it defi ned itself through its publications. In fact, the movement’s publications are the only source through which we can trace the changing ideas and the collective context of the various groups that made up Surrealism.
19 Xavier Bóveda, “Los intelectuales dicen,” El Parlamentario, December 15, 1918; quoted in Andrew A. Anderson, ed., El momento ultraísta. Orígenes, fundación y lanzamiento de un movimiento de vanguardia (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2017), appendix.
20 Ibid.
135
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Used profusely for dissemination, André Breton described magazines as “a means of intervention,”21 because they are inherently active and lend themselves to agitation. In the 1930s, Parisian Surrealist magazines such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33) and Minotaure (1933–39) increased their editorial scope and their influence. In line with Breton’s ideas, art never appeared in them as an object of aesthetic criticism, but as a way of affi rming the “marvelous real.” Meanwhile, Documents (1929–30)—a dissident project critical of Breton’s idealist vision— was founded in Paris, describing itself as a journal of archaeology, fi ne arts, ethnography, and miscellany. It was fi nanced by noted art dealer George Wildenstein and included Carl Einstein on its editorial board. Georges Bataille, the true soul of the project, was named secretary general and became sole editor from the
21 Javier Mañero Rodicio, “Acción surrealista y medios de intervención. El surrealismo en las revistas, 1930–1939,” Anales de Historia del Arte 23 (2013): 231
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fi fth issue onward. Contributors to Documents, “a war machine against received ideas,”22 included dissident Surrealists such as Michel Leiris, André Masson, Robert Desnos, and Joan Miró, as well as experts in ethnography, numismatics, jazz, archaeology, and so on, in pursuit of the knowledge crossover that defi ned the publication. Photography also played an important role, in visual essays and as a tool for surprising juxtapositions that created new mental images. The magazine also had a regular section: a kind of dictionary that reflected on the purpose rather than the meaning of words, and included entries on terms such as “the absolute,” “the eye,” and “the formless.” Featuring works by Miró, Masson, Picasso, Jean Arp, and Jacques Lipchitz, its approach to art focused on the formless, the perversion of forms, and the basest of the senses in order to transgress the forms of
22 Noelia Denise Dunan and José Taurel Xifra, “Bajo materialismo y surrealismo. El debate Bataille-Breton,” Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales 60, no. 223 (January–April 2015): 180.
Acéphale: religion, sociologie, philosophie , year 1, no. 1, June 24, 1936 Avant-Garde
“Unes declaracions sensacionals de Carl Einstein”
(Sensational Statement by Carl Einstein), Meridià: setmanari de literatura, art i política, tribuna del Front
Intel·lectual Antifeixista , no. 17, May 6, 1938, p. 4
modern idealistic humanism. According to Bataille, the dislocation, monstrosity, and representation of the human body were necessary to dismantle the idea of the “natural body”—a construct of our culture that covers up its true destructive nature. Documents also gave pride of place to popular culture, Hollywood films, the music hall, and so on, highlighting their multidisciplinary nature. It was like a cultural and visual collage focusing on the relationship between the images, documents, and texts of its time.
While Documents represented the battle between Bataille and Breton, Carl Einstein’s ideas and texts were also spaces of confrontation for the avant-garde. A poet and writer as well as an art theorist and critic, Eisenstein’s political commitment defi ned his life and work, based on an understanding of art as a process of transformation of humans and reality. His theoretical contributions framed the reading of Cubism, concluding that “in its most precise manifestations, art signifies a revolt against uniform tradition” and that the act of looking is always tantamount to a struggle. 23 Seeking new ways of artistic thought
23 Carl Einstein, Georges Braque (Paris: Éditions des Chroniques du Jour, 1934; repr. Brussels: La part d’œil, 2003), 18 and 64; quoted in José
Variétés . Le Surréalisme en 1929 , special issue, June 1929; Jazz , no. 15, February 1930
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and production, he studied African art, which he considered an example of social—and therefore political—art. As Einstein saw it, African art disrupts successive time and space, which does not coincide with geometric perspective and enables a communal experience that transcends logic and the individual. From this perspective, Cubism—unlike other art movements that were self-absorbed in the technicalities of representing reality—was a way of creating a new reality. As such, art and artists engaged with a new vision of the world.
Due to Bataille’s omnipresence, Einstein left less of a mark on Documents, but his influence can be seen in the magazine’s internationalism, its rejection of a hierarchy between the arts, and the recurring presence of artists he had studied (Picasso, Arp, Gris, Miró, and Léger, among others). The historical and political events of the years that followed led him to focus exclusively on political texts. Consistent with his discourse, Einstein fought in the Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War. In the speech he read at the famous anarchist’s funeral, he said that Durruti had “banished the prehistoric word ‘I’ from his vocabulary. In the Durruti Column only the collective syntax is known.”24
In Spain in the early 1930s, influential publications such as La Gaceta Literaria (1927–32) and Gaceta de Arte (1932–37) provided a new vision of art and of Spain’s role in European culture. 25 In keeping with sociopolitical developments of the time, magazines became plans of action and dissemination for social change—a critical space in which to think about and spread the new art inherent to the new society. The complex course of the Second Republic strengthened the relationship between
Gomes Pinto, “Arte y acción política: el intempestivo Carl Einstein,” Azafea , no. 15 (2013): 189–200.
24 Carl Einstein, quoted in Uwe Fleckner, ed., The Invention of the 20th Century: Carl Einstein and the Avant-Gardes (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2009), 21.
25 Numerous Spanish magazines were published in the 1930s, including Nueva España (1930–31), D’Ací i d’Allà (1918–36), Noreste (1932–36), Orto (1932–34), Sur (1935–36), and A.C. Documentos de actividad contemporánea (1931–37).
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artists and politics, radicalizing their positions and using magazines as fronts for discussion. Directed by influential fi gures, these two gazettes played a key role in the consolidation of the new art. They shared characteristics such as their format, certain ways of doing things, their cosmopolitan agenda, their aesthetic variety, their stance against the past, and their active defense of the modern. La Gaceta Literaria , directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero and based in Madrid, was a project of national affi rmation that positioned itself in the centrality of the state. It presented itself as a one-man initiative, destroying the collective utopia of the Republic and moving toward fascism. Conversely, Eduardo Westerdahl’s Gaceta de Arte, based in the outermost edges, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, stood for anti-isolationism and reflected the utopia of the young generation of Republican intellectuals.
The name Giménez Caballero is inextricably linked to the importance of publishing in the Spanish avant-garde. In his early “Ensayo sobre mí mismo” (Essay on Myself) he described
himself as a cultural and literary producer who started out in the industrial world of paper, which he understood to be inseparable from the new art. 26 Paper was at the center of his carefully constructed image of himself as an avant-garde man. He posed for a photograph—published in Crónica in 1930—in proletarian overalls, sitting on a Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer, in front of a poster by Cassandre and surrounded by a modern bookshelf full of books, many of them his own and those written by his friends or brought back from his travels. His image is that of a revolutionary producer who has transcended the bourgeois and liberal stage of nineteenth-century culture through the dissemination of ideas and by opening up new spaces for culture. It is symptomatic that his projects highlighted print culture as a space of action. On the one hand, he created a series of more than sixty Carteles literarios (Literary Posters, 1925–27)—an ironic look at the Spanish literary world, not without controversy—which he saw as the new painting of industrial society and which he presented as an alternative to traditional literary criticism. 27 A synthesis of verbal and visual registers, somewhere between collage and visual poetry, the posters produced bold and extravagant spaces of renewal. The easy reproducibility of posters led to the project’s dissemination in exhibitions, publications, and conferences at the national and international level. At the same time, Giménez Caballero directed the fortnightly La Gaceta Literaria, which, unlike the Ultraist projects, looked conventional, without much typographic variety and a use of images similar to that of the mainstream press. Giménez Caballero did not start La Gaceta as a vehicle for creation, like the projects of the 1920s, but as an organ of dissemination, “the forerunner [in Spain] of the avantgarde in literature, art, and politics.”28 For him, the magazine was the intermedial space par excellence in which to present a new,
26 This essay was published in the American magazine Books Abroad 5, no. 1 (January 1931): 2 and 6–8; available online at https://www.jstor.org/ stable/40045432.
27 First published in his book Carteles (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1927).
28 Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Historia de la literatura fascista española, vol. 1 (Madrid: Akal, 2008), 123.
145
Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Carteles literarios (Literary Posters), 1925–27: La novela romántica.
Pío Baroja (The Romantic Novel: Pío Baroja); Nuestros críticos de arte en el Salón de Madame Beauté (Our Art Critics at Madame Beauté’s Salon); Gregorio Marañón ; and Guillermo de la Torre
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dynamic, and eclectic culture, with a particular emphasis on the transmission of information, to foster cosmopolitanism.
La Gaceta Literaria allows us to follow Giménez Caballero’s productive dynamism and his active participation in many cultural projects such as the Exposición de Arquitectura y de Pintura Modernas (Exhibition of Modern Architecture and Painting) in San Sebastián in 1930 (where he contributed to the selection of artists and projects). He also founded the fi rst avant-garde fi lm club, the Cineclub Español, and La Galería, his commercial establishment in Madrid that sought to disseminate the new architecture, metal furniture, and traditional craftsmanship.
José Ortega y Gasset wrote an introduction for the fi rst issue of La Gaceta, 29 Guillermo de la Torre was the magazine’s secretary, Gabriel García Maroto was its graphic designer, and its stable of contributors included prominent names such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, José Moreno Villa, José Bergamín, and Sebastià Gasch, among others. Its articles on art highlighted contemporary European movements such as Cubism, New Objectivity, and, above all, Futurism, which Giménez Caballero personally sympathized with. The magazine also covered Spain’s new art: reviews of exhibitions and artists from different parts of the country, such as Federico García Lorca, Moreno Villa, Francisco Bores, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, and others. As Ortega said, the magazine wanted to be an “occasion … a real, living event,”30 and it was the role of the writers to make that happen. To this end, La Gaceta directly addressed its readers, inviting them to position themselves in a series of surveys asking questions such as “What is avant-garde art?” 31 It was also the space where some major confrontations played out, such as that between Eugenio d’Ors and Sebastià Gasch about whether or not there was an Italianizing tendency in the new Spanish art.
29 “Sobre un periódico de letras,” La Gaceta Literaria 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1927): 1; available online at https://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/hd/es/ viewer?id=5c811c87-5e5d-4e3a-b52f-5b686468f9f4.
30 Ibid.
31 La Gaceta Literaria , nos. 83–87 (June–August 1930).
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Between 1930 and 1932, La Gaceta underwent substantial changes due to the political radicalization of its founder and the presence of the editor, monarchist deputy Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, as co-director. Friends and contributors gradually moved away from the orbit of the magazine and in September 1931 a new “subtitle” was added to it: El Robinsón Literario de España (Spain’s Literary Robinson Crusoe). This marked a new era for the magazine, which was now written entirely by Giménez Caballero, with its own specifi c numbering added to the previous sequence of La Gaceta . From then until its demise, La Gaceta Literaria was a one-person project. El Robinsón Literario included all forms of journalism, feature articles, manifestos, compilations of documents, reporting, literary and genre criticism, political essays, etcetera, always from unexpected perspectives and, at times, with a humorous tone reminiscent of Gómez de la Serna. This original and heterogenous platform, with its mix of the individual and collective, disappeared in May 1932 without saying goodbye to its subscribers.
Three months earlier, in February 1932, Gaceta de Arte had been founded in Santa Cruz de Tenerife under the editorship of Eduardo Westerdahl, a writer, painter, and art critic from the Canary Islands with an aptitude for international cultural relations. The magazine—a single sheet of glossy paper folded in two, in other words, with four tabloid-format pages—reflected its main objective: the journey of ideas, the connection between the island and Western culture, bypassing the mainland. Like other initiatives of this kind, it was almost handmade, largely fi nanced by its ideologue and director. Its contributors had a range of interests and it exuded newness, youth, and optimism in its projects and objectives.
The magazine’s inherent international profi le appeared on Westerdahl’s return from a European trip in which he established contacts to provide content and distribute the magazine. European news was included in Gaceta de Arte , mainly with a focus on Germany and Paris, through Westerdahl and Óscar Domínguez, respectively. These international contacts were boosted by the foreign artists who settled in the Canary
Gaceta de Arte , no. 35, September 1935
Islands and by the leading European cultural fi gures invited to visit Tenerife by the group. This international outlook, unattached to national political forces, was also expressed in the magazine’s Bauhaus-influenced design and typography, characterized by the flat geometric layout and the use of four colors—green, red, blue, and yellow. The Canary Island-based magazine’s international success was evident in its presence in European avant-garde circles, which allowed it to participate in the international debates of the time, such as the social function of art, Adolf Hitler’s censorship of the new art, and criticism of the realism of Soviet art. Unlike Giménez Caballero’s one-person project, Gaceta de Arte was intrinsically collective. Made up of a motley group of intellectuals, their joint venture was to capture the spirit of modernity and move toward a new aesthetic order, without adhering to a single strategy. It brought together opposing points of view, beyond polemics, which were presented in a common space reflecting the interests of supposedly contradictory worlds such as that of abstract art and Surrealism. The magazine had a literary and artistic side, but it was also interested in functionalist architecture and urbanism, as well as European avant-garde theater and fi lm. Manifestos focusing on issues central to the group were one of the main strategies used in the publication, along with pamphlets and proclamations. Gaceta de Arte expressed a deep faith in the new aesthetic ideas as a vehicle of social change through its activism against an exhausted bourgeois culture. In the years leading up to the Civil War, its criticism of the cultural activity of the Republic grew increasingly explicit, and it became a space of opposition to what it saw as the radicalization of culture, represented by magazines such as Nueva Cultura (1935–37). Nonetheless, Gaceta de Arte maintained a fruitful exchange with the groups ADLAN (Amics de l’Art Nou [Friends of New Art]) and GATEPAC (Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea [Group of Spanish Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture]).
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The Gaceta de Arte group’s strong interest in communication, education, and dissemination translated into prolifi c editorial work: they published Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo’s Romanticismo y cuenta nueva (Romanticism and a Clean Slate) in 1933, and Sebastià Gasch’s Ángel Ferrant and Westerdahl’s Willi Baumeister in 1934.32 The magazine was also used as a platform for other activations of the cultural life of the islands and the country: exhibitions, conferences, trips, and major events such as the arrival of the Surrealist group led by Breton on board a banana freighter in May 1935, under the auspices of Óscar Domínguez. Various activities were organized during the Surrealists’ short stay in Tenerife, including excursions, lectures (by Breton and Benjamin Péret), book presentations, the screening of Luis Buñuel’s controversial L’Âge d’or (The Golden Age, 1930), and the Exposición surrealista (Surrealist Exhibition), the group’s second international exhibition. Moreover, the September 1935 issue was devoted to Surrealism and covered some of the activities that took place during that visit. 33 A month later, the Surrealist group in Paris and Gaceta de Arte published the second Boletín internacional del surrealismo (International Surrealist Bulletin) in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, with texts in Spanish and French. Thus, for a few days, the island of Tenerife became the center of the international avant-garde, reversing the geography of modernity.
32 Monographs on Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee and a book on Surrealism by Domingo López Torres were also planned but never published.
33 Gaceta de Arte, no. 33 (September 1935); available online at https://jable. ulpgc.es/viewer.vm?id=32375.
Einstein:
Culture’s Universal Time: Gaceta de Arte
André Breton: The Magician of Surrealism
Jordana Mendelson
A photograph of editor, author, and filmmaker Ernesto Giménez Caballero sitting in Marcel Breuer’s famous Wassily Chair (1925), wearing a jumpsuit, diamondshaped glasses, and leather oxfords is fea tured in an interview on “Qué es el vanguardismo?” published in 1930 in the illustrated magazine Crónica. 1 The photograph is published without a credit line, but demonstrates a keen attention to pose and composition by placing Giménez Caballero in the center of this contemporary still life. He is presented as the essence of the Spanish avant-garde at that moment, seated in one of the most iconic chrome masterpieces of the period. He poses confidently looking straight at the photographer/reader, in front of shelves and next to a streamlined chrome side table, both stacked with books and serial publications. This carefully staged vignette puts on display all of the qualities meant to signal a cosmopolitan intellectual: a blend of the latest international trends alongside the publications that transmit these ideas and images across borders of class, language, and geography. What is less visible in the photograph, but made explicit in the interview, are the ambivalences, layers, and more
radical political postures that would come to define Giménez Caballero during this time (from his sole editorship of El Robinson Literario to his embrace of fascism across Europe).
In the interview, signed by Juan de Almanzora (the pseudonym of Juan López Núñez), he mobilizes a dialogue between registers of print culture: the highly intellectual “little magazines” like his own La Gaceta Literaria and the very popular, widely circulating illustrated weeklies like Crónica . The question posed in the article’s headline is answered in the photograph alongside, and is as if uttered by Giménez Caballero himself—“Soy yo,” it’s me. Fashionable self-presentation was not alien to the avant-garde in the early twentieth century. Indeed, Giménez Caballero’s posture aligns with others whose sartorial choices and decision to write about and discuss design and fashion became a regular feature among the artists and writers who counted themselves among the latest trendsetters in Europe. In this photograph, books, magazines, and furniture become the accessories to Giménez Caballero’s jumpsuit, glasses, and shoes. Or, as López Núñez observes, it is the setting and its
Juan de Almanzora, “¿Qué es el vanguardismo? Lo que nos dice el señor Giménez Caballero” (What Is Vanguardism? What Ernesto Giménez Caballero Tells Us), Crónica , vol. 2, no. 42, August 31, 1930, p. 2
Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s (Wassily) Chair
decorations that mean as much as the words on the page: “his original office, decorated in the purest avant-garde style.”
One year after the interview in Crónica, Giménez Caballero published “Ensayo sobre mí mismo” (Essay about Myself) in a magazine that is as unlikely a forum for avant-garde ideas as any: the University of Oklahoma’s Books Abroad , which began publication in 1927 with the goal of distributing “four times a year a little magazine of really useful information concerning the more significant book publications of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, the South American republics, and perhaps other countries.” 2 Giménez Caballero’s publications were featured fairly regularly in Books Abroad (which also featured reviews of José Ortega y Gasset and other writers, and essays written by other leading critics like Guillermo de Torre, one of the members of the Ultraist movement and co-editor of La Gaceta Literaria) and spanned high praise for his experimental novels to a biting critique of him in 1944 in an essay titled “The Poet as Propagandist.”3 I cite this 1931 essay and the journal it appeared in for two reasons: first, it shows how robust the exchange of ideas in print were across geographic and linguistic distances; and, second, it records that among those authors and publishers interested in their ideas reaching new audiences abroad, Giménez Caballero was at the forefront.
Giménez Caballero emphasized in this autobiographical essay the scope of his incursions into modern culture as well as his interest in defining himself as a
particular kind of literary and cultural producer, one whose work is tied to his origins in the world of administration and print culture. He linked his evolution as a writer with the growth of his father’s industry: “My father started his working life at the age of ten. When I was born he was a lowly clerk. Today he is at the helm of one of the leading paper manufacturers and distributors in Spain.” He explained that his own identity is: “That of an entrepreneur of contractor of poetic affairs. Or a poet turned businessman.” There was no distance between the work of the industrialist and the work of the intellectual, nor between the genesis of a work and its final output in print: from editing his first book in his father’s press and writing articles for the liberal newspaper El Sol to editing La Gaceta Literaria and publishing numerous books in different genres, including the almanac-style illustrated chronicle Circuito Imperial (1930), which featured his growing admiration for fascism and Mussolini. Of his accomplishments he highlighted two: his book Carteles and his role in establishing news spaces for art (La Galería in Madrid and the Cineclub Español). 4
Carteles announced modernity itself as something that depended upon the novelty of media practice to embody artistic and literary expression. As the cover illustration of Carteles announces—it was now the “adman” with a bullhorn who had control over public space.5 Together they—the adman and the editor—utilized the press to actively frame a picture of modernity that was both
rooted in the elitism of Spanish culture and took advantage of the thoroughfares of international industrial and media modernity. Sitting on his chrome chair in his very avant-garde studio, Giménez Caballero directed his diamond-shaped glasses at his readers, and invited them to enter a world that was made of both paper and metal, typeface and reflective surfaces. To understand what the avantgarde is, one needed only to inhabit it, to sit on it, and to be surrounded by it.
1 Juan de Almanzora, “¿Qué es el vanguardismo? Lo que nos dice el señor Giménez Caballero,” Crónica, year 2, no. 42 (August 31, 1930): 1. For more on Giménez Caballero and the Bauhaus, see Josenia Hervás y Heras, “Un madrileño
en la revista Bauhaus. Los carteles de Gecé,” Archivo Español de Arte 94, no. 373 (January–March 2021): 69–84.
2 “Forward to Our First Issue,” Books Abroad 1, no. 1 (January 1927): 1.
3 Olive Hawes, “The Poet as Propagandist,” Books Abroad 18, no. 2 (Spring 1944): 122.
4 See, for example, Rosa Sarabia, “Interarte vanguardista y algunas cuestiones teórico-críticas a considerar,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): 45–69; and Luis Moreno Caballud, “Las relaciones interartísticas de vanguardia ante lo político. Un estudio sobre La Gaceta Literaria (1927–1932),” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 34, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 429–49.
5 For a full account of the exhibition in Barcelona, see Martí Peran, “Madrid-Barcelona. ‘Carteles literarios’ de Gecé,” in Madrid-Barcelona. “Carteles Literarios” de Gecé (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona; Madrid: MNCARS, 1994), 9–20.
Gecé: The Sewer Inspector
Fernando Marzá and Francisco Rojas
Industrial society is urban. The city is its horizon. It gives rise to metropolises, suburbs, large housing developments.
Françoise Choay, L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités, 1965
With these words by Françoise Choay, the Museo Reina Sofía incorporates architecture and urbanism into the new presentation of its permanent exhibition, adopting the twofold idea of the modern city as a space where art is produced and as an object exposed to the transformations of modernity.
Two great challenges faced architecture and urbanism from the nineteenth century onward. On the one hand, to adapt large cities to the traffi c and organizational needs of the new industrial society, which gave rise to several models; and on the other, to ensure that living spaces had adequate sanitary conditions for the growing working class.
While the cities founded in America had been somewhat planned, European cities entered the nineteenth century as an anachronistic aggregation of historic centers that had grown organically—in most cases around an original nucleus that was already overcrowded and stifling—and needed to be upgraded for a new society and a new way of life. In their quest for the modern city, artists and theoreticians were conditioned by elements such as the introduction of new means of transport and communication, land-use zoning for different purposes, and the emergence of new kinds of leisure such as culture and sport. Their research, grounded in prior studies, was based on the
Fernando Marzá and Francisco Rojas
objectivity of scientific data or the analytical observation of preexisting conditions.1
Ildefonso Cerdà’s Proyecto de reforma y ensanche de Barcelona (Plan for the Reform and Expansion of Barcelona, 1859) was one of the fi rst two Spanish experiments in this fi eld, along with Carlos María de Castro’s Anteproyecto de Ensanche de Madrid (Preliminary Plan for the Expansion of Madrid, 1860). Cerdà’s plan was based on the statistical and distribution studies of the city published in his Monografía estadística de la clase obrera de Barcelona en 1856 (Statistical Monograph on Barcelona’s Working Class in 1856). 2 In order to deal with the overcrowding caused by the industrialization of the city (the densification of the area within the city walls as a result of migration from the countryside, demographic growth, and a shortage of adequate housing, which led to frequent epidemics) a proposal was made to demolish the city walls and plan the expansion of the city in an orderly manner. The integration of Cerdà’s expansion project and the study of the data justifying it culminated in his Teoría general de la urbanización (General Theory of Urbanization, 1867), the starting point of a new scientific discipline focusing on the city: urban planning.
