Paula Barreiro-Lopez
Avant-garde Art and Criticism in Francoist Spain
Liverpool University Pres
2016
Présentation de l'éditeur
This groundbreaking book surveys the shifts in the aesthetic discourse
and artistic practises that decisively influenced the shaping of the
avant-garde during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). On the basis of
extensive, so far unpublished, archival material, it discusses the
intellectual and cultural field as an important battlefield for fighting
the regime from within.
The study opens with a comprehensive historical overview on the
cultural world from the end of the Spanish Civil War throughout
Francoism and reveals for the first time the broader intellectual and
cultural context of vanguard art considering the special relations and
negotiation processes between artist, critics and institutions during a
major gap in the historiography of post-war Spanish culture: the late
Franco dictatorship (1959-1975). It then analyses in depth the important
role that a group of art critics played as theoreticians and peers in
key artistic movements from the 1950s onwards. Using their extensive
international networks in the midst of the Cold War period, they
decisively influenced the aesthetic and cultural debates of their time
and very concretely helped shaping a completely new discourse for the
avant-garde in Spain.
This book discusses the creation of this new discourse that linked
culture and ethics/politics and analyses its impact on the intellectual
and artistic landscape (visual, print and exhibition culture) during the
last decades of Franco’s regime. It is indebted to a cultural historic
approach that takes high culture, popular culture, politics as well as
the history of ideas in account studying the reciprocal transfer
processes within these fields and across European and American
geographies. This study and its interdisciplinary approach will be of
interest to scholars in art history, visual, cultural and museum studies
of modern Spain in particular and Europe in general.
Paula Barreiro López is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Barcelona.
