Al Mubag

But of course, these early pioneers and the avant-gardes who followed them did not emerge equally in the Western realm. If France was one of its focuses, Spain often looked the other way: to some ironic academic guidelines marked by San Fernando and the National Fine Art Exhibitions. Of course our country had great value, the Prado Museum: opened in 1819, it houses one of the best European collections born in the 16th century; A radical form not only in French romanticism, but also in Manet and the Impressionists, the artists who followed him. While it is true that our male and female painters went to museums to copy, they followed selfish and conservative painting guidelines: they drank from the beginnings of Davidian neoclassicism and the pictorial formulas derived from it. He illustrates a few examples of what normative discourse is and how it is applied: Eduardo Rosales has been subject to misunderstanding and frontal rejection of his fresh modernity. Goya was underrepresented in the museum for much of the century, as some of the paintings that seem incontrovertible and iconic today (for example, the 2nd and 3rd May paintings) were deemed worthless by the institution’s management. For example, El Greco also did not have the relevance we give it today.

But the 20th century changed everything. Its culmination came when Alfred Barr opened MoMA in 1929 in New York with the work of the Post-Impressionists; In 1933 he draws a torpedo integrating the 18th century genealogy of the avant-garde, erasing all the academic and institutional art of the century with a stroke of the pen… and in national and international exhibitions of national heritage? In short: while in France it was usually stored, in Spain it decided to die in El Prado Goya, even some of his contemporaries, such as the patriarch of Madrazo, to the Museum of Modern Art (first the current National Library building in BC). Since then, these collections have gone through endless turns: they were sometimes hung on combs and in a safe place, but they were also displayed in the Casón del Buen Retiro, where many will remember them. In El Prado but outside Prado. It took the extension of Rafael Moneo so that in 2007 the work of XIX del Prado was presented in a temporary exhibition curated by Javier Barón and José Luis Díez; Thus, temporarily these artifacts were returned to the Villanueva building. Finally, the Spanish XIX returned to the permanent collections of El Prado in 2009. More than a century has passed since their separation. Of course, such a decision would have been more complicated if he had not opened the Musée D’Orsay in 1986, an institution that underlined that its aim was not just art but art history. to describe the art of a century it was necessary to include its lights, but also its edges and folds, centers and margins; Among these folds was academicism. D’Orsay represented a paradigm shift to the canon, with works from the 19th century slowly seeping into other collections.

provincial museums

Where this corresponds, in academia, I have already done an analysis of the 2007 sample and the 2009 museography; For example, I questioned whether it was based on an art history that did not take into account cultural studies and new materialisms; no female artists are included, no presence of illustrated magazines and photography (the invention that transforms the visual and imaginary, as well as painting itself), or that the colonial story does not appear remotely in any permanently presented object. and that’s exactly when XIX was the century when most of the non-peninsula areas of imperial Spain were lost. It should be noted that the Royal Decree reorganizing the state collections between the Prado and MNCARS (1995) made it difficult to establish the possible genealogy from Goya (El Prado) to Picasso (MNCARS) in the Villanueva building. This serves to understand the complexity of displaying the XIX in Spain. Some of these issues have since been fixed, slowly but wisely and in good faith, by making more timely decisions. Leaving aside the unsuccessful project of Invitadas, which I analyzed in BILGI Newspaper in 2021, I see that Las Furias is an exhibition fully curated by Falomir. De Tiziano a Ribera (2014) discreetly but resoundingly normalized the presence of women in the artistic system of Spanish history by making visible the patron role played by the Hungarian Mary in the creation of our royal collections. Another interesting example is how MNAC built its 19th century chambers, a story that Francesc Quílez directed with great success. Prado’s latest exhibition also presents interesting findings in this sense, hanging some painters from the 19th and early 20th centuries, their elders, who have been removed from the museum until today. Although there is much to be done, I think this is the way.

And if Spanish 19th century history is difficult to tell for our most important state museum, it is much more difficult for provincial Fine Arts museums. With twenty years of existence, MUBAG is one of the youngest in Spain, but its collections were created from pensions formed by the provincial council in 1863 or later to study in San Fernando, Rome or Paris in the 19th and 20th centuries. , one of the winning works in the National and Provincial Painting Competitions held between 1952 and 1960. But of course, works valued by the provincial institution to provide an adequate account of the development of art in Alicante since the 19th century. They need to be strengthened. Let’s not forget, too, that El Prado is fully aware of its collections from the 1800s, as it published a catalog raisonné in 2015 and made a significant effort to recover lost artifacts led by José Luis Díez. If there’s a collaborative stance on the other side of the equation, Provincial museums can certainly start to work.

Borrowed parts, an oxygen balloon

And the deposits and donations of these great collections are crucial to telling micro-stories and local stories and have been happily worked out over the last decade since MUBAG. We were going to start exactly from a practice initiated by the Madrid museum, which at the time was called “El Prado disperso” and is now renamed “El Prado extended” in a positive key by Falomir. It’s about loaning out pieces—never big enough—often found in the museum’s warehouses, and they are like an oxygen bubble for provincial museographic discourses, although they were not required from the start in the permanent collection in Madrid. The first pieces were stored in Alicante in 1932 and are a part of our local imagination as we remember them hanging in the noble districts of the provincial palace. This deposit policy, with some generous donations added, is on the rise as MUBAG now has a significant number of works from El Prado. Fine Arts. The current permanent collection of Gravina Palace also includes National Heritage deposits, San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, San Pío V Museum in Valencia, Alicante City Council and MNAC (for example, Marianela by Vicente Bañuls). Arrived at MUBAG in 2017, never exhibited after receipt in 1906); or deposits of other types of collectibles, such as the Banco Sabadell, the Elisa Tomás Yusti Foundation, Alfonso Díaz Palanca, the Sánchez Mateo Family and the Children of Margarita Galiana. Not to forget the donations made by Rafael Beltrán Ausó and José Manuel Magro in 1971 and 2017 respectively, which accompany and contextualize these paintings and sculptures with cabinets, fans and various applied art objects.

These institutional accumulations fit into an intelligent and timely policy of cultural restructuring that would normally seem elusive from the centers to the periphery. State museums, including those affiliated with the Generalitat, are obliged to reach all Spanish citizens or Valencians as the case may be, and not to limit their ability to influence behind closed doors. And in my view, museums should be thought of as a concept rather than a physical space.

public heritage

I am also launching an advocacy for the defense of a public heritage which, as the above-mentioned institutions understand, is a heritage that belongs to all, and to which we must include the varelas residue and MNCARS. Although Emilio Varela is a painter related to the Madrid museum, he is indispensable in our collections. He is the most important Alicante painter of the first half of the 20th century and should be here as much as possible. And with it some of the amazing pieces by Sala, Casanova, Bañuls, Bushell, Gisbert, Agrasot, Cabrera or Poveda that can now be watched on MUBAG. However, in addition to this, annual budgets must be applied for the purchase of the works that started the 19th century acquisition policies of the Provincial Committee and close the gaps in the story to be told. Female production is one of these major shortcomings. Everyone’s money should be invested in the public and not be tempted to lease museum concessions or collections foreign to our identities and history; Rather, it is about brands that do not create a cultural context or civic fabric, only a misunderstood tourism policy that sterilizes the cultural fabric. They are today’s bread and tomorrow’s hunger.