On the other hand there was Ebenezer Howard, representing writers whose research was based on the analytical observation of specific situations. His garden city model, described in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), explores the reasons that motivate people to move to the city and the countryside, as if these two spaces were magnets. Howard suggested a third space that would have an even greater power of attraction: one that combines the advantages of the fi rst two. In Spain, there had been a similar proposal a few years earlier: the Ciudad Lineal
1 All the projects displayed in the new presentation of the Collection were studied by historian Françoise Choay in L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités (Paris: Seuil, 1965), and in La Règle et le modèle. Sur la théorie de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
2 Included in Ildefonso Cerdà, Teoría general de la urbanización y aplicación de sus principios y doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona, vol. 1, book 3 (Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1867).
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(Linear City) by Arturo Soria y Mata, who wrote a series of articles in the newspaper El Progreso (1882–83) describing his plan to develop Madrid by means of a railway line flanked by facilities, with the potential for unlimited growth.
Finally, leaving aside the idea of the connection with the rural world, Tony Garnier argued that cities were created for industrial reasons, and that this is where the solutions also lie. After a thorough analysis of the needs of the modern city, Garnier designed and published Une Cité industrielle (An Industrial City, 1901–07), which put forward the idea of functional zoning for the fi rst time. Cities must be built in places that guarantee industrial supply, so he placed his city next to a river that could be used by a hydroelectric power station (the main source of energy at the time) and near the necessary raw materials. Although he did not name a specific site, Garnier had in mind the area around Lyon, his native city.
These new city models were transformed into architectural elements that explored new functional and formal characteristics of architecture. The use of glass—a material that, as Walter
Arturo Soria y Mata, Proyecto de Ciudad Lineal (Ciudad Lineal Project), 1914
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Victor Baltard, Monographie des Halles centrales de Paris
(Monograph of the Central Market of Paris), 1863
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Benjamin wrote, does not retain traces and has no “aura”3 —gave rise to new typologies such as Victor Baltard’s Les Halles central market in Paris (1857), and Bruno Taut’s Glashaus-Pavillon (Glass Pavilion) at the Deutscher Werkbund in Cologne (1914). In Les Halles glass covers the building like a skin, while the GlashausPavillon redefi ned the material, creating a polychrome gemlike structure that brings light into the interior. This sensory immersion ties in with the ideas that Paul Scheerbart published in Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture, 1914): “The face of the earth would be much altered if brick architecture were ousted everywhere by glass architecture. It would be as if the earth were adorned with sparkling jewels and enamels.”4 Scheerbart wrote about a “culture of glass,” saying that it would “transform humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished that the
3 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 2.2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 731–36.
4 Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture (published in the same volume with Bruno Taut, Alpine Architecture), ed. Dennis Sharp, trans. James Palmer (New York: Praeger, 1972), 41; originally published as Glasarchitektur (Berlin: Verlag “Der Sturm,” 1914).
new glass-culture will not encounter too many enemies.”5 The creation of new cities and the use of new construction techniques and materials introduced the possibility of architectural change. In official competitions for emblematic buildings, avant-garde projects could begin to challenge academic and historicist proposals. It should be noted that both trends—modernity and historicism—encompass a wide range of approaches, as can be seen in the competitions for the design of the Chicago Tribune ’s headquarters (1922), the Palais de la Société des Nations in Geneva (1926), Columbus Lighthouse in Santo Domingo (1929), and the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (1931).
Having looked at the different approaches to planning the modern city, let us now turn to the second of the challenges mentioned at the start: addressing the conflict over working-class housing. The population explosion in cities as a result of the Industrial Revolution meant that urbanism and architecture became an issue affecting everyone. As Friedrich Engels explained in his pioneering studies on the development of capitalism, the problem of working-class housing is inherent to capital ism and therefore cannot be resolved within its parameters.6 Low wages and harsh
5 Quoted in Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 734.
6 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and The Housing Question (1872).
Ildefonso Cerdà i Sunyer, Memoria del anteproyecto del ensanche de Barcelona. Casa obrera de segundo orden (Report on the Preliminary Plan for the Expansion of Barcelona: Second-Order Workers’ Housing), cross-section and façade, 1855
Fernando Marzá and Francisco Rojas
working conditions in rural areas led the population of Spain’s provincial capitals to increase by 60 percent between 1860 and 1900: from 1,926,738 to 3,087,654 inhabitants in barely forty years.7 The most developed industrial centers, such as Barcelona, Madrid, and Bilbao, received the lion’s share of the migration from rural areas. The huge housing shortage made it diffi cult for the cities to absorb this increase, forcing factory workers to live in overcrowded slums on the outskirts of cities. As Fernando Chueca Goitia wrote:
Next to the industrial city, the city of the liberal bourgeoisie stood proudly, eager to demonstrate the power and the enlightened brilliance of the ruling class. It was as if the leafy tree of the most beautiful bourgeois urban buildings had roots deep inside the subterranean and dismal areas of the slums, the dreadful industrial areas where workers were crammed together. 8
7 Pilar Erdozáin Azpilicueta and Fernando Mikelarena Peña, “Algunas consideraciones acerca de la evolución de la población rural en España en el siglo XIX,” Noticiario de historia agraria. Boletín informativo del seminario de historia agraria, year 6, no. 12 (1996): 91–118.
8 Fernando Chueca Goitia, Breve historia del urbanismo (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1968), 182.
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Cerdà was one of the fi rst to address this problem, introducing the concept of the “minimum housing unit” in his Anteproyecto del ensanche de Barcelona (Preliminary Plan for the Expansion of Barcelona, 1855). In 1877, Jean-Baptiste André Godin founded the somewhat utopian Familistère (Social Palace) in Guise, based on the idea of Charles Fourier’s phalanstère , or phalanstery, for a self-sufficient community in the first half of the nineteenth century.
One of the strategies against overcrowding was regulation and political intervention. The best example of this is the program implemented by the socialist local government in Vienna, where 65,000 social housing rental apartments were built between 1923 and 1934.9 Rote Wien (Red Vienna) aimed to support workers’ sense of pride by monumentalizing housing, with large multifamily complexes based on the Höfe, or courtyard, model, influenced by the idea of the phalanstère.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, several legislative initiatives were also implemented in Spain, such as the Royal Order of September 9, 1853 to Build Houses for the Poor in Madrid and Barcelona, the 1878 Bill for the Construction of Housing for Workers, and the 1911 Low-Cost Housing Law. At the municipal level, institutions such as the Patronato de la habitación (Housing Board) of Barcelona (1927) were set up
9 Fernando Marzá and Neus Moyano, “La Viena Roja, el dret del treballador a la bellesa,” Ara Diumenge, April 12, 2020, 8–10.
Catherine Adda , Le Familistère de Guise. Une cité radieuse au XIX e siècle (The Familistère [Family Lodging] of Guise: A Radiant 19th-Century City), 1996
Siegfried Weyr, 6 0.000 sind bisher 8 0.000 sollen es werden!
(60,000 So Far, 80,000 Still to Come!), 1932
Fernando Marzá and Francisco Rojas
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to defend everyone’s right to “a modestly comfortable home.” In addition, industry owners, as well as the workers themselves, organized housing cooperatives and communities next to industrial complexes. Factory owners built housing as a means to secure peace and social control.
The development of European cities evolved as the century progressed, with Le Corbusier emerging as one of its most interesting fi gures. Returning to Garnier’s idea of zoning, Le Corbusier proposed a new model of urban planning in the “Ville contemporaine de trois millions d’habitants” (Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants), in which he applied the geometric rigor described in “Après le cubisme” (After Cu bism, 1918). He introduced this project to the public in 1922 by presenting a diorama of this contemporary city along with his designs for its Immeuble-Villa housing blocks; in 1925, he applied this model to the city of Paris in the Plan Voisin, which he presented on two dioramas displayed next to a life-size prototype of one of the units in the Immeuble-Villa apartment blocks. Le Corbusier’s work illustrates how modern architecture used magazines, exhibitions, and the media in general to disseminate
Dances: Figure in Space , 1926
Schlemmer, Figure and Spatial Delineations , 1924; Bauhaus
and consolidate its principles, beyond the built environment.10 The Bauhaus—the state school of architecture, art, and design of the Weimar Republic (1919–33)—also made key contributions. Interdisciplinary experiments in the use of new techniques and materials were carried out at the Bauhaus, exploring the social interaction between the contemporary subject and the increasingly omnipresent modern technology. These experiences played a crucial role in the development of industrial design, and in rethinking the role of architecture in the new industrial context of mass production. In the Bauhaus theater workshop,
10 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
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Oskar Schlemmer explored spatial relations for a new, pseudomechanical body enhanced with technological prostheses. Also drawing on the context of the Bauhaus, the school’s fi rst director Walter Gropius designed the Totaltheater (Total Theater) for experimental playwright Erwin Piscator in 1927. The project consisted of a sort of machine-building with a transformable auditorium and a proscenium stage equipped with several projectors, and generated a series of new relationships with audiences. Meanwhile, back in Spain, where Madrid was being celebrated as the authentic, traditional Spanish city by the literary avant-garde (especially Ramón Gómez de la Serna), another kind of Madrid began to take shape—a city based on modern ideals and aspiring to progress in which architecture, urbanism, and engineering provided facilities and services befi tting a major city. A series of proposals for the improvement of living conditions in the dense urban fabric of the old city followed, such as José Luis de Oriol’s “Plan de reforma interior” (Inner-City Development Plan, 1921)—an unrealized proposal entailing the
José Luis Oriol, Memoria del Proyecto de reforma interior en Madrid (Dossier of the Inner-City Development Plan for Madrid, 1921
Fernando Marzá and Francisco Rojas
opening up of straight roads through the existing urban fabric— and the “Project to Reform and Extend Calle Preciados and the Junction between Plaza del Callao and Calle de Alcalá” proposed by José López Sallaberry and Francisco Andrés Octavio Palacios (ca. 1897–1929), which consisted of opening up Madrid’s
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Gran Vía. The advent of a new material—reinforced concrete— made it possible to construct buildings on this central avenue that were notable for their technical qualities—such as the headquarters of the Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España, Spain’s fi rst skyscraper—and for their plasticity, as in the case of the Edificio Carrión. Beyond Gran Vía, reinforced concrete allowed for formal and structural exper imentation in the design of cultural centers and new sporting facilities such as the roof of Secundino Zuazo’s Frontón Recoletos, and the cantilevered vaulted canopies of the Hipódromo de la Zarzuela, designed by Carlos Arniches and Martín Domínguez.
In 1929, after several unsuccessful attempts to plan the city’s growth, the municipal authorities announced an international competition for the urban development and expansion of Madrid. At the suggestion of Fernando García Mercadal, Secundino Zuazo submitted a project with German urban planner Hermann Jansen, who had designed the plan for Greater Berlin. The competition was declared void, but two ideas from this proposal were put into
practice: a new type of collective housing, tested by Zuazo in the Casa de las Flores, and the organization of the city’s expansion around a main north-south axis, which had already been partially advanced by José Grases Riera and Pedro Núñez Granés in 1901 and 1916, respectively.
Exhibitions played a central role in receiving and transmitting the avant-garde in the visual arts and architecture. The Exposición de Artistas Vascos (Exhibition of Basque Artists, San Sebastián, 1928), the Exposició d’Arquitectura (Architecture Exhibition) at Galeries Dalmau (Barcelona, 1929), and, above all, the Exposición de Arquitectura y de Pintura Modernas (Exhibition of Modern Architecture and Painting) organized by the Ateneo Guipuzcoano (San Sebastián, 1930) were instrumental in establishing a number of Spanish architects associated with rationalism, including the duo of José Manuel Aizpurúa and Joaquín Labayen, as well as Sixte Illescas, Josep Lluís Sert, and Josep Torres Clavé. The emergence of this new breed of architects was key to the founding of the GATEPAC (Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea [Group of Spanish Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture]) in October 1930.
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The work of Labayen and Aizpurúa—whose archive has been housed in the Museo Reina Sofi a since 2018—allows us to see how Spanish architects gradually adopted new European aesthetic languages, such as Le Corbusier’s unadorned and functional forms and the Neoplasticism of De Stijl. Labayen and Aizpurúa’s modern experiments received explicit international recognition by writers such as Bruno Taut (who included them in his book on new architecture)11 and Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, curators of the exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1932), where they were the only Spanish architects to participate with their design for the Real Club Náutico de San Sebastián (1929).
11 Bruno Taut, Die neue Baukunst in Europa und Amerika (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1929).
Fernando Marzá and Francisco Rojas
The year 1928 could be regarded as the symbolic starting point of architectural modernity in Spain. It was the year when Fernando García Mercadal designed the Rincón de Goya pavilion to display a series of paintings by Goya, which, as critic Sigfried Giedion wrote, should “probably be considered the fi rst building in Spain that managed to break with the nineteenth-century tradition.” 12 Also in 1928, García Mercadal was invited to the inaugural meeting of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (International Congress of Modern Architecture, CIAM)13 in La Sarraz, Switzerland—an organization that played a key role in the globalization and institutionalization of architecture in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. At the same time, the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 involved a fi rm commitment to the kind of architecture that would equip cities with the health care, cultural, and educational facilities essential to achieving the well-serviced, educated, and egalitarian society championed by the Republican government. The new government’s profound social reforms also extended to architecture: that same year Matilde Ucelay and María Cristina Gonzalo—the fi rst women to graduate as architects in Spain— enrolled in the Escuela de Arquitectura in Madrid. Particularly important at this time was the eastern section of GATEPAC, which, with the collaboration of Le Corbusier, proposed urban interventions to modernize Barcelona’s old city in the 1930s. Le Corbusier traveled to Spain in 1928 for talks in Madrid and Barcelona. When he returned in 1932 for the preliminary meeting of the International Committee for the Resolution of Problems in Contemporary Architecture (CIRPAC), he designed a monumental urban reform plan for the city in conjunction with the architects of the eastern section of GATEPAC. Following the model of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City), their Plan
12 Sigfried Giedion, “L’architecture contemporaine en Espagne,” Cahiers d’Art, no. 3 (1931): 157–64.
13 The Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (1928–59) was an organization and a series of conferences and meetings of avant-garde architects that developed a signifi cant part of the body of theory on rationalist architecture and cities.
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Macià was an extension of the 1859 expansion of Barce lona, although in this case the city blocks measured four hundred meters by four hundred meters (the equivalent of nine Cerdà blocks). A series of buildings on raised slabs—the so-called redents—more than fifty meters high, were to be placed over these, occupying 12 percent of the land and leaving the rest for gardens, schools, and sports fields. This idea gave rise to the Casa Bloc (1932) apartment block designed by Sert, Torres Clavé, and Joan Baptista Subirana, which has recently been restored.
In the article “Une maison, un arbre” (A House, a Tree, 1933), Le Corbusier addressed the intermediary step needed to help workers from rural areas adapt to the new architectural typology of large apartment blocks. He suggested placing a tree in front of each dwelling, whose windows, for the fi rst time in Le Corbusier’s work, included a brise-soleil . From then on, these moveable shutters became one of the key formal elements of his
work. In addition, he proposed leaving the ground level free to allow for practices that are commonplace in rural dwellings, such as fi re on the ground, water, and other auxiliary elements.14
The eastern section of GATEPAC, like Le Corbusier, used exhibitions as a vehicle for disseminating ideas, as shown by the original panels that are on loan for this new presentation. The group’s fi rst exhibition, held at the 1933 Fira de Barcelona, was Ciutat del repòs i vacances (City of Rest and Holidays), an imagined space for paid workers’ holidays—as mandated by the Labor Contract Act of 1931—set in the Llobregat Delta on the southern edge of the city of Barcelona. La Nova Barcelona (The New Barcelona), the group’s second exhibition held a year later,
14 Fernando Marzá and Xavier Monteys, “Les cases per a mà d’obra auxiliar a Barcelona dintre de l’obra de Le Corbusier,” in Le Corbusier i Barcelona, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, 1988).
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in 1934, sought to address the problems of hygiene and sanitation and the conditions of workers’ housing, documented by photographers Margaret Michaelis and Isaac Saporta 15 in what was known as Distrito V or the Barrio Chino. The third exhibition, Urbanismo y habitación (Urbanism and Housing) should have been held in Buenos Aires in 1936, but the political unrest before the Civil War prevented its opening.
The impact of modern architecture in Spain can be seen in what was to be one of the most important architectural milestones during the Civil War: the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie moderne in Paris in 1937. There were considerable differences between the approaches of the Pavilion’s two architects, Luis Lacasa and Sert—Josefi na Alix 16 places Lacasa in the so-called Generation of 1925, and Sert as part of the more international movement promoted by the GATEPAC.17
The great influence of Le Corbusier’s work on Sert could be seen in the Republican pavilion. It was particularly evident given the similarities between the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux (Pavilion of the New Times) designed by the Swiss master for the same exhibition and Sert and Lacasa’s Spanish pavilion, which used the same construction and communication system. Sert also designed the section dedicated to the history of urbanism in the French pavillon. 18
15 Dolors Rodríguez Roig, “Margaret Michaelis i la Nova Barcelona,” in Margaret Michaelis. Cinc dies pel Barri Xino, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Ajuntament, 2021).
16 Josefina Alix, “El pabellón: arquitectura para una idea,” in Pabellón Español, 1937. Exposición internacional de París, exh. cat. (Madrid: Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1987), 34–47.
17 This duality was resolved in practical terms, judging by Lacasa’s own account: “Although I had publicly opposed Le Corbusier’s principles in Spain and, as such, I did not share Sert’s formalism as regards to architectural composition … in an exhibition where the buildings must necessarily be temporary, Le Corbusier’s simplification was more palatable,” in Luis Lacasa, Escritos 1922–1931 (Madrid: COAM, 1978), 95.
18 Le Corbusier, Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis… S.V.P. (Boulogne: Éditions de l’architecture d’aujourd’hui, 1938), 42–47.
Fernando Marzá and Francisco Rojas
Despite the war, a Republican government that had moved to Valencia, and the very short construction times (it was built in 135 days), Sert and Lacasa’s pavilion was a success. It worked not only as a showcase for the values of the Second Spanish Republic but also as a synthesis of the avant-garde approaches that dominated the artistic and architectural production of the time.
Although the war did not spell the end for Spanish avantgarde architecture, it forced almost fi fty Spanish architects into exile abroad. 19 After the war, it was not until the 1950s that a new generation of architects returned to the paths of modern construction.
19 Arquitecturas desplazadas: arquitecturas del exilio español, exh. cat. (Madrid: Ministerio de Vivienda, 2007); and Arquitectura (Madrid), no. 303 (special issue: “Los olvidados en arquitectura”) (1995); available at https://www. coam.org/es/fundacion/biblioteca/revista-arquitectura-100-anios/etapa1987-1990/revista-arquitectura-n303-Tercer%20trimestre-1995.
Ildefonso Cerdà
In a treatise on urbanism—particularly one whose purpose is essentially its practical application to the reform and expansion of a given city—it is essential to be familiar with all aspects (down to the innermost means and mechanisms, as far as possible) of the functioning of each and every class that makes up the population destined to be contained in and live in the city, whose material improvement is the subject of the treatise in question.
As such, I am perfectly aware that an appropriate ending and conclusion to the foregoing statistical analysis would be a further complementary statistical analysis of the population, by social class, describing the particular way of life of each class, with their corresponding means, re sources, and expenses, their income and outputs, charges and discharges, and their resulting shortfall or surplus. This would undoubtedly give a fair, accurate, and relevant idea of urban life in Barcelona; consequently, it would place science and technology in a position to secure, as far as possible, as regards to the material aspects of the city, the most suitable means to contribute to—or at least not hinder—the
unrestrained functioning of said urban life with regard to each class.
Convinced of this great truth and of the inestimable advantages of applying such an additional analysis to my special studies on the reform and expansion of Barcelona, I had planned to carry out said work. But for this further analysis, as with almost every other analysis I have had to undertake as part of my work, I was unable to find any data or information that could serve even as a basis or a point of departure for my studies; as I would have to obtain all this information myself; and as, moreover, all social classes in Spain live a highly congregated life, carefully and zealously concealing in the innermost recesses of the home both the prosperity and the hardships affecting families, I found it materially impossible to carry out my intentions. These impediments were not the seemingly insupera ble difficulties and obstacles that I have repeatedly encountered in the course of my work, and which, by dint of perseverance, money, and sacrifice can eventually be overcome, as I have almost always done; instead, the obstacles preventing me from carrying out my special statist ical analysis
Ildefonso Cerdà
emerged everywhere and multiplied, as they were in the deeply rooted habits of our society; they were, so to speak, in the atmosphere of social life in Spain, perhaps especially in Catalonia. I was therefore compelled, forced, to desist from this attempt.
In the midst of this desisting, which never ceased to vex and aggrieve me, a happy circumstance occurred, which at least allowed me to gather the most important data and information in order to provide a clear and practical example of the statistical analysis of the actual functioning of the population in the city. Moreover, it fortuitously related to a class whose life and functioning is of greater interest to me than anything else.
Around the year 1855, when, given the exacerbation of the endless difficulties and grievances between manufacturers and workers, and with the full consent and approval of the civil and military authorities, a committee was appointed to work at the royal court, near Her Majesty’s government. Its mission was to find a means by which to put an end to those disagreements, which ultimately weakened industry, to the detriment of those who make a living from or are kept alive by it, and notably damaging the public and general interests, not only of Barcelona, but of the nation.
I myself was fortunate enough to be a member of this committee, the appointing of which in itself reassured the working class; I therefore went to Madrid with my fellow committee members, which, as one might expect, counted among its number some workers from
various trades, named by their respective classes, all of whom, it behooves me to say in the name of truth, were of sound judgment and of very clear and natural talent. This is not the place to go into the steps taken and the results obtained, which were, of course, useless: I will say only that the representatives of the working class must have felt, in the various meetings held with different ministers, a pressing need to demonstrate by ir refutable means the material impossibility and the great difficulties endured in subsisting on the salaries or daily wages or the price of manpower established in Barcelona. So, seeing a situation conducive to carrying out, at least in part, my attempts at urban statistical analysis, while also providing a great service to the working class, I offered to gather and compile all the data and information that they supplied to me. I asked only for the greatest possible accuracy and faithfulness in all the information that I requested and that they provided me with. Then, on the committee’s return to Barcelona, I eagerly embarked on the task I had set myself and found that the workers provided me with every facility and as much fidelity as one could wish for, as I was able to ascertain, given that I have, of course, whenever I thought it appropriate, sought to verify through other channels the data brought to me by the representatives of the working class. Once I had in my possession all the data that could be of interest to my endeavor, I carried out my statistical analysis in such a way that, while satisfying the aspirations of the workers, it would
Introduction to the Statistical Monograph on Barcelona’s Working Class in 1856
more particularly serve my purposes with regard to urbanism.
Such is the story of how this statistical analysis came into being, and the rationale for providing here a practical example of a proper statistical analysis of the functioning of urban life for each of the classes that make up a city’s population.
By dint of the reasons outlined above and of the findings suggested by my special studies, the objective I set myself when collecting and coordinating this data will be easily understood. Nonetheless, I would like to explicitly state that my purpose has been none other than to provide a sample or a specimen of what a genuine urban statistical analysis of the population contained in a city should be. Statistical analysis, seen in this light and applied in this way, is extremely useful and important for the technical expert whose mission it is to design a city for a given population; because even now in our time, given the nature of our social organization and its inexorable tendencies, it would be absurd and an error of grave and dire consequences to attempt to establish a city in which the different classes of the population—who it is intended to serve—were to occupy distinct districts and neighborhoods and streets separated by class or category; the urban planner should never stop making efforts to ensure that, in the city being designed, families of all social classes have houses or dwellings appropriate to their way of being, living, and functioning, and, above all, to provide them with the means and resources that each relies
on for its livelihood. Housing is without a doubt the primary need of social human beings, regardless of the class they belong to; and if the satisfaction of this need consumes a significant part of their financial resources, how will they be able to meet their other basic physical and moral needs?
