Avant-garde Territories. City, Architecture and Magazines

Modernity bears a relation to a series of territories that were conducive to new developments and consolidations in the early decades of the twentieth century, a period that would witness a flurry of changes. The city was fast becoming a locus of thought, conflict and artistic creation — Paris, Madrid and Barcelona were not only centres of artistic production but also stages, where architecture and urbanism illustrated the growth of major cities and responses to new social, labour and demographic challenges in a world indelibly marked by colonialism and industrialisation. Magazines, for their part, became that unofficial space offering a key element missing from galleries, salons and museums: spaces of encounter and discussion which, with swift and inexpensive dissemination, demonstrated they were capable of transcending physical frontiers to foster the emergence of invisible communities and the contact and exchange among individuals across different geographical coordinates.

As the 1930s set in, the social and political events that converged in the pre-war escalation leading to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War impelled numerous artists to take a public stance, turning not just their art but also their locations and means of dissemination into places which transformed society, the body and consciousness.

This chapter from the Collection presents a critical narration of modernity around these three foundations, understanding it less as a cultural continuum which culminates in the present and more as a succession of discontinuities, possibilities and attempts that must be read from a present-day context.