433 up a whole new field of problems that will soon attract the attention of a number of very important artists willing to explore the fields of the dreams and that other world that lies beyond the obvious. It will charge formidable dimensions that Freud, since the beginning of the century, had been associating with the field of sexuality and its representation. The work of Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, here with his Mannequin fatigué of 1926 or Distorsion of Andre Kertesz of 1933 can point out the coordinates of a view that will plot a new line between reality and its ghost. But the 20s are also the decade of the appearance of one of the programs of art with greater enthusiasm and competition in reference to the time: the Russian Constructivism in its widest comprehension. It is undoubtedly the movement that in such short time transformed the iconography of the Russian world prior to the October Revolution, giving rise to a program that will pass through all the arts, from painting to sculpture, from architecture to music, without forgetting the graphic and cinema fields. You will find names such as Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Tatlin or Kasimir Malevich, together with Mayakovsky and the voices of the great culture of the Russian Revolution. 5 On February 28, 1933 was the burning of the Reichstag in Berlin and the formation of the first National Socialist Government in Germany. This is a decisive event that inaugurated one of the most dramatic periods in European history. The enthusiasm that, despite the difficulties of the previous decade toured the utopia of art is transformed into a feeling of political turmoil and struggle. Soon the fronts of intervention will multiply, using posters and all the variations of the graphic work to feed an active agit-prop that the collection of the IVAM accounts with a rich archive. George Grosz with his Ecce homo, the photomontages of John Heartfield for AIZ, or the series of Josep Renau over those years, constitute a fundamental work file at the border of art and politics. Also of importance is that of the Spanish civil war of those years, and the response of so many artists to the conflict and its strategic significance. Since the poster of Joan Miró, Aidez l’Espagne from 1937 to the work of Pablo Picasso or the Petite Montserrat effrayée from 1941 or the Femme criant d’horreur of the same year of Julio González and which express the extremely expressive horror that accompanied the experience of the Spanish civil war. The exhibition presents some works of Pere Català Pic and Agustí Centelles of the photographic collections of the IVAM from the rich photographic archive of the same war. Also included is one of the important works of Equipo Realidad that have the Spanish Civil War as motif and scenario. This scenario of pain and war revolves around the work of Jacques Lipchitz Prometheus Strangling the Vulture of 1936-37, being an allegory of a time in which death and violence had occupied the previous space of the utopian tension that the historical Avant-gardes had tried to think and build. 6 The Second World War meant the end of an age and opened a time of silence and new languages that, after the end of the Avant-garde, begin to appear on the new art scene. Already in the mid 50s we can identify new proposals which in descriptive terms pass as European Informalism and American Abstract Expressionism. Figures such as Dubuffet, Fautrier, Burri and Tàpies, on one side, and on the other Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Barnett Newman which already represented the transformation that was taking place in the arts. Both European Informalism as well as American Abstract Expressionism can be seen as a return to matter, a denial of the primacy of shape and a gestural element that solves the relation with space. Concerning the Gran díptic roig i negre of Antoni Tàpies and the Lake Ontario Flats of Anthony Caro, we can explore works of Pierre Soulages, Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, or André Masson among others. And among them those of Antonio Saura and Manuel Millares that in the 1950s started a process of artistic innovation within the group El Paso, decisive experience for the Spanish art of those years. The same could be said of what is going to happen in the field of sculpture with names such as Eduardo Chillida, Martín Chirino and Alfaro. 7 Parallel to Informalism we can identify throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s the re-arrising of new currents around a renewed geometric abstraction with a constructive root. This phenomenon was also present in Spain, and more specifically in Valencia with groups such as Parpalló or Antes del Arte with very prominent voices and all concerned in restoring the link between art and science. The works of Eusebio Sempere, Pablo Palazuelo, Gerardo Rueda together with Salvador Montesa, Manolo Gil and Equipo 57 can be references at this time. The works of Lucio Fontana will have fundamental importance, as his Concetto spaziale which will mean an important innovation. Also the studies of Franco Melotti of the late 1940s which searched for composing new spaces using materials such as clay, plaster and small scenarios for the imagination. A spatial tension that will become more explicit in other works as in Labyrinth of 1954 of Adolph Gottlieb or the works of Ad Reinhardt of the same years, in which the emphasis passes by the construction of a pictorial superposition that gives to the picture an admirable plastic density. And not forgetting the importance in the field of sculpture of the works of Tony Smith and Jorge Oteiza. One and another from different premises will search for a meaningful spacial field. The video of John Whitney is one of the pioneers of abstract computer art. 8 In the mid-1960s New York becomes the center of the art scene. They are key years and the gaze to art acquires more complex perspectives. It is important to take into account the important role that criticism begins to aquire at the time. It is not a simplification, but the authority and legitimacy of
Colección del IVAM. XXV Aniversario
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