Such is the value that a good urban statistical analysis of what I have called the city’s content, that is, its population, can offer a technical expert and urban planner. To this end, it is essential that the statistical analysis of each class should include not only complete details regarding the number, nature, and circumstances of its members, but also all income and expenditure; in other words, a true economic balance sheet. This is what the administration is doing in its own way, from a certain point of view, and with the sole objective of more fairly assessing taxable private wealth, with regard to the wellto-do classes, which do not even make up three-quarters of the total population; and this is precisely what I, in my own way and according to my own ideas, have expanded on, what I have done and verified with regard to the working class, which makes up more than a quarter of the total population, and which has willingly supplied me with all the necessary information.
Under the general heading of workers, I have included all the journeymen, apprentices, laborers, and assistants, irrespective of sex, age, and other circumstances, all individuals who live from their work but do not carry it out
Ildefonso Cerdà
in their own establishment or workshop, instead providing their services, either on a daily or piecework basis, in their employers’ workshops, factories, or premises, or in their own home.
The general nature of this definition of the working class contributes to making an already arduous and complex job yet more difficult. If the working class includes not only the various categories inherent to each trade, such as journeyman, apprentice, etcetera, but also the almost unlimited variety of arts and occupations that serve society; and if each trade has its own special way of functioning—as regards time and as regards other working conditions—it being understood that it must be so, because it would not be possible for all trades to be subject to the same rule, regulation, and rhythm; then the immense difficulty— and in a sense the absolute impossibility—of reducing all the particular and special statistics of each art or trade to a general statistic becomes evident. The right and proper thing to do would be to present, individually, the statistics for each and every one of that very large number of special statistics, many of which are of great social interest—perhaps even too active and topical. But this process alone would have produced a very large volume, which would be of great interest and value to experts in social studies, rather than to a specialist urban planner. For this reason I have omitted this process, limiting myself to providing the most essential data
confirming each type or trade, so as to discern both the municipal register as a whole and the balance of workers dedicated to each, and then providing the general statistical analysis, as far as possible.
In implementing my plan, I thought I should proceed according to the following method and order:
I have divided my work into four chapters, because it did actually and genuinely have four divisions.
The first chapter is devoted to providing information and explanations conducive to a better understanding of the municipal register or personal certificate of workers, considered from a general point of view.
The second chapter provides the same explanations and information, also from a general point of view, regarding the balance sheet.
The third chapter, through an alphabetical index , sets out the particular and special information and data for each art and trade, which feeds into both the municipal register and the balance sheet of the workers dedicated to each.
The fourth and final chapter consists of the general statistical analysis, with regard to both the municipal register and the balance sheet, and is, in a sense, the positive result of the generic and specific data contained in the previous chapters.
Let’s get started.
Cities, New Architecture
Cities, New Architecture
Cities, New Architecture
Holy Bohemia: Madrid, Paris, Barcelona
GATEPAC: The Urgency of Facilities
Gecé: The Sewer Inspector
Episode 2
Rosario Peiró
The image of the Republican exile, that of thousands of Spaniards walking northward on the roadside—described by writer and minister in the Second Republic Federica Montseny as “the human river overflowing into France” 1—is the quintessential image of exile. It refers to a moment in history and an experience of diaspora that was pivotal not only for Spain and for the twentieth century, but also for the twenty-fi rst-century world marked by a global migration crisis. With this image, we emphasize the ongoing relevance of this history and also take a critical backward look, avoiding fi xed preconceptions and linear chronologies in favor of tracing parallelisms, continuities, paradoxes, and fault lines that problematize both the past and the present. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin, our aim is not to recreate past events, but to analyze how past events affect the present. The ambiguity of this approach, suspended between past and present, allows us to explore the artistic production of the various periods included in the Reina Sofía Museum Collection—presenting them outside the usual formal, linear readings—and draws attention to the work of the museum as a generator of narratives.
The ontology of exile 2 is consistent with this approach: exile, outside of the space and time of the expelling country, has
1 Federica Montseny, El éxodo (pasión y muerte de los españoles en el exilio) (Barcelona: Galba Edicions, 1977), 22.
2 Our understanding of exile draws on Balibrea’s published works on the subject, which include: Mari Paz Balibrea, ed., Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio republicano español (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2017); Balibrea, “Max Aub y el espacio/tiempo de la nación,” in Escritores, editoriales y revistas del exilio republicano de 1939, ed. Manuel Aznar Soler,
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an ambivalent position in history. This experience “between” one place and another, “between” one time and another, should not be read from one of its sides only. The Republican exile produced many other realities in addition to those relating to Spain. This presentation shifts the focus away from the narrative of art produced in Spain. It looks at exile as a connecting substratum, thus recognizing its incontrovertible centrality to the history of the art and culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Like Mari Paz Balibrea, we believe that imposing the space-time logic of the Spanish nation onto the Republican exile condemns it to embodying a kind of “incongruity”—an inconsistent product of Spain’s history.3 If we simply draw a continuous line starting with departure from Spain and ending with return to the country, we simplify its impact and reduce its potential. Our intention is not to deny the connection between this exile and Spain, but to include its international significance. In this sense, it is not just about recovering “forgotten” or neglected artistic work, but highlighting its significance on a global arena, thus adding complexity to and suggesting new readings of the history of Spanish art. Before moving on to look at the cultural production of the Republican exile, we should make a few comments on this period and our reading of it. On the one hand, the nature of the materials presented—urgent, dispersed, transportable, reproducible, precarious, and collective—highlights our commitment to a historical narrative that goes beyond institutionalized content. We have sought out other sources that destabilize notions of what is “marginal” or “secondary” in artistic production, challenging the traditional canons of high culture. The selected materials question concepts such as the uniqueness and autonomy of art, putting the spotlight on all kinds of works, including those considered minor or produced “to pay the bills,” which are
Proceedings of the Third International Congress, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2003 (Seville: Renacimiento, 2006), 163–69.
3 Mari Paz Balibrea, “Hacia otra historiografía cultural del exilio republicano español. Introducción a modo de manifiesto,” in Líneas de fuga, ed. Balibrea, 19.
given new life. This reading also renounces the centrality of individual names—breaking with the idea of the “author” as a heroic fi gure of modernity—and inaugurates a new ontology of art that emphasizes collective and collaborative aspects, beyond national borders. Publications 4 —which were a veritable Spanish territory for the exiles—have pride of place among these materials: polit ical and cultural content was shared in magazines, and both hopes and yearnings were poured into them.5 Recurring themes and references turn up in their pages: monstrosity, loss, travel, waiting, cemeteries, longed-for landscapes, etcetera, and Guernica , always Guernica .
Meanwhile, this presentation also replaces the idea of the genius author with that of node fi gures (Josep Renau, Francesc Tosquelles, and Max Aub, among others), who bring together ideas, practices, and tendencies; and also with certain special locations (Mexico and New York, for their role in taking in a great many of the exiles) and events of various kinds, such as the signing of cultural treaties and the holding of exhibitions— devices par excellence for studying the sociability of art—as well as references to everyday spaces and forms. Rather than seeking to be exhaustive, the idea is to reflect the complex nature of the experiences and forms of resistance of the Spanish diaspora, and to extend its impact up to the Transition, in order to draw attention to its role in the supposed “reconciliation.”
We begin this journey with a space focusing on “the retreat and the camps” that brings together two contradictory positions: flight and confi nement. Here we fi nd drawings, testimonies, notes made quickly on the spot, and works produced a posteriori, such as Josep Bartolí’s scathingly critical pieces
4 Diario de la primera expedición de republicanos a México, the first publication of the Spanish exile, was published on board the Sinaia , the fi rst ship carrying hundreds of Spanish exiles to Mexico. Most of the titles published in exile ( España Peregrina, Las Españas, Nuestra España) emphasize the fact that they were a “substitute” Spanish territory for the exiles.
5 Alicia Alted Vigil, “‘Las Españas’ y ‘Diálogo de las Españas’: integración nacional y recuperación de la continuidad de la cultura en el exilio (1949–1963),” Cuadernos republicanos, no. 11 (1992): 39–56.
Josep Bartolí, Intentaba salir (Campos de concentración)
(Trying to Leave [Concentration Camps]), 1939–44
Rosario Peiró
and Antonio Rodríguez Luna’s paintings shrouded in a surrealist dream. Despite their differences, they all attest to the harsh conditions that the Republicans endured on their arrival in the south of France. Crammed together and surrounded by barbed wire, the Spanish exiles survived in subhuman conditions in the French camps, as their arrival was considered politically problematic for France. Their situation did not improve during World War II, and many ended up in concentration camps once again. In his Monument aux espagnols morts pour la France (Monument to the Spaniards Who Died for France, 1946–47), Pablo Picasso depicted the tragic fate of the Spaniards who fought with the French in the world war, and of those who fell in the Civil War, thus creating an anti-monument to the Second Republic. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, President Lázaro Cárdenas’s policies and his embrace of the Spanish exile made Mexico (also during World War II) a place of refuge for many representatives of the European left, and the image of
Taller de Gráfica Popular (Leopoldo Méndez, Luis Arenal Bastar, Xavier Guerrero, José Raúl Anguiano Valadez), La España de Franco (Franco’s Spain), 1938
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international anti-fascism. This image was encapsulated in the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Arts Workshop, TGP), a printmaking collective founded in 1937 to support and publicize revolutionary social causes, with members including notable figures such as Leopoldo Méndez. The TGP’s support for the Spanish exiles was explicit and crucial, denouncing the situation in Spain both during and after the war. The collective nature of the TGP allowed for the emergence of synergies, contacts, and collaborations between local artists and European exiles (including Spaniards such as Josep Renau and Max Aub) through magazines, exhibitions, and other projects.
Renau arrived in Mexico in June 1939. Although he produced work in various formats and languages, this presentation focuses on his more explicitly political and collective graphic production for the magazine Futuro and on his various posters for Mexican left-wing parties and organizations and for the protest actions of by the Spanish exiles. Futuro , founded by the intellectual, politician, and labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, brought together the discussions and theoretical tools of part of the Mexican left. In addition to economic, political,
Taller de Gráfica Popular, Estampas de la Revolución mexicana (Prints of the Mexican Revolution), 1947: Ángel Bracho, Emiliano Zapata (1877–1919) ; Francisco Mora, Los indígenas de México son despojados de sus tierras (The Indigenous of Mexico Are Dispossessed of Their Land); Jules Heller, Francisco I. Madero, candidato popular (1873–1913) (Francisco I. Madero, Popular Candidate [1873–1913]); Fernando Castro Pacheco, Victoriano Huerta, estandarte de la reacción (Victoriano Huerta, the Standard-Bearer of the Reaction)
, March, June, and December 1942, and July 1943
and social issues, it also disseminated a type of art and literature associated with the labor movements, displaying an aesthetic associated with the world of anti-fascism. The most representative intellectuals and artists of this movement included the aforementioned Leopoldo Méndez and Lola Álvarez Bravo, who were regular contributors to the publication. Renau was named director during the magazine’s third and perhaps most visually bold period, in which he produced his most notable works. Highlights include posters such as La Revolución mexicana aclama el restablecimiento de relaciones con la URSS (The Mexican Revolution Lauds the Resumption of Relations with the USSR, 1942), which attest to his links with Mexican printmaking culture and his cultivation of an image very close to the TGP.6
6 This presentation includes projections of Renau’s fi lm footage, which was included in the retrospective held at the Museo Reina Sofía in June 2019, Renau, Film-maker (curated by Chema González and Luis E. Parés), thanks to research carried out by the museum’s Public Activities department.
Rosario Peiró
In Europe, Francesc Tosquelles defended the figure of the exile and the experience of loss and displacement within the field of psychiatric theory and practice, which is another focus of our reflections on exile.7 This section begins with his radical experiences in the psychiatric hospital for combatants in the La Mancha town of Almodóvar del Campo during the Civil War, and ends with the founding of the clinic La Borde in France’s Loire Valley in 1953 (and which is still operating under Tosquelle’s precepts). This clinic was the most important Spanish contribution to twentieth-century psychiatry: a mental health project with a political approach to patients that also considered their way of relating to their illness, and that was based on destabilizing the bourgeois and individualistic “I” in order to assemble a collective “we” that reinforces the idea of community. In his exile in France, Tosquelles set up a therapeutic community in which madness, pain, and defeat are enduring experiences located outside historical space and time in a forced deconnaître (unlearning). Reclaiming this timeless space—in which the journey and defamiliarization are key concepts—provides a productive lens through which to think about the diaspora and its culture, that is, the production of a population without territory, in “waiting” mode. Exiled artists such as Tristan Tzara and Paul Éluard who, together with members of the French Resistance, were given refuge in the Saint-Alban hospital run by Tosquelles, set up an underground publishing platform with publications such as Souvenirs de la maison de fous (Souvenirs from the Madhouse) and Parler seul (Speaking Alone). Not far from there, near Montauban, Julio González, who had fled occupied Paris, was obsessively drawing La Montserrat (who screamed, empowered, at the 1937 Pavilion of the Spanish Republic, as a metaphor for the Republic). In this new context, the piercing, violent repetition of her scream—all that remains
7 This research has been made possible thanks to a collaboration between the Collections department and researchers Carles Guerra and Joana Masó, curators of the exhibition Francesc Tosquelles: Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field, held at the Museo Reina Sofía, 2022–23.
Julio González, Études de visages criant (Studies of Faces Screaming), ca. 1938–39; Études (Studies), 1938–39
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as her body disappears—makes her the image of defeat. For González, exile was the destruction of the individual, and its image was a theatrical, grotesque, mad Montserrat.
The displacement of exile is not just a physical phenomenon, and mental illness and malaise played an important role in postwar literature and art. Jean Dubuffet also visited the therapeutic community in Saint-Alban in search of works of Art Brut, and exhibited several of them as part of the Compagnie de l’Art Brut collection. 8
These were crucial experiences for the Surrealist movement. As a school of thought that questioned reality—beyond the clichés associating it with automatism and dream images— it accompanied exile and its various manifestations, becoming part of its ontology. Surrealism always had strong two-way links with Latin America. On the one hand, it offered ways to preserve the mythological component in Latin American popular cultures; on the other, the presence of artists such as Cuban painter Wifredo Lam in Europe was pivotal for understanding the Surrealist concept of mestizaje developed by several exiled artists from Spain, and other places.
Thus, from 1938 onward, the Spanish and European exile communities played a key role in spreading Surrealism in Latin America, as Juan Larrea explained in his 1944 book Surrealismo entre viejo y nuevo mundo (Surrealism Between the Old and New World). Several major developments took place in Mexico in the wake of this dynamic, antiauthoritarian, and internationalist “exiled” Surrealism. One of these was the Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo (International Exhibition of Surrealism) held in February 1940, which included works by Mexican artists (Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Juan Soriano), Spanish exiles living in Mexico (Esteban Francés and Remedios Varo), and international artists (Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst).
8 Dubuffet visited Saint-Alban on the recommendation of Dr. Gaston Ferdière, although he did not have a close relationship with Tosquelles, who shunned what he called Dubuffet’s aestheticization of the patients’ work.
José Moreno Villa, Nocturno (Nocturne), 1950–52
Diego Rivera, Les vases communicants (The Communicating Vessels), 1939 Remedios Varo, La Faim (The Hunger), 1938
This show put Mexico at the center of the international art scene and broke with the postrevolutionary nationalist hegemony that had defi ned the Mexican art world. The exhibition also fused the Indigenous past and the modern present in an original approach that bucked the trends of more institutional art. The magazine DYN (1942–44), directed by the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen, emerged in response to this exhibition and to André Breton’s canonical, orthodox Surrealism. This English-language Mexican publication brought together a series of artists in exile in Mexico and was distributed exclusively in New York and London. In it, Paalen steered clear of Breton’s dogmatic approach to the marvelous, advocating a reconciliation of modern art with the science of the day and the Indigenous art of the “Americas.”
Though part of this internationalist Mexico, Spanish exiles went further in the defense of Indigenous American cultures, adopting a Mestizo perspective. Max Aub spoke of mestizaje as “conclusive evidence of man’s identity,”9 and, before him, Federico García Lorca had denounced American racism in Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York), even—in his otherness—identifying with the Black community. Interestingly, years later this text influenced
9 Álvaro Romero Marco, “Max Aub, un ciudadano mexicano en el exilio,” Ciberletras. Revista literaria y de cultura , no. 18 (2007); available online at https://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v18/romeromarco.html.
DYN , no. 1, 1942; no. 3, 1942; no. 4–5, 1943; no. 6, 1944
intellectual exiles scattered throughout the American continent, as the succession of different editions indicates. Through its defense of Mestizo culture, the exile community appropriated the critique of Spain’s past colonial ventures, associating its own expulsion with that of the American “savage.” In La novela del Indio Tupinamba (The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian), Eugenio Granell gives an account of the Spanish Civil War in which the “Indian” is the only coherent character (while also criticizing stereotypes of the exotic and the savage), making him the true hero. Further still, Granell presented the Indian as the author of the novel, merging with him. He carried out a similar exercise in several of his self-portraits, in which he portrayed himself as an Indian. This identifi cation with the fi gure of the landless, defeated Native introduces a proto-Indigenist stance that can also be seen in the fi lm Raíces (Roots, 1953) by Mexican fi lmmaker Benito Alazraki (although some studies point to Spanish exile Carlos Velo—director of the documentaries Almadrabas [1934] and Galicia [1936]—as the true author of the fi lm, or at least of the script). Velo invited several Spanish exiles to be part of the project: Walter Reuter worked on the cinematography, Rodolfo Halffter wrote some of the music, and Renau designed the poster. The fi lm was an international hit. It sought to reflect the reality of Indigenous Mexicans in relation to their environment, culture, and traditions, and with regard to the cultures imposed on them.
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Garcia Lorca, who disappeared from Spain’s intellectual world soon after the war, became one of the mainstays of the Spanish exile community. Not only because of what he stood for in the Second Republic and because of his tragic end, but also for his criticism of racist, dehumanizing capitalism in Poeta en Nueva York . It was precisely New York that welcomed numerous fi gures of the Spanish—and later European—exile, as well as welcoming Guernica: the quintessential civil war artwork, which, following Picasso’s wishes, was deposited at MoMA in 1939 and did not return to Spain until 1981. The 1953 exhibition Contemporary Spanish Paintings was a milestone for the exile community in New York.10 It included several drawings by Lorca and works by Spanish exiles in the city such as Esteban Francés, Luis Quintanilla, and Joan Junyer, and the catalogue introduction was written by Larrea. Esteban Vicente and José Guerrero were part of another group of exiles—intellectual exiles—and both left Spain in search of cultural stimuli that
10 Organized by prominent fi gures of the Republican exile in New York, such as the García Lorca family, and curated by Josep Lluís Sert and James Johnson Sweeney, the aim of the exhibition was to raise funds for the scholarship program of the Spanish Department at Barnard College, Columbia University.
they could not fi nd in Franco’s autarchy. In New York, they contacted political exile circles and participated in the aforementioned exhibition. This was, at least for Guerrero, an introduction to the city’s art scene through the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, James Johnson Sweeney, one of the curators of the exhibition.
New York had embodied the image of utopian modernity in the early twentieth century, but this changed drastically from the Great Depression onward. Images of poverty and violence came to represent the city where thousands of migrants and exiles continued to arrive in search of the American dream. So-called street photography humanized its streets and told its story from the ground up. In the 1940s, Helen Levitt (a Brooklyn-born Jewish photographer who worked with Luis Buñuel on some of
Helen Levitt, New York, 1940 (Man Watching Girl on Back) ; New York, 1940 (Boys Girl Stoop) , 1940 / Later print, ca. 1960
his New York documentaries in support of the Republican cause) photographed the most disadvantaged areas of Harlem, and its children—mostly Hispanic and African American—playing in the street. In her photographs, Levitt envisaged the street as a space for play and captured bodily actions and interactions. She thus created a space of “lyrical movement,” 11 which calls for an
11 Jean-François Chevrier, “Helen Levitt: jugar, trazar,” in Helen Levitt. Lírica urbana. Fotografías 1936–1993 (Madrid: La Fábrica, 2010).
unsentimental, non-propagandistic humanism, and in which the lines of Lorca’s New York poems also resonate. In a similar vein, the 1948 semi-documentary fi lm The Naked City (directed by Jules Dassin, who later made the journey of exile in reverse, from the United States to France, as a result of McCarthyist policies) explores an alternative to the legacy of American fi lm noir. Dassin chooses to eschew the artifi ce of Hollywood and strive for as much realism as possible, shooting most scenes outdoors, with the city and its inhabitants as protagonists.
The 1950s brought discouraging news for the Spanish exiles: the international recognition of Franco’s regime came about with Spain’s admission into the United Nations in 1955, the infl ow of foreign investment, and the emergence of tourism as a major economic driver. While the country’s image changed through effective advertising campaigns, the forces of exile were more isolated and fragmented than ever. With the passage of time and the gradual loss of the leaders of the Second Republic in Mexico, France was once again considered the center of operations of resistance to Franco’s regime, and tentative contact with the “internal exile” began. At the same time, a new generation of intellectuals and artists emerged with a “different” view of the Republican exile, which by then was an event from the distant past. The spirit of “national reconciliation” inspired most of these Spanish intellectuals, and it was key to the tribute to the poet Antonio Machado that took place in Collioure, France, on February 22, 1959. 12 However, leading figures in the more politicized exile community responded powerfully to what they considered a state of oblivion: Max Aub visited Spain in 1969, after thirty years abroad, and wrote a resounding critique of the country in his book La gallina ciega (Blind Man’s Bluff, 1971).
12 Olga Glondys, “El homenaje a Antonio Machado en 1959 en las revistas Cuadernos del congreso por la libertad de la cultura y Nuestras ideas: ¿la guerra fría cultural?,” in Antonio Machado y el exilio republicano de 1939 en Francia, ed. Monique Alonso and Manuel Aznar Soler (Valencina de la Concepción, Seville: Editorial Renacimiento, 2015), 100–117.
Rosario Peiró
Max Aub’s literary works—which range from the war chronicles of his Laberinto mágico (The Magic Labyrinth) pentalogy to more incisive works based on irony, play, parody, and historical fiction—encapsulate the critical and imaginative potential of the Spanish exile. In 1958, Aub published Jusep Torres Campalans, a literary project with a strong visual arts component, in which he invents the biography of an anarchist and Catalan nationalist Cubist artist. It is a simulacrum of reality put together by means of pastiche, or collage, and Aub relied on the complicity of friends and associates to increase its plausibility. After World War II, the book’s protagonist, disappointed and world-weary, fi nds himself exiled somewhere in the jungle of Chiapas, dedicated among other things to “mestizaje.” Aub is the writer who, as a result of a chance encounter, revives and disseminates the life and work of this forgotten artist, who ended up having two exhibitions in Mexico City (1958) and New York (1962). In this very plausible literary fiction, the artist becomes a mirror of the past and demands an avant-garde culture that is engaged with the past and the present, as opposed to the “presentism” of the capitalist modernity13 of late 1950s Spain, which was already aligned with the logic of modernization and Western developmentalism. This modernization necessarily excludes the past, and therefore the possibility of the exile’s return. Jusep Torres Campalans is a text that is consciously and radically based on an anachronism, as a metaphor for an era; a defense of a certain way of doing things and of the transformative power of art—of utopia.
Likewise, history and memory are key in the work of Jorge Semprún, a survivor of Buchenwald and leader of the Spanish Communist Party in France during the 1960s. A friend of the painter Eduardo Arroyo, who went into permanent exile in France in 1963 (after presenting a series of portraits of dictators at the 3e Biennale de Paris, triggering complaints from the Spanish government), Semprún wrote the introduction to his exhibition at Galerie André Schoeller Jr. The show was titled 25 ans du paix (25 Years of Peace) as an antithesis to Franco’s
13 Balibrea, “Max Aub y el espacio/tiempo de la nación.”
Max Aub (Jusep Torres Campalans), La hija de la carbonera (1908)
(The Coal Merchant’s Daughter [1908]), 1958; Sin título (1911)
(Untitled [1911]), ca. 1958; Copia de las rosas de Odilon Redon (1907)
(Copy of Odilon Redon’s Roses [1907]), ca. 1958; and plates, late 1950s
Max Aub, Diptych for the Jusep Torres Campalans presentation at Galerías Excelsior, Mexico City, 1958
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advertising campaign of the same name, with which the regime sought to legitimize itself nationally and internationally as the guarantor of peace, stability, and progress during the “happy” decade of developmentalism in the 1960s. In his text, Semprún called those twenty-fi ve years of peace an “official myth” and recounted the international impact of the regime’s publicity campaign on the Spanish exile community. He discussed Arroyo’s critique of Spanish myths and culture through a personal and political revision of the history of Spanish painting, associating this tactic with the recovery of an “other” history: an important concept for the exile community. This “other” history is the critical history of the exile, forgotten in the construction of modern Spain. Arroyo’s irreverent paintings and his critical lucidity are presented as a counterpoint to the complacent Spain of developmentalism in the context of a new kind of fi gurative art that reflects the changes in society and values brought about by the advent of mass consumption.
