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April 29, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
From Myth to Rumour. Ideas, Debates and Discourses
Serge Guilbaut. Presentation
Francis Frascina. Understanding Power: Cold War Myth and New York Museums
Serge Guilbaut. “Leur faire Avaler leur Chewing-Gum”: Some Tough Problems from the Political-Art Scene in France in 1954
Richard Leeman. “Nach 45”. Michel Tapié, Michel Ragon and Pierre Restany
Karen Kurczynski. The “International Spirit” of CoBrA -
April 30, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Between East and South. Peripheries As New Settings
Serge Guilbaut. Presentation
Alessando del Puppo. From Neo-realism to Neo-avant-garde Art, Critique and Ideology in Post-war Italian Art, 1945–56
María Dolores Jiménez Blanco. A Closed Field? Reflections on Art and Autarchy in 1940s Spain
Gabriela Switek. “Envisaging Exhibitions”. Behind the Iron Curtain. The Central Office of Art Exhibitions in Warsaw (1949–1955)
Concluding round-table discussion with all participants
Radiations. European Art and its Debates during the Cold War, 1944–1955
Held on 29, 30 Apr 2015
The word “radiations” knowingly announces the interesting but also somewhat dangerous theme presented in this seminar: the reverberation of art discourses throughout Europe in a period of divide during the Cold War.
These sessions examine the tense period that elapsed between 1944 and 1955, a period in which the main artistic nuclei, Paris and New York, attempted to define their own powerful “universal image” to impress upon the world. The “New School of Paris”, on one side, and the “New School of New York”, on the other, competed in confrontation, while the rest of the world looked and learned. When at the end of the 1940s the Cold War created new types of world relations based on the division between antagonistic blocs, liberal America and the communist USSR, European countries were forced into reconsidering their values and discourses, their political and cultural identity. It was at this point that the debate became particularly complex and the point in which different concepts of artistic production materialised since the rhetoric of the Cold War tended to present opposing fields, each one using an array of mediums – art, film or music, for instance – to attack the other.
Therefore, offering a heterogeneous narration of how culture was produced in this period in different places and under similar global tensions is key, exploring the ideological alliances and friction between countries and art movements, whilst also acknowledging that art movements and debates changed depending on where they took place. As a result, Radiations. European Art and its Debates during the Cold War, 1944–1955 describes the complexity of the art world in Europe and also acknowledges new voices and positions that remained invisible for many years due to their variance with traditional canons designed in Paris and New York.
Participants
Francis Frascina. Emeritus Professor at Keele University. Noteworthy recent publications include Primitivism, Cubism and Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 1993); Art Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester University Press, 1999), Modernism in Dispute. Art Since the Forties (Yale University Press, 1993) and Un choix de Meyer Schapiro: My Lai, le Moma et la gauche dans le monde de l'art, New York, 1969-1970 (Editions Formes, 2014).
Serge Guilbaut. Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. His noteworthy publications include How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Tirant Lo Blanch, 2007), Sobre la desaparición de ciertas obras de arte (On the Disappearance of Certain Works of Art, Curare/Fonca, 1995), and Los espejismos de la imagen en los lindes del siglo XXI (Mirages of the Image on the Outskirts of the 21 st Century (Akal, 2009). He has also edited the book Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945–1964 (The MIT Press, 1992) and curated the exhibition Be-Bomb (MACBA, 2007), alongside Manuel Borja-Villel.
María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco. Professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her salient publications include Arte y Estado en la España del siglo XX (Art and State in 20 th Century Spain, Alianza, 1989) and Una historia del museo en 9 conceptos (A History of the Museum in 9 Concepts, Cátedra, 2014). She is currently curating an exhibition on autarchy and exile in post-war Spanish art in the Museo Reina Sofía.
Karen Kurczynski. Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Massachussetts Amherst. Her recent noteworthy publications include Primitivism, Humanism, and Ambivalence: CoBrA and Post-CoBrA (RES59/60, 2011), Michel Ragon et CoBrA: Un dialogue sur l’expression populaire (Institut National de l'Histoire de l'Art, 2013) and Asger Jorn, Popular Art, and the Kitsch-Avant-Garde (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). She is currently co-curating an exhibition on the CoBrA movement entitled Animal Culture (NSU Art Museum, 2015).
Richard Leeman. Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Bordeaux. He has recently published Cy Twombly. A Monograph (Thames & Hudson/New York, 2005) and has worked as the editor on various publications such as Pierre Restany's Half Century (Editions des Cendres/INHA, 2009) and Michel Ragon, critique d'art et d'architecture (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013) .
Alessandro del Puppo. Professor at the University of Udine. He has recently published Modernitá e nazione. Temi di ideología visiva nella pittura del primo Novecentro (Quodlibet, 2013) and L’arte contemporánea. Il secondo Novecento (Einaudi, 2013).
Gabriela Switek. Professor at the University of Warsaw. Her recent publications include Art Playing with Architecture: Modern Affinities and Contemporary Integrations (Universidad Nicolás Copérnico de Torun, 2013), Aporias of Architecture (Zacheta-Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2012) and Writing on Fragments: Philosophy, Architecture, and the Horizons of Modernity (Warszawa, 2009). She is also editor of the publication Avant-garde in the Bloc (JRP Ringier, 2009). In 2006 she was curator of the Polish pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Más actividades
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Remedios Zafra
Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
This lecture will address this epochal context, delving into the synchronicity of these upsurges through an additional parallel between forms of patriarchal domination and techno-labor domination. A parallel in which feminism and intellectual work are both being harmed, while also sending signals that in both lie emancipatory responses to today’s reactionary turns and the neutralization of critique. This consonance would also speak to how the perverse patriarchal basis that turns women into sustainers of their own subordination finds its equivalent in the encouraged self-exploitation of cultural workers; in the legitimation of affective capital and symbolic capital as sufficient forms of payment; in the blurring of boundaries between life and work and in domestic isolation; or in the pressure to please and comply as an extended patriarchal form—today linked to the feigned enthusiasm of precarious workers, but also to technological adulation. In response to possible resistance and intellectual action, patriarchy has associated feminists with a future foretold as unhappy for them, equating “thought and consciousness” with unhappiness—where these have in fact been (and continue to be) levers of autonomy and emancipation.”
— Remedios Zafra
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the Mapfre Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.