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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
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.