The image promoted by the regime was also strongly at odds with that presented by José Val del Omar in his Tríptico elemental de España (Elementary Triptych of Spain). In contrast to the false idea of progress and the exoticization of the country for the purposes of tourism, Val del Omar offered a complex view of Spanish culture in which memory and popular expressions played a decisive role. His commitment to modernity combined the use—and invention—of technology with ancient, vital tradition, in a quest for the authentic Spanish essence. It is in this dia lectic—of progress looking back to the past—that Val del Omar engages with the webs of thought and culture of exile, becoming a bridge “on the inside” between the prewar avant- garde movements and the Spanish and international art of the time.
As part of the Tríptico elemental, after finishing the shoot for Fuego en Castilla (Fire in Castilla) in 1959, Val del Omar traveled from Burgos to San Sebastián with Manuel Lazcano and Galician poet and archaeologist Anric Massó, author of Cinas, poesías experimentales cinematográfi cas (Cinas: Cinematic Experimental Poems). Together they drafted a script-poem based on “Negra sombra” (Black Shadow), Rosalía de Castro’s most famous
José Val del Omar, Acariño galaico (De barro) (Galician Caress [Of Clay]), 1961/1981–82/1995 (reconstruction and image and sound editing: Javier Codesal); Arturo Baltar, Nenos cantando Nadal (Children Singing Carols), ca. 1960
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Galician-language poem. It was the seed of the fi lm Acariño galaico (De barro) (Galician Caress [Of Clay]), which Val del Omar began to shoot in 1961, with Massó as assistant director and the participation of Galician cultural fi gures such as Rafael Dieste, Domingo García-Sabell, and the Lois Piñeiro brothers, directors of the fi lm La virgen de cristal (The Crystal Virgin, 1926), whom Val del Omar knew from the Pedagogical Missions of the Second Republic. Other intellectuals such as Vicente Risco and Eduardo Blanco Amor and artists such as Laxeiro (José Otero Abeledo) also hovered around the project. Laxeiro was one of the artists involved in the renewal of the Galician visual arts, and his work explored the culture of exile and popular themes of the Republican avant-garde; his painting Trasmundo (Hidden World, 1946) could be the dark counterpoint of Maruja Mallo’s La verbena (The Fair, 1927). But the most important presence in the fi lm was unquestionably that of Arturo Baltar, whose work altered Val del Omar’s original plans, shifting the focus to “the earth, which, together with water, creates clay and life; and, together with fire, dries up and cracks.” 14 Acariño galaico equated the deep earth of Galicia and the sculptor’s clay fi gures, turning Baltar into a character and his work into the protagonist. Baltar was a singular artist who sculpted round forms and popular subjects from clay, and had danced in a troupe of gitanos in his youth. His life, his poetic sensibility, and his love of nature and popular culture associate him with a generation of artists cut short by the Spanish Civil War.
14 Eugeni Bonet, “Amar, arder. Candentes cenizas de Val del Omar” (valdelomar.com, 2000), 10. Available at http://www.valdelomar.com/ sem1.php?lang=en&menu_act=1&sem1_codi=5&sem2_codi=9. The fi rst version of this text, dated 1982, was published in Val del Omar sin fi n , ed. Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga and María José Val del Omar (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada; Filmoteca de Andalucía, 1992), with a slightly different title to this revised and extended version, which was fi rst published in French in the magazine Trafi c, no. 34 (Summer 2000).
Francesc Tosquelles: The Politics of Madness
The Surrealist Exile in Mexico
Germán Labrador
It is commonly assumed that the perspective of exile is articulated in two directions: it looks, on the one hand, to what is left behind; and, on the other, to what lies ahead. In the experience of the many exiled Spaniards who entrusted themselves to the Atlantic as a result of the Spanish Civil War, this split gaze was also affected by older vectors, including the specters of the empire and colonialism. Thus, in the Republican diaspora, it soon became clear that the question of exile was inseparable from the historical relations between Spain and Latin America. In this context, the Republican exile was precisely what made it possible to imagine new forms of transcultural interaction. Don Quixote, which had celebrated its third centenary on both sides of the ocean, became a symbol with which “itinerant Spain” tried to negotiate, in the imaginary sphere of “Hispanicity,” a utopian image of the defeated Republic, beyond the phantoms of the so- called Discovery and the feats of the conquistadors, and of the missionary imaginary favored by Franco’s regime.
Exile offered an unprecedented opportunity to forge a different relationship between “Spanishness” and “Latin
Americanity.” A number of intellectuals— such as Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz— used this opportunity to advance the needs of the American republics selectively, strengthening the Eurocentric alliance with the educated Creole elites who sought to legitimize themselves through urban cultural traditions. Arcadio DíazQuiñones argues that Hispanicity, in this sense, built a wall of racist distinction between the popular classes in Latin America, categorized as supposedly “savage,” Mestizo, Black, and above all Indigenous. Franco’s own diplomatic institutions (such as the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica [Institute of Hispanic Culture]) soon reinforced this understanding of Hispanicity as a long- standing alliance of patriarchal, non-Black, non-Indigenous, and Catholic legitimacy. In the context of the ongoing Cold War, this also meant opposing other dialogues that the exile community opened up with many Latin American left-wing groups and with the new (inter)cultural liberation movements.
In contrast to this idea of exile in which the encounter with the “other” simply extended the cultural prejudices and the tiers of power of the discourse of
Hispanicity to a larger number of people—intellectuals, artists, politicians, or otherwise—exile actually made it possible to question the categories that until then had regulated relations between Spain and the republics of Latin America. This is what we will call here a “tertiary” model, which rejects the preassigned place of both the self and the other, thus introducing the possibility of a third space in which other encounters, other relationships, and other alliances can take place. In this third space, hierarchies are suspended and differences are explored, becoming an object of desire rather than fear. It is what Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra—son of the exiled Catalan writers Anna Murià and Agustí Bartra—theorized as El mito del salvaje (the myth of the wild man or the savage). For Bartra, wildness is something that rejects both the colonizer and the colonized, allowing the emergence of the new in an intensive dialogue with old traditions and memories. That which is “savage” or uncivilized connects the memory of the traces of the colonized that remain in the colonizer with the promise that he himself, the colonizer, in fact dwells deep inside the other. It was not an arbitrary position taken by these exiles, but a psychological necessity: the subaltern and dispossessed status of the stateless opens up radical forms of solidarity and empathy with all the wretched of the earth. Faced with the trauma of uprooting, they had three options: to rediscover themselves as Native through statelessness, to imagine themselves as conquerors (reaffirming and even radicalizing their
Labrador
identity), or simply to go mad, as Josep Solanes explored in Venezuela. Exile is, or can also be, a sickness of the soul.
From his exile at Princeton University, Américo Castro—who had been born into the same dilemma—introduced a paradigm shift in Spanish historiography based on this gesture of opening up a “third identity.” His famous theory of the “three Spains” challenged the essentialist boundaries of National Catholicism established by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, incorporating oriental otherness—the Jewish or Muslim “other,” who continues to shape Spain’s language and hegemonic cultural forms—into the heart of Spanish history. From Castro on, Spanish history has been conceived (at least by its critics) as a series of successive exiles, expulsions, and removals of people who, on crossing the ocean, got caught up in a more extensive history of colonial domination, Indigenous genocide, and modernization enabled by slavery. The Spanish Republicans— or at least many of them—learned to see themselves precisely by seeing the exclusion of Black and Indigenous peoples by their host societies. But they also saw the forms of syncretism and resistance practiced by those subaltern communities in response. And they projected their own stateless experience in their footsteps.
From this third (some may choose to say “Mestizo”) perspective, we can understand how Alfonso R. Castelao—an emigrant, painter, Galicianist intellectual, and Minister of the Spanish Republican government in exile—learned to
express his grief and sorrow in the snowcovered streets of New York through his “drawings of Black people.” He developed an anti-racist awareness that led to him being named honorary president of the Federación Mundial de Sociedades de Negros (World Federation of Black Associations), at a time when African Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had experienced forms of freedom in Republican Spain that racist laws prevented them from enjoying on returning home to America. Castelao’s “third perspective” had also been shaped by other, earlier ways of seeing—for example, that of Federico García Lorca (in his case mediated by gitano and queer culture)— which revolved around the encounter between the diaspora and marginalized groups in America. The denunciation of the living conditions of African Americans in the heart of capitalist Babylon resonated even more strongly among publishers in exile after Lorca’s death. Thus, José Bergamín published Poeta en Nueva York ( Poet in New York , 1940)— a posthumous and exiled book, the most important twentieth-century Spanish book of poetry—which appeared almost simultaneously in Mexico (Editorial Séneca) and New York (W. W. Norton & Co.). For artists and writers associated with the international left and Black liberation movements, such as Langston Hughes—who was also a translator of García Lorca—and Wifredo Lam, the Spanish Republican cause and exile was an analogous, inverted reflection of the Republican’s attempts to find themselves in ancient America.
Even in cases where this interest in the local, American, culture appears to take on more exotic or picturesque overtones, it is prudent to suspend judgment, at least temporarily, and look more closely. For example, behind Miguel Prieto’s “Westernized” landscapes we find political allegories of the Conquest and comments on the duration of its violence. The same can be said of books illustrated by Prieto, such as Juan Rejano’s “minor” Chronicle of the Indies, La esfinge mestiza (The Mestizo Sphinx), which on the surface appears to depoliticize Mexico in favor of its myths. But its costumbrismo is only the clothing covering the savage, as Bartra would say: a space from which to protect, and encrypt, the writer’s own state less ness. Thus, the exile community’s so-called Criollismo was a continuous game of mirrors and double meanings. Similarly, in Victoria Durán’s (and Manuela Ballester’s) illustrations, popular art serves as a bridge for thinking about Spain in relation to America, and vice versa, through the shared elements of their “regional costumes.” While some exiled engineers went into the jungle to help the Mexican government exploit its operations, others approached the pre-Colombian world responsibly and with respect, revealing the importance of Indigenous culture in the face of the domination drive of modern Mexican cities. This is the plot of Raíces (Roots, 1954), a powerful film that explores the dramatic survival of Indigenous worlds in their “cannibalistic” conflict with capitalist modernity. It comes as no surprise that its director, Mexican filmmaker Benito
Cards from Eugenio Granell’s thematic card index (“encyclopedia of the diaspora”)
The Stateless and the Savage: The Third Perspective of the Iberian Exiles
Alazraki, was himself of Judeo-Spanish (Sephardic) origin, an admirer of Lorca (La voluntad de la tierra [The Will of the Earth]), and committed to the Republican cause. This also explains why the film’s poster was designed by Josep Renau, and the script is attributed to another exile, Galician filmmaker Carlos Velo. Before his exile, Velo, like Luis Buñuel, knew that ethnographic documentaries could potentially explore the various lines of the conflict between modernity and the worlds that know how to resist it. Not just in Mexico: this resistance of “the savage” was also present in Galicia, in Las Hurdes, and in the Rif, and involved different degrees of “abandonment” of modernity. The idea of American contemporaneity as a process of violent erasure of Indigenous culture led many exiles to call for the defense of the supreme difference still embodied by the Native peoples. This was the focus of Los Tarahumara (cada vez más lejos) (Always Further On , 1964), by Luis Alcoriza (a filmmaker from Extremadura who was Buñuel’s right-hand man), a film that addressed differences in sexual mores and was consequently censored by the Mexican authorities. This closeness with Indigenous cultures is expressed in many works produced by the exile community, but it was perhaps most thoroughly explored by Ga lician Trotskyist Eugenio Granell. In La novela del Indio Tupinamba (The Novel of the Tupinamba indian, 1959), for example, Indigenous culture, through a Surrealist lens, becomes the satirical means by which to settle scores with his former fellow countrymen, Republicans, and exiles.
Indigenous elements are to the novel what Moorish elements are in Don Quixote : a space of mediation that destabilizes all the national categories that many exiles faced as a consequence of their defeat.
Around that time, Granell painted a series of Indigenous “heads” that were clearly influenced by Picasso but used elements of Mesoamerican rather than African culture. He also assembled a series of Surrealist totems that mark the two extremes of exile, from Chamán (Shaman) in 1946 to Extranjero (For eigner) in 1974, in which the Indigenous and stateless positions are ultimately interchangeable. This same sensibility runs through the collection of Central American and Caribbean masks that Granell put together with his wife Amparo Segarra. In these masks, associated with syncretic rituals, European paganism meets American Indigenous culture on the periphery of Catholic ritual. A piece that is especially expressive in this sense is a Guatemalan mask called the “Moro Muza”: a masked mask in which Maya gods and resistance persist under the myths of the Reconquest. This and other faces are closely related to the masks we find in the “Moors and Christians” or “Mexican and French” festivals, such as those at the center of the Carnival of Huejotzingo, filmed in 1958 by Fernando Gamboa and Manuel Barbachano Ponce, two great allies of the Spanish exile community. For them, as for Maruja Mallo and Ismael González de la Serna, masks were the only remaining space of negotiation for faces that can no longer recognize their own reflection. In exile at first, but more emphatically after their return, Segarra
Germán Labrador
and Granell built up a file of what we could describe as an “encyclopedia of the diaspora,” organized precisely through these intersections between anthropology and history, politics and poetics. Under the analytical umbrella of Surrealism, the categories that interested them linked all the “others” in the various modern projects of dominion and empire, while testifying to their survival: from massacres of Native Americans in the United States to the Mestizo dances of the Caribbean, from the “tribal” paintings of pacifist students to statues of Christopher Columbus, and from Cuban sugar mills to new forms of contemporary slavery. On one card of this “encyclopedia” we see an image of the old Sioux chief Red Cloud on one side, but when we turn it around we find that Granell had taken advantage of the cardboard of an invitation in support of the Spanish exiles at the New School in New York (which, incidentally, had established a “University in Exile”). It thus subtly shows how Indigenous culture ended up providing a symbolic medium for the diaspora experience, to the point of becoming its subconscious.
Stateless and Natural People
Lost Thought
Episode 3
Rosario Peiró
Chronologically, autarchy in Spain lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1939 until 1953, with the signing of the Pact of Madrid—a step toward the international recognition of Franco’s regime by way of the United States—and of the Concordat between the Vatican and the Spanish government.1
Artistically, this period (which is full of works that are disturbing to contemporary eyes) was revisited by the Museum in the exhibition Campo Cerrado: Spanish Art, 1939–1953 (2016), curated by María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, which is crucial for understanding the new presentation of the Reina Sofía Museum Collection. Here, as in Campo Cerrado, we take “another” approach to the period, focusing on materials from everyday life and popular culture, beyond the official spaces of art. Architecture plays an important role because it opens up new lines of research into the period and its artistic production, as well as its relationship to the economy and the social changes of the time, such as the phenomenon of emigration. Finally, tying in with the Cold War discourse presented on the same floor, we look at exhibitions as weapons of power and propaganda, focusing on the Spanish Pavilion at the IX Triennale di Milano (1951) and the I Exposición de Arte Abstracto (First Exhibition of Abstract Art) in Santander in 1953.
1 This period is presented on the fourth floor, in the space between the two external lifts of the Sabatini Building, separated from the rest of the galleries. The idea is to emphasize the isolation that characterized these years in Spain, expressed also by an architectural break from the rest of the itineraries and materials.
Rosario Peiró
This section begins by looking at the subject of victory, in a space intentionally located adjacent to the one focusing on retreat. The materials in the fi rst are photographs of prominent fi gures from the Nationalist side and of military parades celebrating victory, with rigid geometrical alignment contrasting with Robert Capa’s images of the defeated Republicans’ disorderly flight to France. We move from the anonymous mass going into exile to a celebration of the individuality of the victors who remain. From the destruction that the Republicans left behind and the uninhabitable refugee camps, to the regime’s reconstruction plan, through a series of monumental and theatrical architectural projects such as Francisco de Asís Cabrero and Rafael Aburto’s Casa Sindical in Madrid, and the enormous cross at the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), triumphantly rising as retribution for the secularism of the Second Republic and a symbol of a new era.
With the end of World War II and the defeat of the regime’s external supporters, these authoritarian and openly fascist images were toned down. Franco’s government adopted tenets that were more palatable to Western allies with a Catholic discourse. Catholicism and the institutional Church were an essential part of state governance through educational and repressive institutions. Artistic production revolved around religious exaltation, as did the regime’s cultural activities. As part of this National Catholicism, the “traditional Spanish school” became the official art, with classical styles and techniques reminiscent of Baroque artists such as Velázquez and El Greco. Favored subjects included death and ruin, as in José Ortiz Echagüe’s photographs and Carlos Sáenz de Tejada’s drawings. Religious iconography such as the Descent from the Cross, the Ascension, and the Holy Shroud were used and thus associated with the heroic history of Spain, as in Joaquín Vaquero Turcios’s Alba de Resurrección (Dawn of Resurrection), which clearly speaks of the resurrection of Spain. The country returned to its origins thanks to its martyrs, portrayed being glorified by Christ himself. Toledo became a symbol of the martyrdom and the subject of many paintings, notably Benjamín Palencia’s view of the city.
José Gutiérrez Solana, La costurera (The Seamstress), 1943
Godofredo Ortega Muñoz, Bodegón del pan y el queso (Bread and Cheese Still Life), 1940
Meanwhile, however, another kind of art was being produced that showed the difficulties of everyday life—fear, hunger, and loneliness—in small works with hidden and not always intentional messages. In their simplicity and poor materials, they rebelled against the great works. Godofredo Ortega Muñoz’s Bodegón del pan y el queso (Bread and Cheese Still Life), and the solitary woman sewing by the window in José Gutiérrez Solana’s La costurera (The Seamstress) are good examples of this: their style breaks with the official classicism and resumes the principles of prewar painting. Smallness of scale and everyday subject matter were pitted against the grandiloquence, theatricality, and artificiality of the official art. The coexistence of the two approaches — the reality and the narrative—characterized the entire period. In contrast to the sadness and hunger, there is another image of the postwar period: that of people having “fun,” mainly in the big cities, where marginal amusement spaces were frequented by the popular classes. These were places where “unimportant” and ephemeral things took place, and therefore outside the repressive control of the official authorities. The circus, fairs and attractions, cinemas, variety shows, and nightclubs became zones of resistance, enjoyed on a mass scale by the general public and by artists who used them as subject matter and as spaces to display their work. In all of these spaces there was a kind of underground connection to the prewar avant-garde—basically resignified through the link between Surrealism and popular culture—which was decisive in shaping an alternative postwar culture. These “frivolous” spaces had oppositional potential, especially due to their emotional and collective nature. 2
2 “In the staging of popular amusements and in their depiction by artists and writers, what was perceived as a marginal entertainment or an ephemeral event became in the hands of Spain’s artists and writers one of the most important locations for the cultivation of a form of counterculture—an alternative, shared space that held the potential to bridge before and after, ‘high’ and ‘low,’ mass and elite, foreign and national.” Jordana Mendelson, “Frivolities and the Seduction of Bridging Distances,” in Campo Cerrado: Spanish Art 1939–1953, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2016), 355.
Rosario Peiró
Traditional readings of this period tend to focus on official events or on the existence of influential cultural groups such as the salons organized by Eugenio d’Ors. This presentation takes a different approach, bringing together a wide range of materials (fi lm, graphic design, humorous sketches, photography, publications, painting, and sculpture) in order to explore the emotional, economic, and social climate of the era. For example, the works presented here were not produced for the offi cial art circuit: Ángel Ferrant created his Maniquí (Mannequin) for a window display at Madrid furrier’s Lobel, and Salvador Dalí posed for a magazine that focused on him as a character rather than on his work. There were two main hubs: Madrid and Barcelona, which asserted their modernity through key prewar fi gures. Examples include the presence of Gutiérrez Solana and Ramón Gómez de la Serna in Edgar Neville’s fi lms, and Francesc Català-Roca’s use of Antoni Gaudí’s eccentricity in the latter’s design for Park Güell as a backdrop to his photographic essay on Dalí for the magazine Revista .
The regime’s influence was stronger in the field of architecture, where it employed direct action, successfully combining tradition and modernity, pragmatism and propaganda. The fi rst decade after the war was dedicated to the reconstruction of towns and cities, but in the 1950s architecture faced new challenges in urban and rural areas. In the big cities, workers who had migrated from the countryside were crowded together
Revista. Semanario de información, artes y letras , year 2, no. 84, November 1953
without basic sanitation, leading to social and public health problems. Autarkic policies in the countryside led to increased agricultural production in previously unfarmed areas, so that new towns had to be built. The language of modern architecture, taken up by certain architects of a younger generation who were familiar with international architecture, met and adapted to these new needs. Notable projects include the fi shermen’s houses for the Instituto Social de la Marina (Institute for the Welfare of Mariners) and the 1951 housing complex in Barceloneta, designed by José Antonio Coderch and Manuel Valls; and, in the countryside, the “colonization” villages, designed by José Luis Fernández del Amo, which combined the functionality of traditional architecture with a simple modern style. The monument to Calvo Sotelo designed by Asís Cabrero, under the influence of Max Bill,3 was also decidedly modern in contrast to his fascist design for the Casa Sindical in Madrid.
In the late 1940s, the regime’s commitment to autarky did not appear to be delivering the intended economic outcomes, resulting instead in weaker trade, outdated industry, and an impoverished society. Spain was internationally isolated and had not been accepted into the Organization for European Economic Co-Operation (OEEC), or the Council of Europe, or NATO, and was thus excluded from the Marshall Plan’s lavish aid. But Spain’s geostrategic position in the midst of the Cold War offered the regime a chance to break its isolation. The opportunity arose in Italy—an ideal ally given its cultural proximity based on Catholicism and the idea of a “Mediterranean front”— with the victory of Democrazia Cristiana in 1948: Spain’s participation in the IX Triennale di Milano in 1951. Coderch, who proposed the initiative to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4
3 Cabrero met Max Bill on a trip to Zurich in 1950 and from then on, under Bill’s influence, the Spanish architect used the power of abstraction as a visual element in his work.
4 Coderch had met Gio Ponti, director of the Triennale di Milano, at the V Asamblea Nacional de Arquitectos (Fifth National Assembly of Architects) in 1949, where Ponti invited Coderch to submit a project for the international exhibition in Milan.
