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Dossier : « L’histoire de la peinture de ce siècle »

De la revuelta a la postmodernidad (1962-1982)

Ramon Tio Bellido
Translated by Simon Pleasance
This article is a translation of:
De la revuelta a la postmodernidad (1962-1982)
Bibliographical reference

De la revuelta a la postmodernidad (1962-1982), Madrid : Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011

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  • 1 La colección, claves de lectura (Parte 1), Madrid : Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía : La (...)

1In 2010, the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid published the catalogue of its collection1 in the form of a manifesto for the invention of a new and urgently needed museology. This latter would shed the traditions hitherto favouring an “historical-cum-chronological reading, which sings the praises of great names and relegates everyone else to a secondary level”. The Reina Sofia is proposing to organize many different readings, presenting masterpieces as much as lesser works, photographs, films and other documents, in sequences intended to put all the works on an equal level of perception. As a precaution, it is specified that a “historical and problematic” line will be retained in the presentation of the collection, even if its arrangement is intended to be “deliberately polemical”, because these works/objects are “neither ruins nor relics, but the representatives of plural histories”! After a laboured reference to Aby Warburg, Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin, the authors admit that they have allowed themselves “narratives” which are just a tad subjective, focused on the “interactions between the artistic and the social”. Three main “entries” are designated as conveying the “keys” appropriate to this demonstration: 1°) an “archaeology” of modernity which encompasses, as a tutelary figure, Goya and his Disasters of War and concludes with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a moment which saw the arrival of a diverse range of the most unheard-of techniques and themes, but which above all pointed out the “social and political role of the artist”; 2°) the “great break” of the 1960s, which saw our world topple from an “economy of production to an economy of consumption”, the annexation of the aesthetics of the performing arts and spectacle by way of the performance and other art events, but above all the indisputable arrival of the “political” in artistic proposals; 3°) the contemporary which ended with the fall of the Berlin wall, a period of final questioning of hegemonic models, distinguished by “a totally de-politicized art”. The book then embarks upon an “edifying” circuit of the structures proposed, where it is possible to check that the “Cubist” episode was enhanced by the projection of a Lumière Brothers’ film showing Loïe Fuller devoting herself to a Danse serpentine, or that an issue of Valori Plastici has been slipped into the sequence “Classicism and Realisms”, etc.

  • 2 ¿La guerra ha terminado? Arte en un mundo dividido (1945-1968), Madrid : Museo Nacional Centro de A (...)

2More recently, ¿La guerra ha terminado? Arte en un mundo dividido (1945-1968)2 and De la revuelta a la postmodernidad (1962-1982), in the form of essays/catalogues, deliberately describe an historicist’s “revision” of Spanish art. Their major interest resides in recording the actions and productions of “forgotten” artists. It is nice to see “rehabilitated” in them the importance of the “estampa popular” in the 1960s, and to recall the presence of women artists such as Eulalia Grau, Ester Ferrer, and Angels Ribé, in the “conceptual” period. But the whole thing remains puzzling in its bias and its claim to a somewhat disconcerting museographical invention.

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Notes

1 La colección, claves de lectura (Parte 1), Madrid : Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía : La Central, 2010

2 ¿La guerra ha terminado? Arte en un mundo dividido (1945-1968), Madrid : Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010

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References

Electronic reference

Ramon Tio Bellido, « De la revuelta a la postmodernidad (1962-1982) », Critique d’art [Online], 39 | Printemps 2012, Online since 01 April 2013, connection on 28 March 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/2564 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.2564

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Ramon Tio Bellido

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