Related Encounters with the 1930s

Encounters with the 1930s is a symposium that begins with a line of questions about a decade that has haunted historic and contemporary ideas about art and politics, artistic autonomy, and the pressure of context on artistic production.

This seminar aims to show the variety and complexity in some of the debates on contemporary Spanish history. To this end, it compiles the latest research on aspects such as exhibitions, urbanism, magazines, photography and the relationship with totalitarian regimes and their outcome in the Spanish Civil War and Second World War.

Guernica, a testimony and condemnation of the bombing by Franco's forces of the Basque town of the same name is considered a foundational work of 20th century art and it continues to be a universal symbol of the struggle against oppression. Its arrival in Madrid in September of 1981 was presented as the symbolic conclusion of Spain's transition to democracy following the dictatorship. The complicated diplomatic negotiations undertaken to bring about the painting's move were also the first important steps in cultural policy to be taken by the country's new government, and they highlighted the role that avant-garde art would play in the official culture of Spain's young democracy. With its arrival, it ceased to be the emblem of dissidence against the dictatorship and became the symbol of the healing of the fracture between the two historical factions in Spain: a sign of the reconciliation upon which the new democratic society would be based.

This round table brings together the team of curators behind the exhibition Encounters with the 1930s (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2012 - 7 January 2013), to give the audience the chance to learn about the research process and the dialogue that have arisen from this dynamic rereading of the 1930s, which reveals the links between the temporary exhibition and a broader reinstallation project involving the Museum's Collection, undertaken to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica.

In his 1936 essay, The Artwork in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin uses the Blaue Blume—the romantic incarnation of unobtainable desire—to signify the artifice and perceived immediacy of film made possible through the concealment of the cinematic apparatus.