Rosario Peiró
worked on the project with art critic and poet Rafael Santos Torroella. They wanted the Spanish Pavilion to be different from those of other countries, which focused on consumer goods and the benefi ts of technology in everyday life (in keeping with the “American Way of Life”). Their approach revolved around updating the idea of “Spanishness” and conveying a modern and positive idea of Spain through Mediterranean associations, 5 with Joaquim Gomis’s photographs playing a pivotal role. With its innovative, contemporary display, the pavilion succeeded in creating a bourgeoise interior in harmony with popular
5 Oriol Pibernat i Domènech, “España en las trienales de 1951, 1954 y 1957: diplomacia cultural e imagen de la modernidad,” in Diseño y franquismo. Difi cultades y paradojas de la modernización en España , ed. Pibernat i Domènech (Barcelona: Experimenta Libros, 2020), 121–38. This publication includes a selection of the proceedings of the II FHD Symposium (Fundació Història del Disseny), “Diseño y franquismo / Design and Francoism,” February 2018, available online at https://historiadeldisseny.org/ web/wp-content/ uploads/Llibre-Actas-II_Simposio_FHD-Diseño_y_ franquismo.pdf.
culture, art, and the landscape, suggesting a certain Spanish humanism without the tragic quality that had been associated with Spain internationally since the beginning of modernity. The artists who presented work in Milan—including Ferrant, Josep Guinovart, Josep Llorens i Artigas, and Eudald Serra—belonged to a group from different parts of Spain who sought to modernize Spanish culture in the mid-1940s. To this end, various collectives, initiatives, and institutions emerged in the latter part of the decade (with the support of prominent cultural fi gures such as Eduardo Westerdahl, Ricardo Gullón, and d’Ors himself), such as the bookshop-gallery Clan, the publishing house Cobalto, and the avant-garde art groups Dau al Set and Grupo Pórtico. They all revolved around the Escuela de Altamira (Altamira School), a platform for discussion and creation founded by Mathias Goeritz when he and d’Ors visited the Altamira cave in Santillana del Mar. This new school welcomed all Spanish artists who wanted to pick up certain threads of the prewar avant-garde and turn abstraction into an alternative path for Spanish art. Its discourse on abstract art—the search
Rosario Peiró
for the essence of a universal art devoid of context and individualism—gradually caught on in a section of the country’s political intelligentsia, who ended up supporting the cause. They helped to fund and organize the fi rst colloquia on abstract art in Santander, culminating in the I Congreso de Arte Abstracto (First Congress of Abstract Art) and the First Exhibition of Abstract Art, both held in 1953.
Sponsored by governmental institutions and launched by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the I Congreso de Arte Abstracto and its accompanying exhibition represented what Juan Barcino called “the official recognition of abstract art.”6 Fernández del Amo, the director of the Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid, invited artists, critics, and intellectuals—such as Luis Felipe Vivanco, Ricardo Gullón, Manuel Millares, and Antonio Saura—to gather in Santander in 1953 to discuss the nature and relevance of abstract art. Fernández del Amo called for a “courageous and intelligent” attitude to abstraction, emphasizing that “abstract art makes no concessions to values extraneous to art.”7 His words powerfully encapsulate a theoretical framework similar to the American view of abstract art, which is also devoid of context and focused on self-referentiality. The congress also compiled a bibliography, set up a reading room, and organized a documentary fi lm series on the subject for the delegates. 8 Interestingly, the diagram used to explain the origin of the Abstract art movement at the congress was clearly inspired by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s famous flowchart.9 The notion of abstraction in this conceptual framework was broadened to include a certain
6 La Vanguardia, August 18, 1953.
7 Documents from the Congreso de Arte Abstracto, Archivo José Luis Fernández del Amo, Library and Documentation Centre, Museo Reina Sofía.
8 Many of the bibliographic materials were provided by Casa Americana, a US cultural institution in Madrid, which contributed to the organization of the event.
9 This refers to Barr’s diagram of the origins and evolution of modern art (Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, [10.34]. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York), which was used as the cover of the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art (MoMA, 1936).
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Diagram charting the sources and evolution of modern art, 1890 to 1935, in Cubism and Abstract Art , 1936
Rosario Peiró
Spanishness, austerity, and spirituality, which were expressed in pseudo-religious terms that satisfi ed the regime’s Catholic intelligentsia. Finally, with the recognition of Joan Miró, Vasily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee as influences, an appropriate genealogy was assembled and the congress was ready to introduce Spanish modern art to the world, as it did with great success in the following years. Autarchy was over.
“Frivolous”
“Frivolous”
Spirituality and Abstraction: The First Congress of Abstract Art, Santander
Spirituality and Abstraction: The First Congress of Abstract Art, Santander
CONFIDENTIAL: Do not publish (Notes on the reception of the Spanish Pavilion at the IX Triennale di Milano, 1951)
José Antonio Coderch
The architect [ Aldo] van Eyck of the Dutch section has expressed great interest in the Spanish pavilion from the beginning , even helping—with the last ? bits of work . He is a member of CIAM [Congrès International d ’Architecture Moderne (1929–59)] and said he will propose setting up a group in Spain to join CIAM . At the moment , the Spanish architects who are members of this organization are outside Spain (expatriates) and do not count as Spaniards .
Swiss architect Max Bill , one of the contributors to the magazine Werk and curator of the Swiss pavilion at the Triennale, visited the Spanish pavilion with his wife and praised it, and the exhibits, very highly. He invited us to lunch on the day of his return to Switzerland.
Mr. H . O. Gummerus , representative of the Finnish pavilion , asked us if it would be possible to take the Spanish stand to Finland, where they are organizing an exhibition . He said that although Spain is only showing a few things , they are good and interesting.
The members of the French and Swedish delegations have repeatedly expressed their surprise at the Spanish stand and the objects displayed, as they all expected
something similar to the Belgian pavilion (which the newspaper Corriere della Sera described as a nightmare).
Two members of the French delegation, who are communists according to our reports and had initially been very cool and reserved toward us, came to congratulate us before all the objects were in place.
It should be noted that from the beginning everyone knew that this was the official Spanish pavilion.
Milan magazine Domus and Spazio magazine in Rome took many black-andwhite and color photographs and have requested very detailed information for their articles.
As the objects were being placed in the pavilion, people became interested in the Spanish contribution. We received advice and even help from architect Gio Ponti, Italian; painter [Adriano di] Spilimbergo, Italian; the aforementioned Dutch architect van Eyck; a Mr. Faniel, French, etc.
In view of this success, Spilimbergo, painter and member of the executive committee, has promised to set aside an area three times larger than this one at the next Triennale, should Spain participate.
José Antonio Coderch
Former socialist minister Ivan Matteo Lombardo, president of the Triennale, was particularly eloquent at the Spanish pavilion and asked us to set aside several objects for him to purchase. Architect and painter [Gigiotti] Zanini, the Italian corresponding member of the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, who had a keen interest in our participation, expressed his satisfaction with its quality, and was surprised to learn of the speed with which everything was organized.
Conte Barbaour [sic], a leading modern art dealer in Italy, and sculptor [Apollonio] Pessina, former head of the Italian artisans association, also expressed their interest and congratulated us on its success.
We dined as guests of Italian painter [Attilio] Rossi and with French architect Henri Prouvé. They have extremist tendencies. The painter Rossi said he was happy to have dealings with Spaniards, despite knowing we were “Francoists.”
Many journalists visited our pavilion at length; they all showed great interest and asked for many details.
We hope that the articles they write will coincide with what they told us.
The? architect Nary Nakorvaki from Stockholm has requested photographs for her publication.
Munich magazine Bauen a Vohnen [sic] has also requested photographs for publication.
The president of the Triennial has ordered the [illegible] of antique ceramic pieces for September; they will take care of the presentation and cover half the costs of the catalogue.
José A. Coderch y de Sentmenat
[Marginal note]
The Rotary Club has invited us to lunch.
—Architect [Richard] Rogers told us he liked the pavilion very much and invited us to his studio.
It should be noted that the price of the Spanish pavilion would have been 60% lower if there had been more time to build it .
Episode 4
Rosario Peiró
The Manhattan Project was the code name for the US government’s research and military project to develop a nuclear weapon before the Germans did, and thus win the war. However, as the German army was defeated before the war ended, the Americans could only use it against Japan on the Pacific front. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945, followed by Nagasaki three days later. These two actions mark the beginning of the Cold War, because, as art historian Serge Guilbaut points out, once the nuclear bomb arrived on the scene, a “hot war” was no longer viable.
The Cold War led, on the one hand, to the geopolitical preponderance of the United States in the Western world, and, on the other, to modernity’s decisive leap toward a presentist temporality that erased the traces of the past in favor of a perpetual present. The United States embarked on a new stage focused on shaping a national culture free from the European legacy of the avant-garde and its emancipatory promise of technology, which had become a weapon of destruction. Against this background, anthropocentric humanism gradually declined, paving the way for a world of existential anguish that offered two ways out: psychoanalysis and consumption. The prevailing extractivist economy soon needed to look beyond the domestic sphere and seek new markets thanks to advertising and transport infrastructures.1
1 Jaime Vindel, ed., Visualidades críticas y ecologías culturales (Madrid: Ediciones Brumaria, 2018).
Rosario Peiró
In his 1954 speech to mark the twenty-fi fth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called on artists to “freely use their talent,” thus disassociating himself from the Soviet bloc’s strict control over the arts and appropriating the discourse of modernity for the West. Modern art abandoned its utopian prewar ontology of self-representation and came to embody the values of the new Western democracy.
On a tense global chessboard, the Cold War largely played out in the cultural realm: the United States launched a carefully designed strategy of propaganda, seduction, and cross-border exchange. It backed the most important touring exhibitions and sponsored major new art events, such as the biennials (the fi rst Documenta took place in 1955 in Kassel) that proliferated and began an international exchange of exhibitions and artworks that is today reaching a peak. The internationalism of the 1930s and 1940s, associated with the Spanish and European exile, changed its meaning: instead of a unifying and universalist movement, it became about the success of one aesthetic model over another: (democratic) abstraction in opposition to (socialist and fascist) realism.
MoMA and American abstract art were at the forefront of this culture of freedom, as evidenced by the numerous national and international exhibitions organized by the museum in the 1940s and 1950s. Starting before World War II, its director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. made modern design, and its role in art and culture, an integral part of the museum’s program. Exhibitions such as Useful Objects2 defi ned this line—which not only highlighted good design itself, but also its production and consumption—well into the 1950s. Museum visitors became customers and consumers, and modern culture became domestic and democratic, which was the reason for its success. MoMA offered
2 This exhibition was part of MoMA’s series of exhibitions on modern design in the 1950s, which are essential to understanding the museum’s position on modern art.
a new vision of the avant-garde: redesigning the world to make it more comfortable and beautiful for everyone.3
To “make the best for the most for the least” was Charles and Ray Eames’s motto as designers. “We don’t do ‘art’—we solve problems,”4 they proclaimed. The Eameses had a very fruitful relationship with MoMA, whose director described their work as a combination of aesthetic brilliance and technical inventiveness.5 The Eameses shared the museum’s interest in promoting the democratization of art and objects through exhibitions and
3 Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
4 Jim Carroll, “‘The Best for the Most for the Least’: The Eames Office and the Democratic Impulse,” Jim Carroll’s Blog , November 22, 2018, https:// www.jimcarrollsblog.com/blog/2018/11/22/the-best-for-the-most-forthe-least-the-eames-office-and-the-democratic-impulse.
5 Charles Eames had been a regular visitor to MoMA exhibitions since 1944, and in 1948 Charles and Ray won the International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design organized by the museum.
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educational devices, and in presenting it to American families through play.6 The Eameses’ house—fi lmed, photographed, and disseminated to national and international audiences—became the focus of American life: a desirable, carefree, colorful, aseptic exhibition space, the perfect setting for the new consumer goods produced with cutting-edge technology. The “American Way of Life” was born. This is the image that the United States very successfully sold to the rest of the world, creating a widespread fascination that endures to this day.
In 1959, the Soviet Union and the United States participated in a cultural, technology, and science exhibition exchange program, with each country contributing one show. America excelled with the “suburban house,” complete with modern appliances and clearly defi ned gender roles for its inhabitants: this was true “American Freedom.” 7 In the exhibition, which
6 Beatriz Colomina, “Reflections on the Eames House,” Blueprint, no. 153 (September 1998): 41–45.
7 It is particularly telling that in the conversation between US vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev held in July 1959 as part of the American National Exhibition in Moscow (the recording can be heard at the Museo Reina Sofía), Nixon talked about the superiority of the
featured work by leading American designers, the Eameses created an impressive multiscreen installation showing the “good life” in America through the fi lm Glimpses of the U.S.A., which zooms in from images of outer space to close-up details of the everyday lives of Americans. As Beatriz Colomina says, the intimacy of the domestic realm was suspended between a new system of space and military technology; it became a Cold War weapon. 8
Around the same time, a series of critical responses to this official trend also used the exhibition device. In 1955,
American way of life and, in particular, about American kitchens and their advanced household appliances.
8 Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Barcelona: Actar; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
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British artist Richard Hamilton presented Man, Machine and Motion , an exhibition dealing with “the mechanical conquest of time and distance” through “the pictorial record of the structures which man has created to extend his powers of locomotion and to explore regions of nature previously denied to him.” 9 Hamilton shared with the Eameses an interest in the relationship between art, design, and technology that ran through all his work. But his understanding of the exhibition device—based on the radical practices of the Surrealists, the Dadaists, and the Bauhaus—made this a completely different exhibition. While the visual prevailed in the Eameses’ installation, Hamilton’s show urged spectators to move, to perceive the exhibition with their bodies: it was an experiential space rather than one of contemplation. More interested in the mythical image of machines than their functionality, he presented a kind of absurd techno-futurism whose obsolescence 10 links
9 Richard Hamilton, in Man, Machine and Motion press release, Tate Archive, Institute of Contemporary Arts collection, TGA 955.1.12.70, 2/23.
10 Hal Foster, “On the First Pop Age,” New Left Review 19 (January/February 2003): 68–87.
back to forms of the historical avant-garde, by reclaiming an irony—a particular mix of cynicism and irreverence—that is far removed from the Eameses and their “play.”
In Latin America, Constructivism, Concrete Art, NeoConcrete Art, Kinetic Art, and other forms of geometric abstraction associated with the most advanced modern art trends in Europe flourished in the urban centers of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Economic growth and the euphoria of developmentalism favored the revival of a utopia that was a world away from the stale and exhausted old continent. Projects of the historical avant-garde that sought aesthetic renewal and participation in processes of social change were reactivated and radicalized in American cities.11 Like the early avant-garde, various groups—such as the Buenos Aires-based Madí movement—published manifestos and disseminated conflicting viewpoints in publications and exhibitions, creating a rich and experimental art scene. Cities became the sphere of transformation, where architecture met art, design, and craftmanship, including some pioneering and highly ambitious projects, such as Brasilia. As a result of the economic expansion of South America—and the subsequent increase in foreign interest and investment—this abstract, experimental, and collective paradigm was “interpreted” from 1950 on in various exhibitions and cultural events associated with the presence of the United States in the area. Examples include Nelson A. Rockefeller’s involvement in the creation of a museum of modern art in Brazil, and the tensions between antagonistic ways of understanding abstraction, such as that expressed by Mário Pedrosa at the IV Bienal de São Paulo, where he criticized the international jury (of which Barr, then director
11 For more on this, see Andrea Giunta, “Crítica de arte y Guerra Fría en la América Latina de la revolución,” paper presented at the UNAM and Getty Foundation, Buenos Aires, 1999; Paulo Herkenhoff, “Rio de Janeiro: A Necessary City,” in The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection , ed. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, 2007), 50–62; and Ferreira Gullar, Experiência neoconcreta: momento-limite da arte (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007).
335
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of MoMA, was a member) for not understanding the work of Alfredo Volpi or the Nueva Visión (New Vision) group. 12 The work of artists and collectives in the urban centers of various Latin American countries—such as Mathias Goeritz in Mexico City and Lygia Pape in São Paulo—reflected the South’s resistance to US culture and had a structural role in the cultural arena of the Cold War.
In Europe too, various new cultural and artistic movements broke away from the American model. The Situationist International (SI) and the International Movement for an
12 Mário Pedrosa, “Brazilian Painting and International Taste” (1957), in Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents, ed. Glória Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 192.
Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB), 13 whose members included Asger Jorn and Pinot Gallizio, defended the value of collectivity, automation, and a new distribution and economy of art, as revolutionary ways of living and creating. After meeting in 1955, Jorn and Gallizio organized conferences, exhibitions, and publications against the conceptual background of a critique of functionalism and of the homogenization of life through the prevailing modernity. Gallizio’s interest in the ways of life of the Roma people living in Alba, in the Piedmont region of Italy, gave rise to one of the critical and conceptual frameworks for “unitary urbanism,” which encourages the reappropriation and reterritorialization of architecture. In the summer of 1956, a group of artists gathered in Alba under the umbrella of the First World
13 While Max Bill left a foundational mark on Latin American Concrete Art, his work was not always well received in the postwar European art scene. In fact, Danish artist Asger Jorn’s criticism of his plans for a new Bauhaus in Switzerland served as a trigger for the creation of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. It seems that Bill’s refusal to encourage experimentation, imagination, fantasy, signs, and symbols (preferring to focus exclusively on architectural technical training) exasperated Jorn.
Congress of Free Artists, where they presented their views and painted outdoors with handmade tools. Forming an assembly line, they collaborated in creating works that were later displayed in Turin with the message: “all the canvases are guaranteed pure cotton.” The exhibition was held in a popular venue, without the architectural constraints of the “white cube,” and the setup was completely anarchic, devoid of structure. The arrangement of the pieces suggested a market, and the paintings were sold by the meter: the artists were aware of the high value of exhibitions in the postwar and Cold War economy, and wanted to put them back into the traditional consumer economy.
As already noted, contrary to these critical projects, Spain in the 1950s was fervently trying to obtain recognition from the United States and a place on the chessboard of international politics. The fi rst US-Spain bilateral agreements were followed by the successful third Hispano-American Biennial of Art in Barcelona (1955), which was supported by the United States and revolved around the official concept of Spanishness backed by
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the regime’s cultural policy. The biennial featured recent work by Spanish and Latin American artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Manuel Millares, and Oswaldo Guayasamín. The inclusion of exiles such as José Vela Zanetti among the Spanish participants was criticized by the more politicized exile community, creating a rift that continued to grow apace with the regime’s internationalization campaign. The biennial also included Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York , an exhibition of the art being made in America organized by MoMA, which included leading fi gures such as Mark Rothko and would later tour to other European cities.
At the same time, the United States set up four military bases on Spanish territory and gained significant commercial benefi ts by organizing trade fairs intended to publicize and sell its agricultural and livestock technology. These exhibition devices, with their modern architecture, were reminiscent of the aforementioned Eames exhibitions. Like the Glimpses of the U.S.A. projection in Moscow, they conveyed a technological mastery that promised to lead to the longed-for American happiness.
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As soon as the political and economic interests of the Franco regime veered toward the United States and Europe, diplomatic actions in the field of the arts—led by curator González Robles—closed down the aforementioned HispanoAmerican Biennial of Art. The new policy, focusing on Spanish Informalism, was a great success, with prizes awarded to Jorge Oteiza at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1957 and Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tàpies at the Venice Biennale in 1958. Finally, in 1960, high-level negotiations between the United States and Spain led to the most important milestone in the internationalization of Spanish art: two exhibitions at two major museums in New York, the capital of modern art. One was Before Picasso; After Miró, curated by James Johnson Sweeney at the Guggenheim, which offered a historical overview of twentiethcentury Spanish art with Isidre Nonell as a point of departure and Joan Miró as the touchstone of modern Spanish painting,
and included the only woman artist in the two exhibitions, Juana Francés. The other was New Spanish Painting and Sculpture (1960), curated by Frank O’Hara at MoMA, which focused more on the El Paso and Dau al Set groups. Both exhibitions reiterated the clichés of Spanish art—the importance of the Baroque painting tradition, spontaneous gesture, the color black, and the presence of Goya—and removed the works from the country’s social and political context. In exchange, the exhibition Arte de América y España (Art of the Americas and Spain) toured to several Spanish cities, and Francisco Franco himself was present at its opening.
In the midst of these political and exhibition milestones, the Spanish National Economic Stabilization Plan—aimed at restructuring the economy and reducing inflation—was implemented in 1959 with the support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
Anonymous, Spain is “Different”: visit Spain, Sevilla, 1950; Spain is Different: toros en Chinchón, Madrid (Spain is Different: Bulls in Chinchón, Madrid), 1964
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and Development (OECD). Various development plans were approved in the years that followed, and the regime opened up the economy, with tourism playing a key role. The popular “Spain is Different” campaign launched by Manuel Fraga through the Ministry of Tourism was significant in this regard. José García-Ochoa’s posters under this slogan introduced a new trend that focused on the photographic image and shaped the country’s image abroad, both in formal and iconographic terms. Photography became a privileged medium for communicating the campaign’s traditional, picturesque, and exotic image of Spain as a tourist attraction. However, in the hands of a few forward-looking photographers (some of whom were members of the Afal group), 14 photography also served to document the contradictions of this society, as can be seen in the ironic view of tourism in Xavier Miserachs’s series Costa Brava Show.
14 Adolfo Autric and Rosario Tamayo’s donation to the museum of an important group of works and documents relating to Afal makes the Reina Sofía Museum Collection an international resource in this field.
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As well as changing how the world saw Spain, the country’s image at home also needed updating. In 1964, an ambitious propaganda campaign called “XXV años de Paz” (25 Years of Peace) was launched to commemorate the twenty-fi fth anniversary of the end of the Civil War, and to convey an idea of peace synonymous with economic prosperity and political stability. Exhibitions, festivals, competitions, publications, and fi lm premieres were organized as part of the campaign, and posters featured strongly as vehicles of propaganda. A major competition was held to choose the image that best represented the commemoration, and an exhibition of posters titled España en paz (Spain at Peace) was organized and toured the major Spanish cities, in venues more like fair pavilions than traditional museums and galleries. With a focus on promoting consumption, the exhibition put the spotlight on design and advertising. The competition was won by Julián Santamaría, who in 1961 had co-founded Grupo 13, an association of designers with a
groundbreaking approach to design.15 This group was also commissioned to produce 61 of the 150 posters in the exhibition, extolling the achievements of those twenty-five years of Franco’s dictatorship through themes such as sports, agriculture, education, and tourism. The bold modern language of Grupo 13 defi ned the graphic image of Spain in the 1960s.
Having already mentioned the American program of international exhibitions intended to disseminate the country’s cultural policy, we should also consider the exercises in appropriation and depoliticization of European art that were taking place around the same time, such as the work shown in the New York exhibitions noted above and in New Images of Man , organized at MoMA in 1959. This show, proposed by Barr and curated by German-born American art historian Peter Selz, brought together a group of European and American painters and sculptors of different generations—including Jean Dubuffet, Alberto
15 Grupo 13 did not enter the competition organized by Fraga. The fi rst prize went to Julián Santamaría, one of the founders of the group, who entered in a personal capacity with a modern, colorful typographic poster. For more on this, see Asunción Castro and Julián Díaz, eds., XXV años de paz franquista. Sociedad y cultura en España hacia 1964 (Madrid: Sílex Ediciones, 2017).
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Giacometti, Leon Golub, and Francis Bacon—in a project that revolved around humanistic fi guration. This approach initially sought greater engagement with the human form compared to the prevailing abstract art and early Pop Art. Nevertheless, it ended up reproducing the same strategies of decontextualization and creating the same forced personalist, linear genealogies. As seen through the lens of New Images of Man , all the works, regardless of their historical moment, were similar and had the same aim: to show the heroism of the artist in his intensely subjective labor. The whole exhibition was shrouded in an aura of virility, which condensed the theoretical suffering of man. Giacometti’s importance and art’s move toward the fi gurative after World War II eclipsed the interwar European abstract avant-garde and its place in the geography of postwar art. Existentialist philosopher and Protestant theologian Paul Tillich’s participation in the catalogue also reflected the principles of the individual ethos of the artist and the spirituality of art, used by MoMA’s “intelligentsia” for its structural discourse. But around these activities, other disruptive exercises were taking place in the United States, taking a stance in favor of the ambiguity, timelessness, and non-territoriality of exile, and problematizing the heroic, male, liberal, and individualistic vision of Cold War America. Thus, in his lecture “The Creative Act”
in Houston in 1957, Marcel Duchamp stated that a work of art is not made by the artist alone, and that the experience of the spectator affects the transubstantiation of matter into art.16 The ideas of Duchamp, who had permanently migrated to the United States in 1942, were latent in the 1940s and 1950s, but from the late 1950s on they became a beacon for a new generation of artists troubled by American chauvinism and its position in the world. Moreover, Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of communists and homosexuals created a climate of opposition in parts of the art scene, leading various artists, such as Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly, to migrate to Europe. This journey
16 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act” (American Federation of Arts Convention, Houston, April 1957), ASPEN: The Multimedia Magazine in a Box, no. 5 + 6, “The Minimalism Issues” (1967).
