The museum becomes focal point of modernism and the Civil War | The number of works exhibited passes 600-1300 joins the story as the film, photography and posters | Gaudi and Jujol become the new stars of MNAC | the collection explains the birth of modernity in a dense route that goes up Dau al Set.
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The Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) Museum is the great museum of Romanesque and Gothic is something known by visitors from around the world, year after year make pilgrimage to the National Palace to admire works that know they can not see anywhere else in the world. Starting today, when it opens the remodeled modern art collection also find that the MNAC is also the great museum of modernism and the Civil War. “The MNAC start having more names,” summed up yesterday’s director, Pepe Serra, chief architect and co-curator, Juanjo Lahuerta, a presentation rarely like this deserves to be called revolutionary.
Did he know the art collection of nineteenth and twentieth century that houses the museum? Yeah? In the absence of a visit, a few simple numbers can make him change his mind. Where once hung on the walls around 600 works, there are now over 1,300 and of these, at least a thousand have been rescued from the reserves, ie, were not exposed. Although the fundamental change of mentality. Serra and Lahuerta have said goodbye to the canon and the dictatorship of the historical categories, without fear of anachronism and unorthodox confrontation, putting the collection in the service of a story, or rather multiple micronarratives, around the birth of modernity. “And here we are unbeatable. Nobody can explain it better than us and that gives us a new international position. “Serra stresses.
Film, art, photography.
The 4,000 square meters on the first floor on which the collection is displayed have been altered in the course, changed the lighting and exhibition area. The story expands to the forties and fifties of the last century, with Dau al Set; unapologetic embrace film (four films are: from Eruption volcanique à la Martinique, a wonderful film Méliès produced in Barcelona in 1902, a Taboo, powder blush, conducted by Josep Serra Massana in the years before the Civil War) puts the photo on equal footing with painting and sculpture; makes a hole the other expressions of popular culture: posters, collages, cartoons; reaches out to women artists as Lluïsa Vidal or Méla Mutermilch- and, above all, out of the limbo of reserves virtually unknown artists such as Antoni Fabrés orientalist, Torne-Esquiuus Pere Joan González (Juli brother) or the enigmatic Jose Narezo Garcia, who is an extraordinary collection of drawings made for the Spanish Pavilion of the Republic when he was 15.
Art in Context.
The new presentation of the collection of modern art, in short, no longer aims to show “the best” of Catalan art, but what sticks out his chest is the collection itself-in which, incidentally, also militate many international figures, Jacques-Emile Blanche Alfred Sisley, who once came as donations or acquisitions Museus Board. The jewels of the museum ‘The Battle of Tetuan or Vicarage of Fortuny, Casas, Rusiñol- remain, but places them in context, facing the complexity has often shunned classical historiography. The result is a tour of modern art in which periods and art schools are permeable entities if necessary to tell a story. Not everyone will be satisfied-he could not be otherwise-but at least It would be desirable can create an interesting debate.
Unpublished and additions.
The art historian and architect Juanjo has spent months researching Lahuerta in museum reservations. Rediscovering paintings, sculptures, photographs and posters that deserve to see the light. Most of the above-there are 267 artists-was unprecedented. In addition to equity, the museum has built significant deposits Family architect Josep Maria Jujol, the Basilica of the Sagrada Família, which has yielded a set of twenty works of Gaudí and other modernist authors and MACBA, who has given Out of the works of the Dau al Set group with which, as an epilogue, this return to the avant-garde after the Civil War announces what will come after. And what comes next, or what projects the MNAC, is to cover the second half of the twentieth century in the XIII and Victoria Eugenia Alfons Fira pavilions once they become part of the museum’s facilities. Pepe Serra also launched a cracking case to museums (Picasso, Miró, Dalí) so that, in view of the redevelopment, establish a more fluid relationship with the museum and that naturally raises the possibility of temporary loans. The reorganization, which has cost 890,000 euros (462,000 in respect of museology and other 427,000 to the adequacy of the exhibition spaces) has had the collaboration of the Caixa Obra Social, whose contribution represents about a third of the total.
The modern artist.
The new presentation of the collection not only supports multiple views, but is recommended. They are barely 100 years old, but explains an extraordinarily complex world that deserves a relaxed look. The exhibition, which despite its permanent changes shall be -mandan ideas-is divided into four areas and an epilogue. In the beginning is the birth of the modern artist, who is no longer in the service of the Church and the aristocracy, but depends on an anonymous market in a cosmopolitan city. “Given the reality of conversion of art into a commodity, the artist invents a new religion, art for art, of which he is the priest,” explains Lahuerta. In the portraits that open the path (Sorolla, Casas, Ishmael Smith, Pere Daura …) we see depicted himself as a dandy or bohemian, as if to confront the conventions of bourgeois society without realizing the terrible paradox that “the bourgeois enemy is also your customer.” We see below their transition from academia to the workshop; fashions of Orientalism (Tapiró, Fabrés, Fortuny …) and Japonisme, history painting, where a painting of houses coexists with a drawing correspondent Josep Lluís Pellicer in the war of Oriente, landscapes.
Gaudí’s house and Jujol.
But it is certainly with the advent of modernism, now happily enriched Jujol Gaudí and where the path reaches one of its most critical moments. They were the noucentistes happen with disturbing findings like the Pere Esquius Torne (will be the subject of a forthcoming exhibition) and confirmations as Torres-Garcia; stops later in the emergence of advertising and mass media, surrealism, to return to another of its peaks reach with the advent of World War II, at which many of the artists are turning in their commitment to Republic. The MNAC funds retained in many of the works that were exhibited in the Pavilion of the Republic José Luis Sert designed for the Paris Exposition of 1937.
EXECUTIVE CHAUFFEUR BARCELONA 