We already suspected that it is not true that any time in the past was better, but, in case we had forgotten, this month's selection of exhibitions will certainly remind us. The mass graves of Paterna still bring us echoes of voices silenced by the Civil War and post-war political repression. In the National Library of Spain, mutilated books tell us about ideas severed, expurgated, erased, with mixed success, by the guardians of morality of past centuries.
Art can be a refuge from violence, as Chagall understood it, or a way to exorcise the traumas experienced, as it was for the Slovenian painter Zoran Mušič, a survivor of Dachau, whose sketches of the horrors of the camp form part of an exhibition at the MNAC. Sometimes, the suffering that moves us is that of others. The Massacre in Korea, a heartbreaking Picasso denunciation, visits the Picasso Museum in Malaga on the occasion of one of the exhibitions commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Malaga genius.
“You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but to me they are life itself, in all its happy brilliance.” It would be wrong to deduce from these words that Marc Chagall had an easy life. However, he faced his hardships with stubborn naivety and a palette soaked in vibrant tones, qualities that perhaps contributed to his longevity: he reached almost a centenary and never stopped painting.
Born in Belarus as Moshe Segal into a Jewish family, he was exposed to anti-Semitism as a child and had to leave the Vitebsk Art School, which he had founded, due to disagreements with Kazimir Malevich.
He avoided Stalinism by moving to Paris, and Nazism by exiling himself to the United States, where his first wife, Bella, died, whom he missed so much that she continued to appear in his late paintings. His painting, spiritual, dreamlike, draws on traditional Belarusian craftsmanship and the religious traditions of his childhood.
The printing press brought with it a popularization of reading that the political and religious powers soon considered dangerous. The first index of prohibited books was published in Paris in 1544. Spain joined this dubious honor from 1551 to 1790.
But vetoing publications was not the only form of censorship in the modern era. The printed copies were ruthlessly purged of any immorality or revolutionary ideas, with marks, crossed out, pages torn out or glued together. During the 16th century, the Barcarrota library, in Badajoz, was walled up in order to hide it from the Inquisition.
Trauma was a central theme for many artists of the mid-20th century, and rightly so. The Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Holocaust, and the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left little room for optimism and faith in humanity. Some artists fell silent. Others captured the horror, the pain, the exile. A few also wanted to attest to dignity, humanity and hope.
International references such as Inge Morath, Henry Moore, Agnès Varda and Giacometti dialogue in this exhibition with Spanish creators, many of them as relevant as Julio González, Josep Guinovart, Antonio Saura or Jorge Oteiza.
More than one hundred and fifty mass graves have been documented in the municipal cemetery of Paterna, containing the remains of at least 2,237 people shot between 1939 and 1956.
The exhumation of these bodies, in order to attempt their identification and return them to their family, has yielded, in addition to human remains, personal objects of great testimonial interest: footwear, pipes, glasses and writing utensils that belonged to these people who were retaliated against during the first years of Francoism.
Archeology and anthropology go hand in hand in this exhibition, which aims to be an exercise in reparation and historical memory.
The world held its breath when Pablo Picasso unveiled his work The Young Ladies of Avignon in 1907, but it continued to spin. His radicalism did not leave anyone indifferent.
Some artists and a good part of the public expressed their rejection, but many others, who had been exploring new languages for some time, picked up the gauntlet and reflected in their work, in one way or another, Picasso's innovations. A heritage still evident in numerous contemporary creators.
Along with eighteen pieces by the Malaga native, creations by Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon and Jeff Koons, among others, are on display.
Since abruptly leaving Rodin's workshop, after just three months there as an apprentice, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncusi embarked on an extreme simplification of lines and forms, to the point that, in 1924, American customs made him pay tariffs for Bird in Space, one of his most beautiful and famous pieces, which the guards, however, did not consider a work of art.
Very different is the opinion of renowned museums such as the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London or the Guggenheim Foundation in Venice, which have contributed to this exhibition with loans from their collections.