Marcel Duchamp, Coin de chasteté (Wedge of Chastity), 1954/1963
Dorothea Tanning, Étreinte (Embrace), 1969
back reclaimed the symbolic territory of the losers and the antiaesthetic stance of a section of European Informalism—with names such as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana—and broke with the dominant mindsets of abstract art. The emphasis on the personal and the Duchampian use of oblique sexual metaphors symbolically shattered the stoicism of the American artist, and turned the spotlight on the vernacular, the objectual, humor, and the body, working with associations that transgressed the categories of high and low culture.
Like Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois and Dorothea Tanning were personally and conceptually connected to European Surrealism. They shared its friends, influences, and geographies and created the same kind of disruptive artistic projects that explore bourgeois models of identity. Both Bourgeois and Tanning reclaimed interior space—rooms and houses—as a dreamlike mental space in which to forge a new identity beyond the constraints of gender. Unsurprisingly, their radical works were not understood in a conservative and puritanical America, or in an art scene defi ned by the prevalence of the visual over other forms. Their use of biographical narrative—of pain and the possibility
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of redress—as a way of escaping the literal facts of their lives was at odds with the supposed stoicism with which official male art resisted the human condition. As such, their work was considered a deviation, and placed on the margins of officialdom; in other words, their work lived as they did, in exile. In this “suspended” position, Tanning and Bourgeois, each in her own way, pushed through the limits of representation, fi nding their own space through subtle and perverse biological associations, the centrality of the body, and the tactility of textiles. Biography, self-representation, and literature were spaces of experimentation in which they combined high and low culture, the American and European, art and literature, feeling and space, proposing a different kind of art and of femininity.
The American Way of Life
The American Way of Life
Richard Hamilton: Man, Machine and Motion, 1955/2012
1955: The American Friend The 3rd Hispano-American Biennial
1955: The American Friend The 3rd Hispano-American Biennial
Spain is Different: Tourism and Propaganda in Developmentalism
Spain is Different: Tourism and Propaganda in Developmentalism
Spain is Different: Tourism and Propaganda in Developmentalism
1960: New York Exhibits Spain
1960: New York Exhibits Spain
Rogelio López Cuenca
“Blacks!” Shouted one of the explorers.
“Get ready to fight,” Hannon instructed his men.
Marcel D’Isard, África misteriosa
The quote is from a novel titled África misteriosa (Mysterious Africa) by Marcel D’Isard (nom de plume of José María Carbonell Barberá), a prolific author of adaptations of classic young adult books. The natural response of preparing to fight as soon as Black people—or Moors—were in sight was a recurring scene, a kind of repeated rhyme running through the stories. These lavishly illustrated adventure novels were targeted at a young audience and reached their peak of circulation and popularity between 1957 and 1967. Those years were also the high point of a process that began with the end of World War II and radically transformed the global geopolitical map: the rise of national liberation movements in the territories controlled by the great European empires that would lead to the emancipation of most of the former colonies.
These movements were not always peaceful. They were opposed by those whose privileged position was gravely
threatened by the demise of the colonial regime. In European cities, directly political initiatives were reinforced by numerous cultural events aimed at creating public opinion in favor of stopping, hindering, delaying, or influencing the decolonization processes.
The unusual circumstances of Franco’s dictatorship had a particular effect on the way Spain—a declining colonial power—approached this phenomenon. By that point, a few fragmented, scattered colonies in the Gulf of Guinea, Morocco, and Western Sahara were all that remained of the “empire on which the sun never sets.” But fascism in Spain relied on the exaltation of the great deeds of the empire as a pillar of its rhetorical pomp. Moreover, the origins of the military caste that had established and sustained the dictatorship could be traced back precisely to the colonial wars in Morocco.
Spain’s admission to the United Nations in 1955 entailed, among other concessions, its recognition of these territories’ right to self-determination. But the regime was far from gracious when it came to accepting the independence of the last colonies. The Spanish army grudgingly withdrew from Morocco: from the northern
Rogelio López Cuenca
part of the protectorate in 1956, from Cape Juby in 1958 (only after a military confrontation), and from Ifni in 1969. It did not withdraw from Equa torial Guinea until 1968, or from West ern Sahara until 1976. In the case of Western Sa hara, the withdrawal was so petulant that there was no process of decolonization—a matter that is still pending.
Morocco’s independence in 1956 prompted Spain to take measures to defend the legitimacy of Spain’s colonial presence in Africa in the face of pressure from the international community. These actions included proclaiming these territories “provincias españolas de ultramar” (Spanish overseas provinces), and subsequently creating provincial governments, granting Spanish ID cards to inhabitants, and, when time was running out, as in the case of Spanish Guinea, enacting a statute of autonomy. The last resort in the face of inevitable decolonization was the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to expressly train a local elite to lead future officially independent states, while remaining deferential servants of the interests of the mother country.
The official propaganda of this period went to great lengths to recreate scenes emphasizing the colonized people’s need for protection. The most common trope was the contrast between Spanish and African culture— between primitivism and development, modernity and backwardness— often using images of Indigenous people as a mere exotic backdrop intended
to highlight the superiority of the colonizer. The photographs of Franco at the Feria del Campo (Country Fair) in Madrid, inspecting pigs, sheep, and indigenous Sahrawis without differentiation —in the tradition of nineteenthcentury human zoos—are illuminating. So are those of a Moroccan delegation in Madrid visiting the Circo Price theater, and the press conferences introducing the albino gorilla Copito de Nieve and Madrid’s first Black police officer, Jesús Nguema.
Also notable was the role of institutions such as the Instituto de Estudios Africanos (Institute of African Studies, IDEA), under the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council, CSIC). The IDEA provided “scientific” support for the civilizing mission of Spanish imperialism in Africa through publications such as La capacidad mental del negro (The Mental Capacity of Blacks, 1952). It also ran the Museo de África, which between 1951 and 1955 hosted the Exposición de pintores de África (Exhibition of Painters of Africa)—so called not because the painters were African, but because they painted African subjects— a late expression of an Orientalism in terminal decline.
The architectural projects designed by Ramón Estalella in the 1960s in collaboration with other architects in Sidi Ifni, Laayoune, and Spanish continental Guinea are among the most interesting examples of the image of modernization and progress that Spain sought to publicize in the late colonial period.
Despite their nod to the local cultures, these radically modern projects again used a gesture that highlight the contrast and their own superiority over an alterity that serves as a blank space to be used. The same élan permeates the exhibition of architectural bravura and of cars plying roads in the postcards of Laayoune at the time, the lyrical scenes of baptisms of Black people in the jungle, and the charity collecting tins in the shape of the heads of “infidel children.”
Without downplaying the important role of schools, the press, news bulletins, and film documentaries—the No-Do newsreels that were required to be shown in Spanish cinemas between 1942 and 1981—it could be said that the main justification for maintaining the colonial regime was disseminated more diffusely through the social fabric at the level of everyday life and the emerging consumer society: in the 1950s and 1960s, “ultramarinos y coloniales” (groceries from overseas and from the colonies) signs were still common on the streets of a Spain that was starting to shed its international isolation. Although those shops no longer sold only products from abroad, they still stocked coffee and sugar, with packaging decorated with exotic figures, be they half-naked farm laborers, pages, servants, or slaves adorned with silk and turbans.
Chocolate, whose raw material was produced and imported from Spanish Guinea, was accompanied by collections of picture cards, such as one from Batanga brand chocolate called A través de África (Journey Through Africa),
393 … and Colonial
“tales of the adventures of the Batanga Explorer and his friends,” “Black boy Mongo,” and “the Batanga Black girl,” whose list of virtues and shortcomings is a veritable catalogue of classic stereotypes about colonized peoples: the “loyal, selfless, humble” girl who “likes colorful dresses and glass bead necklaces” and “loves the Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary” and prays to them in the face of danger; and the “simple and good-natured” boy who “slouches when he walks” but “climbs like a monkey” and is “good and loyal,” and, “sad to say, does not like to work.” This, in contrast to the protagonist of one of the most famous jingles in the history of Spanish advertising: the “little negro who sang the Cola Cao song as he worked in the fields.” In the 1950s, the naive racism of the humorous adventures of the master Morcillón and his servant Babali in the TBO comic books, coexisted with other more belligerent publications aimed at a young (and, naturally, male by default) audience. These comics featured Western and Christian heroes constantly at war with the eternal Muslim enemy, and were set either in a vague Middle Ages— evoking another myth cherished by Franco’s regime: the spirit of the Crusades and the Reconquest, as in the case of Capitán Trueno (Captain Thunder) and El Guerrero del Antifaz (The Masked Warrior)—or in the then actual context of Morocco under the protectorate, as in the case of the Audaces Legionarios (Bold Legionnaires), Captain Rey and Sergeant Matamoros (“Moor-slayer,” as it happens).
Rogelio López Cuenca
The cover of the novella África misteriosa features a dramatic overhead closeup view of an African warrior who has climbed a tree and is about to throw his spear at a white explorer in a pith helmet who is walking by with a Native porter, oblivious to the imminent danger. It is a depiction of the colonial enterprise
understood as an exercise in switching between using a heavy hand against rebels and paternalism in the case of domesticated Natives. An allegory of the noble and selfless sacrifice of the superior races— the “white man’s burden”—and also of Franco’s dictatorship as a colonial regime on European soil.
… and Colonial, 2021
Episode 5
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
History is the battlefield of modern thought and, according to Marxism, a constant dialectical movement of contradiction and transcendence. However, in the late 1960s Michel Foucault suggested we abandon this dialectical logic to take up a position on the margins of modernity and try to transcend its boundaries: “We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.”1 In his 1967 lecture, “Des espaces autres” (“Of Other Spaces”), he compares the modern utopia situated in a non-place with (an)other history, which is multiple rather than singular: the heterotopia, comprised of different spaces that favor multiplicity, difference, and the dispersal of power. From this perspective, Foucault fi rst considers the problem of space as an important aspect of contemporary thought—“the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space”2 —and then demystifies the narrative of history as progress. History, he argues, must be thought as a space of dispersion and discontinuity. Within this theoretical framework, in the late 1960s the issue of space took center stage in the reflections of the neo-avantgarde scene, producing a paradigm shift in relation to previous decades: from a focus on time to the centrality of space. We could therefore describe the neo-avant-garde as a seismic movement
1 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 45.
2 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22.
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
that, drawing on the experiences of the so-called historical avantgarde of the early twentieth century, aimed to displace, subvert, penetrate, and disrupt the relationship between art and life, body and text, observer and creator, artwork and object; a kind of antipoetics that interrupted traditional mindsets and conventions in order to propose new ways of producing art, writing, and life through the radical experience of space in all its senses. Contrary to the fi xed, static space characteristic of modernity—based on the private/public binary—this new generation of artists sought a mobile, dynamic, taut space that was perceived as performative, thus encouraging intellectual and emotional interaction. From different contexts, artists approached space in various ways. Some used geometric abstraction to explore space and its construction, bringing the viewer and the surrounding architecture into the experience. They incorporated formal and architectural elements from popular culture and broke with the separation between inside and outside, in favor of the idea
of contamination. Examples include the lattices of Venezuelan artists Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) and Jesús Soto, and Chileanborn Roberto Matta—geometric structures whose organic patterns broke down the compact, isolated space of rationalism. Other artists chose to explore the environment as if it were a system, attempting to decipher its relationships and patterns. This allowed them to approach the sciences (especially mathematics), architecture, and language as systems linked by power relations, which can be exposed and unpacked. For example, in works such as Fibonacci Napoli (Fabbrica a San Giovanni a Teduccio) (Fibonacci Naples [Factory in San Giovanni a Teduccio], 1971), Italian artist Mario Merz used the Fibonacci sequence to suggest elementary structures as well as the patterns organizing industrial societies. Merz used numbers as a means to generate rhythms and operations from the material and working world.3 Meanwhile, German artist Hanne Darboven was motivated by
3 In Merz’s words, “Numbers are the vitality of the world,” in Richard Koshalek, “Interview with Mario Merz, 1971,” in Mario Merz, exh. brochure (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1971). Also in Arte Povera, ed. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (New York: Phaidon, 2014), 254; and in Mario Merz, I Want to Write a Book Right Now (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1989), 106.
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
the need to order the surrounding chaos based on a rigorous logic, which she did through numerous variations of mathematical combinations. Systems and the repetition of forms are also present in the work of artists associated with American Minimalism. Donald Judd, for example, sought to strip his works of uniqueness and narrativity, and to remove any trace of the artist’s hand, in order to focus on the relationship between the object, the viewer, and the space.
Cities were also a field of action for the neo-avant-garde artists. Their work spilled beyond the walls of traditional spaces for the production, circulation, and presentation of art, spaces which were characterized by a supposed neutrality and disconnection from reality. Artists expanded their range of action, questioning the art object. The street became a space of creation, exhibition, and experimentation, and also a medium. Public space started to be seen as a wonderful living stage, full of symbols, memories, and relationships, where the boundaries between art and life blurred. In the context of May 1968 in France, the affi chistes tore posters displayed in Paris, revealing their layers, while students occupied public space with their rallies and covered the walls with slogans. In Italy, Michelangelo Pistoletto offered a new way to experience the streets of Turin through his sound intervention Le trombe del Giudizio (The Trumpets of Judgment, 1968).
On the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States, dance and performance also moved into the urban space and away from theaters and official institutions. Artists such as Trisha Brown danced, improvised, and performed actions on the streets, in parks—for example her piece Group Accumulation in Central Park (1973)—and in unused or vacant spaces such as abandoned buildings and former industrial docks.
Behind this searching on the margins—in neglected spaces that are unaltered and inaccessible to modernity—there was a questioning of the political, social, historical, and economic
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Le trombe del Giudizio
(The Trumpets of Judgment), performance in the courtyard of the artist’s studio, Turin, 1968
Trisha Brown and Babette Mangolte, Trisha Brown “Group Accumulation in Central Park,” 1973
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
implications of traditional art spaces, and of the role of artists in relation to the world they lived in. These spaces of alterity that are discursively excluded from official history became territories of dissent and discord—“spaces of life.” In Italy, Arte Povera critiqued industrial development and rebelled against the “economic miracle” of the 1960s, in a lament for the vanishing world of the wastelands portrayed by poet and fi lmmaker Piero Paolo Pasolini. In the United States, Robert Smithson turned his attention to modern ruins and the impossible future through his non-places: landscapes overlooked by history, disused and suspended in time.
But it was in the context of Latin America—which had been shaped by a colonial legacy and its continuation under different forms, and by a succession of dictatorial regimes—that these spatial practices and explorations really prevailed and became radicalized. We will look at them—their characteristics and contexts—here in more detail.
Studying Latin American practices from a Spanish national museum such as the Museo Reina Sofía requires adopting a decolonial perspective that questions historiographical assumptions and cultural models that have been in place for a long time. To start with, it is necessary to question the view that brings together a heterogeneous territory—with huge differences between the countries and contexts that comprise the continent—under a colonial umbrella term: Latin America. As such, it is necessary to address this heterogeneity by contextualizing the artistic practices of each region in a way that reflects the specifi cities and differences, while also acknowledging cross-contamination and affinities. Although we are dealing with a territory that is fragmented in many ways, consideration should also be given to the communities and networks of exchange and protest that have been forged by artists, intellectuals, and activists; and, conversely, the alliances created by the military governments of the various countries.
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
Another key point is the need to question the idea that the Latin American neo-avant-gardes—in plural—are peripheral in relation to those of North America and Europe. We can do this by highlighting other centers of artistic and discursive production, and abandoning the Eurocentric prism through which these practices, their history, and their influences have been interpreted. What we fi nd is that the Latin American neo-avant-gardes, simultaneously, in various scenes, took up, expanded, and recontextualized the work of the historical avant-garde, sometimes even with greater force than in other parts of the world. Finally, this study also looks at the relationship between the Latin American scenes and the context of Spanish art in a period that was also marked by a dictatorship, and by its peripheral status in relation to the United States and the hegemonic European countries—circumstances that strengthened existing contacts and exchanges between artists in both Spain and Latin America.
This research begins in 1964, the year of the coup d’état against Brazilian president João Goulart. Four years later, the military government issued Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5), which suspended habeas corpus and constitutional rights including the rights to freedom and assembly. This act institutionalized repression and violence as well as the strict control of cultural production. These events marked the beginning of one of the darkest and bloodiest periods in recent Brazilian history, with countless disappearances, deaths, and exiles. The occupation of public space as a place for action, gathering, and protest was vital in the years that followed. Part of the Left advocated moving away from avant-garde language in favor of a more direct activist rhetoric. However, a third path emerged in response to the dictatorial authoritarianism and revolutionary discipline. Artists such as Hélio Oiticica proposed taking a critical stance against the regime while also challenging the elitist and exclusionary ideas of Brazilian culture. Accordingly, Oiticica incorporated bodily, sensory, popular, and everyday elements into his (anti-)poetics as part of his concept of “anti-art.” His aim was to move beyond traditional notions of the art object
and the spaces of art by redefining the role of the viewer from spectator into active participant. In 1967, Oiticica participated in the Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity) exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro with Tropicália, an “environment”4 that invited visitors to experience the architecture of the favelas and at the same time challenged the media portrayal of Brazil as a tropical paradise. Through this gesture of radical experimentation, Oiticica brought the popular, organic, spontaneous forms of the favelas into the spatial debate of the international neo-avant-garde.
The term coined by Oiticica for this work soon became the title of a song by singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso and of a collaboration album that marked a period of creative explosion in the history of Brazil, which came to be known as Tropicália
4 The work was a labyrinth-like installation made of painted wooden planks—consisting of two Penetrables, PN2, Pureza é um mito (Purity is a Myth, 1966), and PN3, Imagético (Imagetical, 1966–67)— as well as live birds, plants, and a television set.
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
Tropicália au Panis et Circensis (cover design: Rubens Gerchman; photo: Olivier Perroy), 1968. Gal Costa, Legal (cover design: Hélio Oiticica), 1970. Caetano Veloso, Caetano Veloso (cover design: Rogério Duarte), 1968.
Rogério Duprat, A banda tropicalista do Duprat , 1968
408 or Tropicalismo. Through its capacity to merge styles and blur boundaries—between erudite and popular, high and low, local and universal, elegant and kitsch—it avoided becoming an elitist project, thus dismantling the national-populist ideology and its defense of a homogenous Brazilian culture. And in its commitment to a dynamic, sensory experience of place, Tropicália embodied an image of resistance to the economic and political system of Western modernity, with its spaces of consumption, exploitation, and conquest.
Tropicália was a major cultural shift that inspired a desire for renewal and rupture in other parts of Latin America, through updated forms of graphic art, mail art, actions, and multimedia. Many artists sought to draw attention to and denounce the living conditions in their countries, and to reclaim other languages and cultural references—to abandon abstraction, take up institutional critique, and fi nd new ways of connecting with other artists
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
and with the world. They aspired to go beyond individual experience, to address—and in many cases directly involve—viewers and communities, generating forms of collectivization of aesthetic experience. Various self-managed spaces emerged in this spirit, along with numerous collective and radical institutional projects experimenting with new educational formats, such as the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires (1958–70). Artists occupied and activated public space with very few resources, often using their bodies as their principal means of expression, social critique, and protest. They challenged the traditional notion of the artistic object through actions and performances, or using poor and perishable materials. Another path taken was the use of mass media—posters, radio, the press, mail art, and publications—to create ephemeral, reproducible, multiple works that could circumvent official channels and censorship, and generate local and international networks of exchange.
A critical strategy shared by many of these artists was to challenge the use of mapping as a tool for controlling and defining the territory, and to reinterpret maps through a colonial lens. Used as an instrument of power and domination since the beginning of the modern age, maps create a distance that makes territories and borders legible but omits the beings who live in them. Cartography offers a symbolic representation of space, but in order to understand the landscape in its social, historical, cultural, and emotional dimensions we must speak of place—space experienced by a physical body and informed by everyday life.
By modifying, redrawing, resituating, and renaming maps, artists were able to reappropriate space and question the established world order and national identity, to bring to light inequalities and violence of the past and present, and to project alternative worlds. By connecting the body with situations of violence in different parts of Latin America, the works of Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger, Chilean artist Elías Adasme, and Argentinean artists Horacio Zabala and Luis Pazos brought the material and sensory dimension into spatial representation. The body thus became a metaphor for the territory, with its
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
political and geographical problems, and embodied concepts such as the “multitude”—a plural and collective body. In this sense, in a text on the work of Italian-born Argentinean artist Elda Cerrato, researcher Ana Longoni writes that “the nature of the map of Latin America is that of a living body, which changes.”5
Mapping is closely linked to colonization, and thus to travel. It was a tool used by extractivist expeditions, and for the control and classification of the colonies and their inhabitants. Invoking this practice and the idea of travel and expeditions— although in a critical sense—many artists embarked on journeys through the American continent. In his installation Video Trans Americas (1976), Chilean artist Juan Downey presented a journey with stops in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, in which he identifi ed shared values, histories, and sensibilities in the various Indigenous American cultures. In doing so, he explored his own Chilean identity and, at the same time, offered viewers an alternative, interconnected map of the continent. On his travels Downey took on the role of the ethnographer, but subverted the colonizing gesture implicit in ethnography by handing the camera over to the communities he fi lmed, in an attempt to create a mirroring dynamic in which to see and be seen.
Photography—as a means to document the territory—has also been linked to mapping from the outset. Artists such as Swiss-born, Brazil-based Claudia Andujar, and likewise Swissborn Bárbara Brändli, based in Venezuela, have used photography as a means of documentation, although in a spirit of protest and reparation. The work of both artists was primarily focused on portraying the territory, the forms of life, and the cosmogonies of Indigenous populations, who were often forcibly disappeared. They have photographed peoples, defended their
5 Ana Longoni, “Entre el cuarto camino y la tercera posición: esoterismo, peronización y anticipación en la obra de Elda Cerrato,” in La memoria en los bordes. Archivos de Elda Cerrato (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires [UBA], 2022), 22.
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
rights, and made visible other forms of knowledge and ways of living, such as those of the Yanomami people in the Brazilian Amazon in the case of Andujar’s work Vertical 9 (1981–83). Also interested in exploring other realities, Peruvian artist Carlos Ferrand has portrayed the dispossessed on the margins of cities. His photographs conjure up a possible new territoriality of resistance.
Photography was also a means for reflecting on the dramatic growth of Latin American cities as a result of the developmentalist policies and rapid industrialization processes in the region, imposed by the agendas of the North. Cities were hubs of change, tension, and inequality, as well as effervescent activity and cultural change. With their cameras, Italian-born Paolo Gasparini and Mexican photographer Enrique Bostelmann had captured the glaring social contradictions and the changes that swept through the societies of many countries in a few short years, such as the rural exodus to Lima, Caracas, Bogotá, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City. Some of their photographs went on to become photo books, that is to say, publications that scaled and organized the images into sequences—sometimes accompanied by text—endowing them with rhythm and narrative. The Latin American photo books of those decades that managed to circumvent the censorship regimes became key vehicles of mobilization and denunciation at the local and international level.
