Room 201

The myth of progress is the driving force behind history midway through the 20th Century, an aim that generates as much social change as exclusion. Realism is the movement which best summarizes the tensions surrounding Modernity. Photography and cinema are born as documents which describe this world in a state of constant change. In Spain, the re-generational utopia of Instituto Libre de Enseñanza [Free Institute of Learning] constrasts with the atavism and historical drama of Darío de Regoyos' (1857-1913) or Ignacio Zuloaga's (1870-1945) "Black Spin", and José Gutiérrez Solana's (1886-1928) “esperpentos” [grotesque and deformed realism]. Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) appears before these artists as an esthetic referent, the embodiment of a radical critique that they are unable to reactivate. Decadentism links to the 19th and 20th Centuries, between Symbolism and landscape, between the bourgeois private space and the public experience of urban bohemia, contrasts that are present in the works of Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), as well as in the portraits of Camera Work, by Hermen Anglada Caramasa (1871-1959), or the young Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

Room information