Cartel de la Exposición de Arquitectura y de Pintura Modernas, organizada por el Ateneo Guipuzcoano (Poster for the Exhibition of Modern Architecture and Painting, Organised by the Guipúzcoa Athenaeum)

The Exposición de Arquitectura y dePintura Modernas, held at the Gran Casino in San Sebastián in 1930 and organised by the Ateneo Guipuzcoano, marked a turning point for modern Spanish architecture, enabling ideas to be received and discussed among the architects that were emerging out of rationalist architecture, for instance Fernando García Mercadal, José Manuel Aizpurúa, Joaquín Labayen, Ricardo de Churruca, Pere Armengou, Ignasi Oms García, Josep Torres Clavé, Josep Lluís Sert and Sixto Illescas. In its painting section, the show also featured works by avant-garde painters such as Pablo Picasso, Maruja Mallo, Pancho Cossío, Juan Gris, Joan Miró and Juan Cabanas, who designed the exhibition poster. By the same token, avant-garde films were also screened — featuring Luis Buñuel and his Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) and Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s Esencia de verbena (The Essence of the Fair).
The show was a public success and had a major impact on the cultural environment of the time, as much for the interdisciplinary nature of the works displayed as the distinction of the artists and architects that were part of it, confirming the force of new architecture based on rationality, luminosity, hygiene and economy, in opposition to eclectic architecture, which was criticised for the discrepancy between the work and its purpose.
The show resulted in the founding, in October of that year in Zaragoza, of GATEPAC, the Group of Spanish Architects and Experts for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture.

Juan Carlos Rodríguez Pérez