Other artists, also based in urban areas, forged new territories of resistance and confrontation through new forms of graphic activism. For them, graphic art was an effective tool for the communication of ideas and the socialization of artistic production outside the official circuits. This practice established a reproducible and ephemeral street vocabulary that explored the intersection between graphic art and social and political action, using public space for artistic production, controversy, and denunciation. As well as drawing on the imaginary of popular culture, many of these new, radical, socially engaged graphic art projects also made use of the sensationalist language of the mass media to draw attention to human rights movements and
Paolo Gasparini, Para verte mejor, América Latina (The Better to See You, Latin America), 1972
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
trade union struggles. Moreover, they reworked the aesthetics of political posters by opting for a collective and participatory approach. This is the case of Peruvian artist Herbert Rodríguez, who took a collective and experimental approach both in his solo projects and in his collaborations with groups such as Taller Huayco EPS (1980–81) and collective projects such as Contacta 79 (1979), Los Bestias (The Beasts, 1984–87), and Conexiones (Connections, 1987). Another example is his fellow Peruvian Jesús Ruiz Durand, whose work offers a critical view of the land, its struggles, and its memories. His posters on the 1969 agrarian reform featured the peasantry and revived Indigenous resistance leaders such as the revolutionary Túpac Amaru. A fi nal example, also in Peru, is the Taller NN, a collective of architecture students, active in Lima between 1988 and 1999, which took its name from the abbreviation for nomen nescio used to refer to the unidentifi ed bodies of those who died in the Peruvian conflict. In NN-PERÚ (Carpeta Negra) (NN PERU [The Black Folder], 1988), its fi rst and best-known work, Taller NN drew attention to the seduction strategies of a certain revolutionary discourse. In problematizing rather than monumentalizing its symbols (Che Guevara, José María Arguedas, Edith Lagos, Mao Zedong, etc.), it used them as a critical tool.
Enrique Bostelmann, Sin título (Sufrir fue mi destino) (Untitled [Suffering Was My Destiny], from the series América: un viaje a través de la injusticia (America, A Journey Through Injustice), 1957 / Later print
Herbert Rodríguez, Tenga esa figura que siempre soñó (Have that Figure, Which Was Always Dreamt Of), 1986
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
Some institutions also played a crucial role when it came to experimenting with new kinds of relationships between art and politics, art and action, and art and media: the Sala de Arte del Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez, in Puerto Rico; the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), in Brazil; and the Instituto Di Tella and the CAyC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), in Argentina, are some examples. All of them brought together artists from different parts of the world who then established complex national and international networks. These critical and experimental spaces owed their existence—even in authoritarian contexts—to selforganization, in some cases outside of officialdom, and to links with universities and student movements that enabled crossdisciplinary exchange and the fusion of different languages and media.
the series Reforma
1969–75
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
One of the key fi gures of the Latin American neo-avant-garde scene in Latin America was Spanish artist Julio Plaza. He first visited the continent in 1967, when he traveled to Brazil to take part in the IX Bienal de São Paulo and spent some time there thanks to a grant from the Brazilian Embassy in Madrid. Previously, in Spain, he had been a member of the Cooperativa de Producción Artística y Artesana (Cooperative for Arts and Crafts), a group of poets, visual artists, and musicians founded by poet Ignacio Gómez de Liaño together with other writers. Through this group, Plaza began a correspondence with Haroldo de Campos and the other São Paulo poets from the Noigandres group. Once in Brazil, he and local artist Augusto de Campos collaborated on a series of book-objects that were the result of their research into the dialogue between poetry and sculpture, and reflected their interest in bringing the body into the idea of the object. Earlier, in the Madrid scene of the 1960s, Plaza had also met Ángel Crespo, a Spanish poet and art critic who later invited him to the Universidad de Puerto Rico en Mayagüez. There he came across another Spanish artist, Tomás García Asensio, who was known for his research into Constructivism and the automatic generation of geometric shapes, which he carried out at the Centro de Cálculo de la Universidad de Madrid (1968–73). As organizers and promoters of new artistic experiences—one of their most important roles—Plaza and Crespo turned the art center at the Mayagüez campus into an international avant-garde space, which drew artists from other parts of Latin America, Spain, the United States, and Eastern European countries. Plaza settled in Puerto Rico with Brazilian artist Regina Silveira, and together they remained in Mayagüez from 1969 to 1973, during which time they experimented with new screen-printing technologies. Although they both destroyed most of the works from this period before returning to Brazil, it was a turning point that led them to gradually move away from geometric standardization and toward conceptual work based on a critical study of the mass media.
Augusto de Campos and Julio Plaza, Objetos (Objects), 1968
Back in São Paulo, Plaza collaborated on projects organized by Brazilian historian, art critic, and curator Walter Zanini at MAC USP, of which he was also director, from its foundation in 1963 until 1978. This key relationship allowed the museum to open up to a generation of artists interested in the appropriation of new media and mass communication technologies, and to incorporate multimedia expressions such as video art, mail art, happenings, fi lm, performance, environmental art, and installations, among others. The collaboration between Plaza and Zanini culminated in Prospectiva’74 (Prospective’74) and Poéticas Visuais (Visual Poetics) at MAC USP in 1974 and 1977, respectively. These two exhibitions can be considered catalysts of the early conceptual art of the 1970s and of the creation of international collaboration networks and mail art. Later, Zanini invited Plaza to organize the mail art section of the XVI Bienal de São Paulo (1981), and the Arte e Videotexto (Art and Videotext) exhibition at the following edition in 1983. Plaza brought his artistic and theoretical skills to these projects, but also the network of contacts he had built up during hist time at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, as well as his relationships with Spanish artists Antoni Muntadas,
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
Valcárcel Medina, Una obra permanente (A Permanent Work), 1973–74/2021
Àngels Ribé, and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. These events were key to the development of the new media appropriation practices, understood as means of action and denunciation, and spaces in which art and life merged. Since many of them were based on the principle of “unlimited communication,” as in the case of mail art, they also paved the way for transnational dialogue— a kind of pre-internet network—and for alternative information circuits, which were particularly valuable for underground and marginal scenes, not only in the countries of the Southern Cone but also in the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe. Exchanges with other institutions in the regions—such as CAyC in Buenos Aires 6 —were also important in Zanini’s
6 Founded by Jorge Glusberg in 1969, CAyC played a key role in the development of conceptualism in Argentina, in the use of new media in the art field, and in conversations about the identity of Latin American art.
directorship of MAC USP and the creation of an international collection at the museum. In fact, the revolutionary impact of the Argentine neo-avant-garde of the 1960s extended far beyond its borders, to neighboring countries in Latin America but also to Spain and even the United States. This radical and experimental scene, infused with the international rebellious spirit of May 1968, developed in a tense political context fi rst shaped by the military dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–70). With its growing authoritarianism and censorship apparatus, this was but a prelude to the brutal state terrorism that opened the way for the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process, PRN, 1976–83), led by Jorge Rafael Videla, a decade later.
Founded in Buenos Aires in 1958, the Instituto Di Tella, which was mainly funded by private capital and philanthropy, managed to operate during those years with a certain degree of independence from the state. It specialized in the promotion of contemporary art through three centers dedicated to the visual arts, music, and audiovisual experimentation. The Centro de Artes Visuales (CAV), directed by Jorge Romero Brest, became the nerve center of the modernization of the Buenos Aires art scene,7 with ample doses of the avant-garde and utopia. Oscar Masotta 8 was an important presence among the many artists and prominent figures who passed through the CAV. A theoretician and facilitator, his writings on art, politics, and psychoanalysis revolutionized critical thought in Argentina, and also in Spain, where he went into exile after a brief stay in Paris. Notable contributions include his text “Yo cometí un happening ” (I Committed a Happening) and the book in which
7 During the 1960s, bars, galleries, bookshops, independent theaters, and so on, sprung up around the Centro de Artes Visuales building on calle Florida, creating a cultural hub that was soon targeted for surveillance and repression by the dictatorship.
8 The exhibition Oscar Masotta: Theory as Action, curated by Ana Longoni, provided a clearer understanding of Oscar Masotta’s role, both in Latin America and in Spain (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA], Barcelona, March 23 – September 11, 2018).
427
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
it is included (1967) 9 —the English-language term “happening,” taken from the American context, paradoxically allowed him to question the action art or performance art that was happening around the world and to introduce Argentine specificity in the genre.
Referring to the action art genre in the book Happenings, Masotta mentions Alberto Greco, to whom we could also add Kenneth Kemble: two Informalist Argentinean painters from the previous generation, which can be seen as a precursor of these transgressive action practices of the 1960s. Masotta also mentions their contemporary and fellow Argentinean Marta Minujín, who created some of Di Tella’s most emblematic performative pieces: La Menesunda (Mayhem, 1965, with Rubén Santantonín), and Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity, 1966). These works can be considered part of what Masotta, in his pioneering critical research on information technologies, called “media art”: a form of artistic expression able to inspire revolutionary political formations.
9 Oscar Masotta et al., Happenings (Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez, 1967), 157–76.
In the late 1960s, Onganía’s reforms, which were stifling the Argentine intelligentsia, culminated in the closure of the Instituto Di Tella, which said it had financial problems. Its demise sparked a gradual politicization of the art scene, as its latent revolutionary and transformative energies were poured into much more ideological works, without this diminishing their experimental aspect. Some artists left the country, others abandoned art and became activists. Roberto Jacoby, who produced the emblematic piece Mensaje en el Di Tella (Message at the Di Tella Institute, 1968), temporarily disappeared from public life, but not before participating in Tucumán arde (Tucumán is Burning, 1968), an important collective experience considered the epitome of the merging of art and politics in Argentina.
A year later, in 1969, a group of self-organized artists based at the CAyC came together in the city of La Plata. They were also known as the Grupo de 13 (Group of 13),10 even though there were many more than thirteen artists linked to this art center that tried to take up the torch of the Di Tella. Jorge Glusberg was the chief ideologue, organizer, and director of the CAyC until his
10 Artists included Carlos Ginzburg, Luis Pazos, Horacio Zabala, and Juan Carlos Romero.
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
death in 2012. Wanting the center to be international in scope, over the years Glusberg invited artists and critics from various continents to participate in its exhibitions and activities.11 Among them was French-born art historian Nelly Richard, who has lived in Chile since 1970. Thanks to an invitation from the CAyC, she was able to present the Chilean art scene outside the country for the fi rst time, as in the exhibition Cuatro artistas chilenos en el CAYC (Four Chilean Artists at the CAyC, 1985).
11 Spanish historian Simón Marchán, author of the seminal book Del arte objetual al arte de concepto (1972), maintained a long correspondence with artists from this scene, and his archive includes many documents and records of the works they produced in Argentina—it is a point of connection with many Spanish artists. Experimental poet Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, who was a link between artists in Spain and a disseminator of the international scene, had a similar correspondence with Argentinian artists, especially with Edgardo Antonio Vigo.
A few years after Richard’s arrival, on September 11, 1973, a military coup took place in Chile, overthrowing the socialist government of Salvador Allende and bringing Augusto Pinochet to power. It was one of the last dictatorships in the region, but like those described above in other Southern Cone countries, its policies were based on the elimination of the progressive scene, on censorship, and on making people disappear. Some of the artists who had supported Allende’s Unidad Popular went into exile or were silenced, and at the same time a new generation emerged during the dictatorship determined to oppose the Pinochet regime. Much of it was brought together by Richard under the name Escena de Avanzada (Advanced Scene). Groups such as C.A.D.A. (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte / Art Actions Collective) and artists such as Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Leppe, Luz Donoso, Virginia Errázuriz, Elías Adasme, and Lotty Rosenfeld developed a counter-institutional practice that questioned the traditional languages of art, using photography, video, mass printing techniques, and, above all, performance and direct actions in public space.
To close this text, we reverse the journey, traveling from Latin America to Europe; more specifically to Madrid, where Julio Plaza started out. During the years of the Chilean dictatorship,
Cristina Cámara, Lola Hinojosa, Isabella Lenzi, and Rosario Peiró
numerous exhibitions were organized abroad, calling for the restoration of democracy. These included two shows of “unoffi cial” Chilean art in Europe: the 1982 Biennale de Paris, and Chile Vive, in Madrid, in 1987. Despite the fact that they included innovative works (by artists such as Leppe and Adasme, among others) about what was, with Pinochet’s regime, the fi rst experiment with neoliberalism in history, the critical reception at the time reduced them to residual expressions of European conceptualism. As we pointed out at the beginning, this has been the dominant view in narratives around the neo-avant-gardes in Latin America. We have tried to challenge and refute it through this research, presenting contextual interpretations together with an analysis of the main issues, fi gures, spaces, and experiences of this influential and revolutionary radical scene.
Lola Hinojosa
Augusto Pinochet’s regime (1973–90) was the last military dictatorship in the Southern Cone to make the transition to democracy. Following democratic presidential elections in 1989, Pinochet handed over to the newly elected president Patricio Aylwin in 1990, ushering in a new historical period known as the Transition to Democracy. A couple of decades earlier, guerrilla warfare and other forms of armed struggle had become a modus operandi of the Marxist-Leninist left in Latin America (and other parts of the world undergoing a decolonial process) to achieve the emancipation of the oppressed people.1 Salvador Allende’s Chile (1970–73) showed a different—peaceful and democratic—way to bring socialism into power. Consequently, US interventionism (under President Richard Nixon and CIA director Henry Kissinger, fearful that this peaceful socialism would spread to other Latin American countries) helped the Chilean military class to overthrow a legitimate democratic government. This sparked international solidarity and made the anti-Pinochet movement a symbol of socialism around the world.
Through the art world, a phenomenon occurred that was unique to Pinochet’s
Chile compared to its neighboring countries that had also suffered dictatorships: throughout the almost twenty years of the Pinochet regime, numerous exhibitions were held abroad to support the country and call for a return to democracy. Perhaps starting the trend, the first of these came only a year after the coup d’état: in 1974, the Venice Biennale was dedicated to Chile. For several years, under director Carlo Ripa di Meana, the Biennale had adopted a political commitment that made it an instrument of resistance to international fascism. True to this policy, the Central Pavilion of the 1976 Biennale was dedicated to democratic Spain, with a varied cultural program and a major exhibition. Both biennales presented “unofficial” sections, adopting a stance of resistance to the governments of the two countries. They could be seen as a kind of defense of democracy on the international stage.2 The way in which art exhibitions can embody political strategies will be one of the subjects discussed in this text.
During the 1980s, a generation of Chilean artists began to be known under the name “Escena de Avanzada” (Advanced Scene), a term coined by art critic
Lola Hinojosa
and theorist Nelly Richard, who also curated or organized many of the exhibitions that disseminated these works outside Chile. The “Avanzada” brought together a series of conceptual practices produced since the previous decade that disrupted the canonical languages of art. Through this transgression and the critique of the institutions that supported them, their shared aim was to confront Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, keeping them on the fringes of any institutional art scene in the country.
The first of the international exhibitions in the 1980s took place at the XII Biennale de Paris (1982),3 at which Richard was invited the present the new advanced scene, and chose to do so through the “photographic record of live actions carried out with the body in the city.”4 In Europe, there was a very limited idea of Chilean political art, which basically came down to the militant realism of the muralism and poster art that had been presented at the Venice Biennale. The selection that traveled to the French capital included works by the group C.A.D.A., the Taller de Artes Visuales (TAV), and artists such as Carlos Leppe, Eugenio Dittborn, Lotty Rosenfeld, Marcela Serra no, and Elías Adasme, among others. The types of practices presented in Paris— and the intentionally poor, precarious nature of that exhibition—were the antithesis of the exhibition Chile Vive (1987). This can be said of the contents but also of the lens through which it was received. Organized at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, 5 and with a large budget, it brought together works from fields
such as the media, architecture, music, theater, literary recitals, and visual arts (including painting, storytelling, video, and performance). The selected artists lived in Chile, with the exception of Robert Matta, who had been living in Europe and the United States since the 1930s, but whose presence was justified by “his commitment to creative and political freedom.”6 The fact that no “official” artists were invited led the Chilean government to lodge a formal complaint through its Embassy in Spain.7
Official relations between Chile and Spain were increasingly strained after Franco’s death. A month before the 1978 constitutional referendum, the International Conference of Solidarity with Chile, organized by Chilean exiles and Spanish politicians, was held in Madrid. The major political parties were represented at the event, although the Unión de Centro Democrático (Union of the Democratic Center), which was in government at the time, pulled out at the last moment citing the overrepresentation of the Left. The conference, which was well received by most of the Spanish press, heralded a shift in Spanish foreign policy. This turnaround was confirmed later that year, when Spain supported the United Nations resolution condemning the Chilean military regime for its repeated human rights violations. In this way, the Transition projected a new international image in which Spain’s relationship with Chile—two kindred dictatorships in the recent past 8 —was based on a staunch defense of the democratic state. Previously, Felipe González,
general secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and leader of the opposition, had traveled to Chile to meet the relatives of disappeared persons and underground socialist groups. In 1982, PSOE won the elections and used cultural policy as one of the main strategies for modernizing the country’s image abroad. Finally, in 1986, Spain’s entry into the European Union marked, according to many historians, the end of the Transition and the beginning of a consolidated democracy.9 In this context, the exhibition Chile Vive can be considered an epilogue to this period of political transformation: a gesture of closure, which, on the other hand, marked the beginning of similar strategies in Chile, since a plebiscite held in 1988 put an end to the Pinochet dictatorship.
As Nelly Richard wrote, “Chile Vive was the first and most conspicuous cog in a series of political-cultural events … that inspired the design of the ‘democracy of agreements’ activated by the future governments of the Concertación and their leitmotif of consensus.”10
Some images in the exhibition may have functioned like a mirror in the imaginations of visitors, reviving memories of Franco’s dictatorship that had been voluntarily buried in the Moncloa Pacts of 1977—particularly the photographs taken by members of the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes (Association of Independent Photographers, AFI), created in Chile in the early 1980s as a source of counter-information in the face of media censorship. Their photographs, circulated through the international
Lola Hinojosa
media, testified to the pervasive violence of life in Chilean cities. However, not all the artists or the content of the works in Chile Vive were overtly political. The Spanish press covering the show barely mentioned the practices of more critical and radical visual artists, such as those of the members of the Escena Avanzada, including transgressive queer artist Carlos Leppe. We can certainly interpret what happened as an exercise in whitewashing and homogenization, in which the more revolutionary Chilean political practices went unnoticed in favor of the more canonical works in traditional media such as sculpture and painting. There were few dissenting voices like art critic and professor Ángel González,11 who wrote of Spain’s political “benevolence” and wondered what Leppe or Eugenio Dittborn thought of the exhibition. The work of these artists responded to a different logic to that of the images created by the AFI. Its materialization in the form of photographs and videos was merely a strategy through which to explore the notion of trace and memory, because achieving a final image was not their aim. They were interested in direct action, the body, and the city as spaces of intervention. Nelly Richard raised the issue of the difficulty of understanding these works outside their context at the XII Biennale de Paris, where they were received as versions from the South of the (North American and European) practices of Land Art and Body Art, a kind of “déjà vu.” 12 Richard asked how these works could be presented not merely as a testimony to the brutality of the
dictatorship, but also as evidence of the neo-avant-garde scope of an emerging art scene that rejected the simplistic Eurocentric “center/periphery” and “original/ copy” readings.13
The acquisition of works by artists from the Escena de Avanzada for the Reina Sofía Museum Collection over the last ten years has been the result of a long research process, steering clear of stereotyping a foreign context and succumbing to the archival impulse. It is a project that is constantly listening to situated voices that, as Chilean historians Paulina E. Varas and Javiera Manzi point out, expand the established repertoires.14 However, the creation of the ARCO art fair in 1982 had boosted the art market in Spain in the 1980s, with a preference for the return to painting. Thus, of all the works presented at the Chile Vive exhibition, the Spanish Ministry of Culture was only interested in purchasing Roberto Matta’s Munda y desnuda, la libertad contra la opresión (Worldly and Nude, Freedom Against Oppression, 1986) for the now defunct Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo (MEAC). A “Trojan horse” in the exhibition, this more than four-meter-long painting came to be considered the Chilean version of Guernica (which, at the time, was still on display behind bulletproof glass at the Casón del Buen Retiro).15
The socialist government’s “political subconscious” was already contemplating a future museum to house Picasso’s Guernica —with its enormous symbolic capital—as the foundation of a collection that would shape the narrative of Spain’s modernity and validate the country’s
fledgling democracy. It was a modernity, however, that proved to be peripheral with respect to the rest of Europe.16 Besides the ambivalence of the relationship that can be established between a former mother country and its ex-colonies, Spain is also emotionally and historically connected to those “other” Latin American modernities—not only through the weight of this undeniable asymmetry, but also by a shared recent past of dictatorships, censorship, and violence. The traditional interpretation of Latin American art in terms of center and periphery can be challenged, as Andrea Giunta does when she invites us to think of the artistic production of Latin America as a heterogeneous series of situated centers17—rather than peripheries—that can give rise to new readings in a transatlantic dialogue. Because, as Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha said, Spain was “Europe’s Bahía.”18
1 The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written by Frantz Fanon—Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist and philosopher, and member of the Algerian National Liberation Front—with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, was a theoretical touchstone for various anti-colonial liberation movements.
2 The Biennial dedicated to Chile was followed by other exhibitions such as the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile and We Want People to Know the Truth (both held in London in 1974), which were widely covered by the British press. As well as presenting works by Chilean artists, artists from many other countries donated works to be auctioned for the cause.
3 Other shows were organized years later, including the exhibition of documentary materials Art in Chile: An Audiovisual Documentation, curated by Nelly Richard (and accompanied by the book Margins and Institutions), which
437
toured Australia (with the support of the artist Juan Dávila, who was exiled there), Spain, and England, from 1986 to 1989; and Cirugía plástica. Konzepte Zeitgenössischer Kunst Chile 1980–1989, held in Berlin in 1989 (with the collaboration of Darío Quiñones, Chilean critic and curator based in the German Democratic Republic). For more on the latter, see Francisca García, “Berlin, ‘Cirugía plástica’: historia de una controversia,” in El arte chileno más allá de sus fronteras. Ensayos sobre artes visuales, vol. 8 (Santiago de Chile: Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo Cerrillos, 2019), 24–41.
4 Richard says that they decided to send works in such a precarious medium because “it showed that the process and success of ‘art actions’— tangled up in Chile’s social and political dangerousness—were incompatible with the reification of the ‘work’ as a finite and definitive product, which lends itself to being contemplated in the midst of the safe, calm time of an international museum.” Nelly Richard, Reescrituras y contraescrituras de la Escena de Avanzada (Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Chile, 2020), 135–37.
5 In collaboration with the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Comunidad de Madrid, the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana (ICI); and as the Chilean contribution, with CENECA (Centro de Indagación y Expresión Cultural y Artística).
6 Chile Vive: muestra de arte y cultura , exh. cat. (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1987), 292.
7 Chile Vive: memoria activada, exh. cat. (Santiago de Chile: Centro Cultural de España, 2013), 12.
8 This is evidenced not only by the public expressions of support between the two military dictatorships, but also by the exchange of letters between the two dictators. See Mario Amorós, Pinochet. Biografía militar y política (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2019).
9 In 1986, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad de Santiago de Chile (Vicariate of Solidarity in Santiago de Chile) was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord for its defense of human rights during the dictatorship. It was responsible for sending many of the materials for the Chile Vive exhibition to Madrid.
10 Richard, Reescrituras y contraescrituras , 141.
11 Quoted by Francisco Godoy, “conelchilenoresistentearte, Solidaridad: Chile Vive, una Exposición en España contra el Chile Dictatorial,” Aisthesis, no. 48 (2010): 186–204; available online at https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_ arttext&pid=S0718-71812010000200012.
12 Nelly Richard, “Le Chili comme scène de revendication,” Art Press, no. 62 (1982): 15.
13 Lucy Quezada, “Nelly Richard sobre su curaduría en la Bienal de Venecia,” Artishock, December 2014; available online at https://artishockrevista. com/artishockrevista.com/2014/12/11/nellyrichard-curaduria-la-bienal-venecia/.
14 Lucy Quezada “Poner el cuerpo. Arte y política en los 80 en América Latina,” Artishock, March 2016; available online at https://artishockrevista.com/ 2016/05/02/poner-el-cuerpo-arte-y- politicaen-los-80-en-latinoamerica/.
15 After the demise of MEAC in 1987, its collection was transferred to what was then called the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, which became a national museum the following year. Guernica became part of its permanent collection in 1992.
16 Today, Spain is considered the South by Northern Europe. An example of this is the derogatory acronym PIGS, which has been repeatedly used in the English-language press to refer to Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain because of their fragile economies.
17 Andrea Giunta, “Situados, no periféricos,” in Modernidad y vanguardia: rutas de intercambio entre España y Latinoamérica (1920–1970), ed. Paula Barreiro and Fabiola Martínez, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2015), 261–67; available online at https:// www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/ publicaciones/textos-en-descarga/modernidad_ y_vanguardia.pdf.
