429 vindicate the aura of the exceptional and wonderful, creating its own galleries of taste. We can imagine a long history that flocks to the history of our own artistic culture. Following these new collections, or those others more distant in time, the figure is still alive of those who made collecting a way to gather the variations of the world and culture in a fantastic area for their galleries or museums. Walter Benjami dedicated a few pages to this issue in 1937, a reflection that today is still lucid and opportune. Surround the character of Eduard Fuchs he poses the double problems of the psychological characters of the collector and the nature of collecting so that the passage of the history of culture to a patrimonial space in which pieces acquire the added value of taste and passion granted to them. After this operation is another in disguise, which is not alien to the historical recovery attempts, following the fils rouge of the memory, now encrypted in the objects in the collection. In it they sleep awake, as Mario Praz wrote in La casa della vita, the happy moments in a story that runs partly parallel to the curiosity and taste of different times, giving rise to those places that the collector’s fantasy and wandering desire establishes. 3 From this perspective, it would be exciting to explore the great collections, which have been configured throughout the 20th century with the purpose and intent of gathering the so-called modern art. And it would be pointless to recall the key role that the MoMA had through their first exhibitions from the 30s to the time of establishing the principles and historiographical criteria that have been applied and validated for decades at the time to organize the different modern art museums. A way of thinking and exhibiting art of clear historicist intention that served as the basis to address the numerous projects that from the 1950s multiplied in European spaces and to which Spain will join later. This was both a theoretical question, as well as the one most related to the ideas that the museum is a space of representation of art. One and another, intrinsically connected, suited the models that are implemented in the second half of the 20th century and which are questioned at the moment of rethink the forms of the museum and its exhibition strategies. A generous and lucid effort has guided the formation of the work of the Collection of the IVAM over the 25 years of its existence. A first stage focused on the decades of the first half of the century to Second World War, and a second that was present from the 1950s until the mid-1990s. These articulated stages of the collection and its strong knots. Added to this is a third stage which deals with the last few years allowing the IVAM to maintain a dialogue with processes and proposals on the contemporary scene. In a direct manner this exhibition commemorating the 25th anniversary of the institution follows the axis of the development. In relation to the first half of the century the artistic personality that best expresses the anchor of the historical Avant-garde is Julio González. The acquisition of a significant number of works by the artist since the very beginning of the Museum has allowed the IVAM to have today the most important collection of the artist. This fact makes the start of the exhibition, which has been conceived as a dialog of Julio Gonzalez with artists of the 20s such as Torres-García and others. These authors are well represented in the collections of the Museum, as well as the different languages that the Avant-gardes develop in that time. The attention given by the collection to the 20s, 30s and 40s allows the IVAM to go through the first half of the century with key pieces from which can be read the serious tensions that run through those decades. Rather than focusing on canonical figures for all historiography, we seek to construct constellations that articulate the different speeches that from Futurism to Constructivism, from Dadaism to Surrealism, to different specialists utopia organisms dramatically leading to scenarios representing the Great War. An end of the Avant-gardes and the ideals that had sustained throughout a passionate journey full of experiments. An end that Walter Benjamin recognized by announcing the catastrophe of an era. There they are together with Julio González and Torres-García, Brancusi and Matisse, Picasso and Miró, Alexander Calder, Pevsner and Gabo, Schwitters or Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp and André Masson, together with key materials of the extensive experience of the Russian Constructivism, so attentive to the graphic shapes and compositional game that made possible the construction of a new utopian universe. Up to coming to the dramatic 40s into which the tension of the era transforms the languages of art, leading them to taking part in a nervous game of denunciations and political agitation. Works gathered in the exhibition such as those of George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Josep Renau. Alongside of them are excellent works of the Soviet agit-prop, all this articulated by the sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, thought like a sacrificial totem of a time that is the victim of it’s own contradictions. The metaphor used by Th. W. Adorno in his Äesthetische Theorie as an approach to modern art: ‹ The fragment is the dam that makes death in the work of art. To destroy it also removes the stain of its appearance ‹. It refers both to the cultural conditions in which the 20th century art emerges from, as well as the limits that circumscribe any interpretative attempt of the same. Already at the beginning of this work he claimed that ‹losing the categories of his evidence a priori, he also lost his art materials, as the words in the poetry’ - recognizing in the Chandosbrief of Hofmannsthal the most forceful testimony to this. Later and as development of the same assumptions, he will add that all the art of our century must be understood articulated to a language problem, founded in the crisis that inaugurates the nihilism, this interpreted as an abandonment of a basic illusion, which had governed the strategies of the culture of classicism, which is not other than that of the symmetry of the order of the language and the world order. In this way of understanding the crisis of the fin-de-siècle it is also easy to understand the program of the Avant-guards as postulated in the early decades of the 20th century. Understood as crisis of language, from the first manifests one breathes the atmosphere of freedom and construction, of an essay and experiment, tension and utopian future. It is the crisis that will open new possibilities
Colección del IVAM. XXV Aniversario
To see the actual publication please follow the link above