Avant-Garde Trends

While all this was happening in Catalonia, other winds were blowing in Europe. Far from the nineteenth-century conflict between Romanticism and Classicism that Noucentisme had embraced, the avant-garde trends that emerged in Europe around 1905 prevailed over both and sought new forms of plastic experimentation that did not look to the past. Despite having settled in France, Spanish artists like Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Joan Miró (represented in the exhibition) played an active part in this process.

Two groups of works illustrate this survey of the avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century. The first is devoted to the foundational moment of contemporary art before the end of World War One, and includes Fauve, Cubist and Simultaneist works by Georges Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris and Robert Delaunay. The second focuses on a subsequent period, the late thirties, a time of synthesis between comprehensive artistic movements such as Abstraction and Surrealism that encompasses works by Miró, Willi Baumeister, Joaquín Torres-García and Wifredo Lam.