18 Rocha, who was born in the Bahia region of Brazil, traveled to Spain for the first time to film Cabezas cortadas (Severed Heads, 1970). Excerpts from his writings on that experience have been selected and compiled by Manuel Asín and Daniel Pitarch in “‘Impreciso, difuso, bárbaro’. Montaje de citas sobre Cabezas cortadas de Glauber Rocha,” Concreta, no. 12 (Fall 2018): 54–67.
Infi
Thinking Through Numbers: Infi nity in Parts
Art and Computing: The Universidad de Madrid’s Centro de Cálculo
Studio Is the Street
From Drought to Palm Trees
Mail Art Network and Prospective Multimedia
Cristina Freire
In the late 1960s and throughout the following decade, the state of exception declared in Brazil by the military dictatorship (1964–85) intensified. This exacerbation pushed many artists and intellectuals into exile and condemned others to prison and persecution. Against this background, artists experimented with a number of strategies and tactics symbolizing the search for spaces of freedom, dialogue, and openness to artistic creation. Since its inauguration in 1963, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP) established itself as an operational space: a space for creation and the dynamic archive of a flood of creative impulses that were repressed during those difficult decades. At the initiative of Walter Zanini (1925–2013)— art historian, academic and avant-gardist, critic and curator—the museum started out as a meeting place and research center. Zanini, a staunch supporter of artists, conceived it as a space for experimentation and connection, activating many exchange networks through open calls for exhibitions. As a result, MAC USP functioned not just as a collection of masterpieces or a monumental building, but above all as a museumgesture of solidarity, guided by the ethics of reciprocity and trust. It comes as no surprise that the Brazilian arts community of the time christened it “Zanini’s MAC.”
The anonymous, impersonal digital networks that connect and activate virtual communities in a matter of seconds are, of course, not the same as those that arise from well- defined personal relationships based on affection, such as those established around the world by the first director of this contemporary art museum in Brazil.
The fact that MAC USP is a university museum, open to the public, meant that years later, in the mid-1990s, 1 I was able to research and reflect in situ, that is, in the actual space that houses what were then long-forgotten works and documents that bear witness to a particular spirit of a vanished time.
The history of certain absences and an interest in the dynamics of the modern/colonial legacy in Brazil laid the foundation for a long-term curatorial, educational, and research project aimed at understanding— through a critical and engaged curatorial practice—the hegemonic narratives in relation to the histories buried in the museum. The paradigm shift had been foreseen by Zanini, who from the beginning saw mail art as a “poetics arising from an urgent need for alternate structures at the international level.”2 Connection had more weight than competition in this ethos; accordingly, trust and information-sharing were
Cristina Freire
more important than copyright. The theories and practices developed at the museum for working with the collection were shaped by the new paradigms suggested by artistic practices.
After the international boycott of the 1969 Bienal de São Paulo, MAC USP— which had the capacity to host group exhibitions—became an essential meeting space for artists and a center for experimentation with new technologies. Accessible means of reproduction such as the mimeograph, xerography, heliography, fax machines, and, of course, photography, were popular. Mail art, as an underlying curatorial and operational exhibition principle, proved to be an important strategy for the inte rnationalization, expansion, and modernization of the museum’s collection despite its limited financial resources. Thanks to this practice, this university museum was able to assemble the most important public collection of conceptual art in South America.
Conceptual poetics, which had been a minor underground phenomenon in the 1970s, became the dominant trend toward the turn of the century. Synonymous with the digital world, the web expanded in flows consistent with the movements of capital in globalized societies, under the banner of deterritorialization.
The central core of the MAC USP Conceptual Art Collection derived from two major exhibitions, Prospectiva’74 (Prospective’74) and Poéticas Visuais (Visual Poetics, 1977), both organized by Zanini in collaboration with Spanish artist Julio Plaza (1938–2003), who had just settled in São Paulo. Prospectiva’74 was only open for a month in 1974, but the large number of artists involved suggested a blurring of the boundaries of the figure of the artist. The first artists
invited subsequently invited others, giving rise to a cartography that included littleknown artists, all outside the hegemonic exhibitions that revolved around the United States and Western Europe. The setup of the exhibition was simple. The works were hung directly on the walls, unframed and unprotected by glass, eliminating any sense of the aura of distance associated with museums. Visitors were invited to browse through publications that were prominently displayed on tables and that aroused considerable interest among them.
The distribution strategies used by mail art often generated group exhibitions and publications. This tactile network passed materials from hand to hand, disregarding market principles and remaining invisible to dictatorial censorship. The roles of curator and publisher merged, echoing the relationships between some of the artists in the network, such as Julio Plaza and Concrete poets such as Augusto de Campos. The exhibitions and publications were interchangeable and functioned as language laboratories: ideal opportunities for intersemiotic translations in different times and spaces.
Discussing these exhibitions at the time, Zanini noted, “Mail art can be considered one of the liveliest phenomena in the new international languages. A growing number of enthusiasts, especially young people, are practicing it all over the world, and there is no denying that this activity provokes new communicative and structural situations for artistic language. It is one of the most intriguing aspects of the trend toward anonymity and the non-objectual that characterizes much contemporary artistic production.”3
The catalogue accompanying the Prospectiva’74 exhibition, designed by Plaza,
was simple and austere. On the first page there was an alphabetical list of the names of all the participants, specifying their countries of origin. Likewise, the space allocated to each artist was limited to a single photograph of one work, and this applied equally to all. No jury, no fees, no prizes, no returning of the works submitted to the exhibition: it was simply a catalogue to document the artists’ participation. These were the principles agreed upon by all participants.
The organizers introduced the exhibition with brief texts: Plaza acknowledged that Prospectiva’74 had been possible thanks to the communication between the collaborating artists from many countries, in a show of unconditional support that only occurs, he concluded emphatically, when “the concept of information prevails over that of the commodity.” In his text, Walter Zanini emphasized the documentary nature of conceptual art and defended a different kind of museum whose role included the creation of hybrid works of art; that is, texts, concrete and visual poetry, footage of actions, photographs, sound recordings, films, slides, maps, artists’ publications, and so on.
The avant-garde nature of this strategy, underpinned by the logic of the network as a guiding principle, paved the way for MAC USP and Brazil to enter the international debate on conceptual art and Conceptualism, which was an important milestone for this community of artists.
The artwork-document thus originated the activation of the museum as an archive and a hub of poetic research and experimental politics. The artwork-document status challenged the documentation, conservation, and exhibition practices of modern museums. This concept can be seen as a kind of pre-digital precedent in relation
to topics such as authorship, originality, authenticity, and the distribution of images, all issues that digital art poses for museums and for social memory in today’s world.
As can be seen from the list of participants and works submitted to Prospectiva’74, there was intensive contact from places under dictatorial rule, both right- wing, such as the military dictatorships in Latin America, and left-wing. Many artists living in Eastern European and South American countries continued this alternative means of exchange, forging lasting friendships.
Zanini was always interested in the concept of the museum as a laboratory in which artists could explore new technologies. In 1977, he purchased a video system so that artists could experiment and develop projects with the new equipment inside the museum itself. He set up a specific area called “Espacio B” for experimental exhibitions, especially video art. From then on, the museum no longer entered the scene after the work was complete: it accompanied the process of creation, forming part of it.
Exhibitions at MAC USP, such as Prospectiva’74, included films and slide projections. At that time, slides and audiovisuals functioned as technical and conceptual bridges connecting photography, art films, and installations. Slides combined with audio—which Hélio Oiticica referred to as “quasi-cinema” in his projects—were a hallmark of the period. From the white cube to the black box, that formula was a sign of an evolving museum.
The distinctive mechanical sound of slide projectors, and works consisting of eighty slides—the maximum capacity of the projector carousels generally used by artists—were common in exhibitions until the mid-1990s, when slides were replaced by digital software technology.
Cristina Freire
In the early video art experiments in Brazil, women played a leading role as directors and/or producers. Likewise, the videos often portrayed the body in their resistance strategies and tactics. It was a body that, in the case of the women pioneers of Brazilian video, referred to chimeras of the social body, especially in the earliest videos made between 1974 and 1977.
Zanini also coordinated an early Brazilian work of video art, which was sent by mail to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to take part in the pioneering group exhibition Video Art USA.
Critics of the time treated MAC USP exhibitions with indifference, even though they attracted considerable numbers of visitors and the interest of the arts community.
Roberto Pontual, one of the few Brazilian critics to review Prospectiva’74, in an article published in the Jornal do Brasil, 4 described it as “the first major show of the young international art of today in our context.” Pontual, who at the time was exhibitions coordinator at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, drew a comparison between Prospectiva’74 and two other exhibitions: Harald Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form , which was held in Switzerland in 1969 (and did not include any Brazilian artists), and Information , organized by Kynaston McShine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970.
In fact, the MAC USP exhibition deactivated the centrality of the aesthetic function in art. It went beyond major twentiethcentury exhibitions by establishing networks and solidarity as curatorial principles to promote more inclusive art circuits,
outside the hegemonic centers of power and market forces. Significantly, Prospectiva’74 was organized at MAC USP without financial resources, while the show curated by Szeemann was sponsored by US tobacco company Philip Morris.
More than 150 artists from around the world submitted works to Prospectiva’74 , including Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, who participated with Una obra permanente (A Permanent Work), consisting of a card file with catalogue cards of a kind commonly used in libraries at the time. In this case, the artist’s details were printed on the card, including his postal address and a small photograph of his face at the top, and a blank space to be filled in at the bottom. Sending the completed form to Valcárcel Medina could activate the work as a device for making contact, in a random, unpredictable, and nonhierarchical horizontal network, with the potential to connect the artist at home in Spain to exhibition visitors in Brazil. Perhaps the sense of those museum-gesture projects and exhibitions— linked to reciprocity and to selfless and fortuitous solidarity—remain alive, invisible, silent, and subtle, in some other (human or nonhuman) community, beyond frames and display cabinets.
1 Arte Conceitual no Museu (São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras, 1999).
2 Walter Zanini, “A arte postal na busca de uma nova comunicação internacional,” in Walter Zanini. Escrituras Críticas , ed. Cristina Freire (São Paulo: Annablume; MAC USP, 2013), 260.
3 Ibid., 257.
4 Roberto Pontual, “Entre o atrás e o adiante,” Jornal do Brasil , August 28, 1974.
Mail Art Network and Prospective Multimedia
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Riestra, pp. 11–81, 119–155, 173–202, 225–260, 275–280, 293–306, 323–324, 329–352, 391–394, 399–438, 463–466
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Images of the front and back covers José Lino Vaamonde Valencia, installation and outside views of the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, Paris, 1937
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35 (Donation of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, 1947); 38; 39; 41; 44; 46–47; 50; 52; 54–55; 57 (bottom); 60–61; 69–71; 74–75; 76 (Donation of Inés Juana Vila Vandageon, 2023); 78–79; 146; 175; 178; 180–181; 189 (Donation of Martín Domínguez Ruz, 2021); 228 (Donation of Georges Bartolí, 2021); 191; 229 (Donation of French State, 1990); 251 (Donation of Harriet and Esteban Vicente Foundation, New York, 2017); 231; 236–239; 241–243; 244 (bottom); 245; 247; 250; 252; 256 (Donation of the Aub family, 2022); 258 (top) (Donation of Val del Omar Archive, 2011); 295–296; 299; 302–303 (Donation of Herederos J. A. Coderch de Sentmenat, 2019); 305 (top); 334; 336; 337 (Donation of Paula Pape, Rio de Janeiro, 2014); 337–338; 340–342; 343 (Juana Francés Legacy, 1990); 345 (Donation of the Autric-Tamayo family, 2018); 347–350; 400; 401 (Donation of Germana Ferrari de Matta, 2011); 402; 404 (bottom); 411–413; 425; 431
Collection of the Library and Documentation Centre of the Museo Reina Sofía: front and back cover, 1, 6–7, 10 (Donation of J. Vaamonde Horcada, 2001); 53; 125; 126; 127; 128 (right); 130–131 (Archivo Lafuente); 132; 134; 136–141; 143; 144 (Archivo Lafuente); 149; 150 (Archivo Lafuente); 151; 152 (Archivo Lafuente); 168; 194; 232 (Long-term loan of the Fundación Museo Reina Sofía); 246; 259 (top) (Donation of Val del Omar Archive); 300; 306; 346; 339; 344; 408; 418; 435
Long-term loan of Fundación Museo Reina Sofía, 2016–2021: 62 (Donation of Juan Carlos Verme); 230, 233; 244 (top) (Donation of Vicente Quilis Moscardó); 255; 348 (Donation of Paul Golub, Philip Golub, Stephen Golub and The Nancy Spero and Leon A. Golub Foundation for the Arts. Museo Reina Sofía Foundation/USA);
407 (Donation of Jorge M. Pérez); 409; 414; 417; 419; 420 (Donation of Herbert Rodríguez); 421; 423–424; 428 (Donation of Andrés Capriles, José Marín and Alec Oxenford, courtesy of Henrique Faria gallery, 2016); 429 (Donation of Marga Sánchez); 430
Long-term loan of Museo ABC de Dibujo e Ilustración: 42, 80
Long-term loan of Museo Nacional del Prado: 57 (top)
Long-term loan of Telefónica Collection: 67
Long-term loan of Compañía Madrileña de Urbanización, S.A.: 176–177
Long-term loan of Bühnen Archiv Oskar Schlemmer / The Oskar Schlemmer Theatre Estate: 186
Long-term loan of Familia Millares: 305 (bottom)
Long-term loan of The Easton Foundation, New York: 351
Long-term loan of Galerie Georges-Phillipe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris: 403
Loans
Akademie der Künste, Berlin: 179
Archivio Pistoletto. Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella: 404 (top)
Archivo General de la Administración: 182
Archivo Horacio Coppola. Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires: 66
Archivo Tosquelles: 235
Arquivo Arturo Baltar e Xosé Luís López de Prado Aria, Ourense: 258 (bottom)
ARTE France: 183
Arxiu National de Catalunya: 56
Association Frères Lumière, Paris: 43
Bauhaus Archive, Berlin: 187
Biblioteca de Gerardo Diego. Fundación Gerardo Diego, Santander: 64
Biblioteca Nacional de España: 190
Cinémathèque Française: 49
Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Paris: 82
Colección Bruce Posner: 59
Colección Fernando Marzá: 188
Colección Fundación Eugenio Granell, Santiago de Compostela: 248, 278
Colección Fundación Laxeiro, Ayuntamiento de Vigo: 259 (bottom)
Colección Isidoro Valcárcel Medina: 426
Colección Moraes Barbosa: 408
Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC): 193
Eames Office LLC: 331, 333
Filmoteca Española: 298
Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris: 185
Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte: 190
J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: 331 Televisa, Mexico City: 249
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rheim: 332
Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Vienna: 184
Archivo ABC: 83
Public Domain: 86, 122, 124, 128 (right)
Biblioteca Nacional de España (Foto Mayo. Laboratorio fotográfico del Ministerio de Propaganda): 91
© of this edition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2024
The essays, BY-NC-ND 4.0 International © of the primary sources, their authors
Of the translations, BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Of the images, © 1973 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved © 2024 Projeto Lygia Pape © Alberto Sánchez, André Masson, Ángeles Santos, Association Marcel Duchamp, (2023) Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico City, Benjamín Palencia, Ceija Stojka, Comissió Tàpies, Dedalus Foundation, Inc. /VAGA, NY, Donation Jorn, Silkeborg, F.L.C., Dorothea Tanning, Eduardo Arroyo, Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ, Eugenio Granell, Francis Picabia, François Dufrêne, Gutiérrez Solana, Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg, Jean Dubuffet, Jesús Rafael Soto,
Joaquín Sunyer, Joaquín Vaquero Turcios, José Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat, José Guerrero, José Val del Omar, Juan Downey, (1998) Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, Laxeiro, Lucien Simon, Manolo Millares, Maruja Mallo, Matta, Max Ernst, Oscar Domínguez, R. Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, Rafael Alberti. El Alba del Alhelí, Remedios Varo, Saltés, Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, SBJ, Sempere, Sucesión Pablo Picasso, The Easton Foundation / Autorizado por VEGAP, The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS, The estate of Leon Golub, Vela Zanetti, Walter Gropius, Wifredo Lam Estate, Adagp, Paris, Zabalaga Leku, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive
© Archivo María José Val del Omar & Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga
© Archivo Marta Minujín
© Archivo Tosquelles
© Arquivo Arturo Baltar e Xosé Luís López de Prado Aria, Ourense, 2024
© Association Frères Lumière
© Augusto de Campos – Julio Plaza
© Carmen Bores, 2024
© César and Claudio Oiticica
© Claudia Andujar. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Vermelho
© clj, Madrid, 2015
Courtesy of Jesús Ruiz Durand and Wu Galería
Courtesy of Herbet Rodríguez
Courtesy of the heirs of Oscar Masotta
Courtesy of Estudio Regina Silveira
© Courtesy of Archivio Gallizio
© Delhy Tejero
© Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld, C.A.D.A. (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte), Madrid, 2024
© Eames Office LLC (eamesoffice.com)
© Eli Lotar
© Elías Adasme, 2024
© Estate of Helen Levitt
© Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy of Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche
© Fondo Gatcpac. Arxiu Històric del Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya
© Fundació Josep Renau – València
© Fundación Gerardo Diego, Santander
© Heirs of Xavier Miserachs
© Heirs of José Bardasano
© Heirs of José Moreno Villa
© Heirs of Max Aub
© José Lino Vaamonde, Valencia. MNCARS, Madrid. Donation of J. Vaamonde Horcada (2001)
© Josep Bartolí / Donation of Georges Bartolí
© Kati Horna, MCD. Archivos Estatales (España)
© Mathias Goeritz (ca. 1948; 1957–1958) under license of L. M. Daniel Goeritz and Galería
La Caja Negra, Madrid
© Michelangelo Pistoletto
© Norah Borges, courtesy of Federico de Torre
© Oskar Schlemmer
© Paolo Gasparini, 2024
© Pietrina Checcacci, 2024
© Roberto Jacoby
© Siegfried Weyr
© Sonia Delaunay, PRACUSA, 2024
© Successió Miró 2024
© Succession Wolfgang Paalen, The Wolfgang Paalen Society e.V
© Sucesión Joaquín Torres García, Montevideo, 2024
© Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico, 2024. Courtesy of maestro Jesús Díaz
© The Harriet and Esteban Vicente Foundation, New York
© Tomás García Asensio
© Trisha Brown; Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; © Trisha Brown; Video: Peter Muller. Courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company
© of the rest of the works, their authors, and heirs
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
Akademie der Künste [AdK] Berlin: 179 (Photograph by Arthur Köster)
Archivo ABC: 83
Archivo General de la Administración: 182
Archivo Lafuente: 130–131, 144, 150, 152 Archivos familia Tosquelles; photographic reproduction: © Roberto Ruiz: 235
Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya: 56
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin: 187
© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN – Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI: 82
Claudia Andujar, courtesy of the artist and Galeria Vermelho: 417
Colección MACBA. Centro de Estudios y Documentación.
Fondo Xavier Miserachs: 345
Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC): 193
Eames Office LLC (eamesoffice.com): 331 (Photograph by John Entenza), 332–333
Elías Adasme: 412–413
Fernando Marzá: 188
Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris: 185
Fondos de la Biblioteca Nacional de España: 91 (Foto Mayo. Laboratorio fotográfico del Ministerio de Propaganda)
Fundación Eugenio Granell, Santiago de Compostela: 278
Fundación Gerardo Diego, Santander: 64
© Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, IVAM (Photograph by Juan García Rosell, IVAM): 232
Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Instituto del Patrimonio
Cultural de España, Madrid: 189 (Archivo Pando), 190
Museo ABC de Dibujo e Ilustración: 42, 80
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofía, Madrid: Joaquín Cortés, Román Lores and Library and Documentation Centre: front cover, 1, 6–7, 10, 35, 38–39, 41, 43, 44, 46–47, 49–50, 52–55, 57, 59, 60–61, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70–71, 74–76, 78–79, 94–117, 125–127, 128 (right), 132, 134, 136–141, 143, 146, 149, 151, 156–166, 168, 171, 175–178, 180–181, 183, 186, 191, 194, 198, 203–221, 228–231, 233, 236–239, 241–252, 255–256, 258–259, 262–274, 281–289, 295–296, 298–300, 302–303, 305–306, 308–325, 334, 336–344, 346–351, 354–390, 395, 400–404, 407, 408–409, 411, 414, 418–421, 423–431, 435, 440–462, 467–473, back cover
Wienbibliothek im Rathaus: 184
We are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others. While all reasonable efforts have been made to state copyright holders of material used in this work, any oversight will be corrected in future editions, provided the Publishers have been duly informed.
We would wish to express our gratitude to the collectors, institutions, foundations, archives, and collaborators who have made this presentation possible, both those whose works are reproduced in this first volume of Communicating Vessels, and those who are mentioned here:
Archivo Bau
Archivo Josep Renau
Archivo Lladó CCHS-CSIC
Asociación de Amigos del Museo
Reina Sofía
Sharon Avery-Fahlström, The Öyvind Fahlström Foundation
Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás
CCHS-CSIC
Calder Foundation
Centre de Documentació i Museu de les Arts Escèniques
Colección Abelló
Colección ICO
Colección Sánchez-Ubiría
Colección Sonnabend
Fondation Constant
Fondation Gandur pour l’Art
Fundació Suñol
Fundación Argentinita y Pilar López
Fundación Enrique Herreros
Fundación Federico García Lorca
Fundación Gerardo Diego
Fundación Gregorio Prieto
Fundación Mapfre
Fundación Pablo Palazuelo
Fundación Susana y Ricardo Steinbruch
Galeria Superfície
Hauser & Wirth
Institut Valencià d’Art Modern IVAM
The Jacques and Yulla Lipchitz Foundation
Museo Art Nouveau y Art Déco, Casa Lis
Museo de Historia de Barcelona MUHBA
Museo de Pontevedra, Colección Familia Souto Aliseda
Museo del Traje CIPE
Museo Nacional de Antropología
Museo Nacional del Teatro de Almagro
Museo Universidad de Navarra Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando Residencia de Estudiantes
Richard Hamilton Estate
The Jacques and Yulla Lipchitz Foundation
Jesusa and Margarita Aguirre Benito
Mercedes Albi
Jorge Ramón Alva de la Canal
Sandra Álvarez de Toledo
Manuel Asín
Pedro and Ary Altamiranda
Gilberte Jacqueline Boyer
Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco
María de los Ángeles Ciruelos Otero
Cornell Capa
Isabel Azcarate
Fernando Miguel Barral Arranz
Aurelio Botella Clarella
María de Corral
Rita Donagh Hamilton
Georges Detais
Jacinto Esteva
Familia Lacasa
Familia Yarnoz
Rafael Fernández del Amo
Ysabel F. Galán
Tomás García Asensio
Ángela García Codoñer
Ángela García de Paredes and siblings
Joaquín Gasca Gil and Antonio Gasca Gil
Luis Gordillo and Pilar Linares
Eulàlia Grau
Carles Guerra
José Antonio Guerrero
Herederos de Anric Masso
Antonio Homem
Ana María and María Pilar Lagunas
Alberdi
Juan José and Margarita López Andreu
Soledad Lorenzo
Familia Lozano Bartolozzi
Augusto Martínez Torres
Antoni Muntadas
Juan Navarro Baldeweg
José Ortiz-Echagüe
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Mercedes Puig Pérez de Guzmán
Rocío Rivière Vidal-Quadras
Ángeles Santos Torroella and Julián Grau Santos
Suzanne de la Serna
Regina Silveira
Piero Simondo
Candida and Rebecca Smith
Gonzalo Juan Suárez Pomeda
Lucien Treillard
Antonio Vázquez de Castro
As well as all of those who have wished to remain anonymous.
José Lino Vaamonde Valencia, outside the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, Paris, 1937 (detail)
