At the end of the 1940s Catalonia breathed an atmosphere of artistic revitalisation in which there were moves to recover paths that had been cut short by the Spanish Civil War. Collectives such as Cobalto 49 and Dau al Set, events like the October Salons and the New Art Experimental Cycles and publications like Ariel and the magazine Algol all emerged at that time. In addition, in the 1950s several artists who were later to make a name for themselves travelled to Paris, where they attended the ‘decline’ of Surrealism and the rise of what we could call the last of the great European painting, personified by Michaux, Fautrier, Wols, Dubuffet, Mathieu, etc. They also made contact with Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, the masters of the avant-garde in exile in Paris, from whom they hoped to receive the baton of modernity or perhaps just a simple blessing to legitimise their urge to break with everything.

Almost 30 years later, after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, Catalonia became the epicentre of libertarian culture. On 2 July 1977, at the very doors of the present Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, National Confederation of Labour) held a mass meeting in which emblematic anarcho-syndicalist leaders in exile took part, including Federica Montseny and Josep Peirats. Some months later, between July 22 and 25, the Jornadas Libertarias Internacionales (International Libertarian Sessions) were held in the Park Güell and gathered a million people over several days.

Seen in perspective, these two events are today an invitation to reconsider the history of democracy in our country with different horizons.

This exhibition sets out to look at the development of artistic practice in Catalonia over 27 years, from 1950 to 1977, rereading the stories that narrated them from the present moment, on the basis of coordinates with which we can gauge their ties and their disparities, their tensions and their transfers. The works of the artists appear side by side with historiographic testimonies and with extensive material documenting the way the institutional scenario, the gallery scene and the map of alternative venues were built up.

In this respect, the exhibition is a complement to and a chronological extension of the new presentation of modern art in the collections of the Museu Nacional, providing a foretaste of a possible permanent exhibition spanning the period to the end of the 1970s, but at the same time pointing to future monographic views and the museum’s documentary collections.

For some historiographic narratives, Dau al Set has become a kind of myth of the beginning times whose importance has overshadowed numerous artists and groups who played a central role in the development of modernity in Catalonia, artists like Josefa Tolrà, José María Nunes, Antoni Clavé, Ángel Ferrant and Joaquim Puigvert, collectives like CLUB 49, designers of the calibre of Ricard Giralt Miracle and many others.

Equally significant was the work of the Sala Gaspar and the Galerías Layetanas, true epicentres where the boldest ideas of the 1950s were put into practice. At the same time, the performing arts were seeing a transcendental surge thanks to the choreographers Joan Tena and Joan Magrinyà, the playwrights Ricard Salvat and Maria Aurèlia Capmany and to Joan Brossa, a very important artist for understanding later performative practices. Along with them, we ought to mention the theorists Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, Rafael Santos Torroella, Cesáreo Rodríguez-Aguilera and Juan-Eduardo Cirlot, the last of whom produced a poetic oeuvre that was ahead of its time.

The 1960s go from the decline of informalist painting to the first manifestations of conceptual art. Here we find pictorial tendencies like the essentialism of Pic Adrian or the expressionist collages by Armand Cardona Torrandell and Modest Cuixart, performance art by the Grup Gallot from Sabadell, Joaquim Llucià’s research with tin foil and Albert Ràfols Casamada’s chromatic work. Parallel to this there were groups who experimented with sound, such as Música Oberta, promoted by Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny, and the ideas rooted in arte povera proposed by Antoni Llena, Jordi Galí, Sílvia Gubern and Juan Carlos Pérez Sánchez in El Jardí del Maduixer. In Lleida, Grup Cogul was founded, a movement directed at Pop Art whose work could be seen in the Petite Gallerie of the Alliance Française. The MAN exhibitions, the salones de Mayo (May salons) and the exhibitions ‘Machines’, at the Sala Lleonart, and ‘Nuevas expresiones’ (New Expressions), at the Sala Gaspar, vouch for the popularity of the pop aesthetics that were a prelude to later conceptual practices. In this respect, Joan Miró’s ephemeral mural for the Association of Architects of Catalonia was a significant turning point, the same as the Galería René Metras, where the work of the most famous French painters of the time could be seen.

The theoretical activity of that time was also also fundamental. Here we find names such as Joan Perucho and Alexandre Cirici, to Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who wrote for the magazine Hogares Modernos under the pseudonym of ‘Jack the Decorator’, from the publications Serra d’Or, Questions d’Art and Destino to the writings of Xavier Rubert de Ventós, Romà Gubern, Eugenio Trías, Iván Tubau, Juan-Eduardo Cirlot and Terenci Moix.