Temporary exhibition hall
Muriel Gómez and Joan M. Minguet
€5
The exhibition is based on exhaustive research in public and private archives, and will synthetically collect the enormous activity of Club 49.
Cultural life under the Franco dictatorship was an obstacle course for those who, in the times of the Republic, had sniffed out modernity. Suddenly, the military victory of fascism stopped all the processes of cultural openness that had overcome the frameworks of Noucentisme. The Republic and, above all, the war years accelerated those processes, but they were hastily cut short. This modernity had, in the thirties, had had several ways of unfolding and from all social classes. The petty bourgeoisie of Barcelona launched an initiative with great repercussions: ADLAN (Friends of New Art) between 1932 and 1936. After the hardest years of the dictatorship, some of the protagonists of ADLAN carried out an adventure with similar characteristics, although careful not to upset Franco’s leaders: Club 49.
Club 49 carried out regular activity in the cultural field between 1949 and 1971, carrying out more than 500 activities. l, as they had done in the ADLAN years, with behaviors full of modernity, even if it was a monitored modernity: they maintained an intense collaboration with entities that were already rooted in cultural life: the Hot Club Jazz, the Sala Gaspar, the Institutes of culture of democratic countries…; they programmed events that encompassed the entire cultural arc, without distinctions of rank or prestige: from classical music to jazz, from the painting of great names to that of emerging authors, from photography to video, they held events in public places, but also in private homes; they focused their events on the city of Barcelona, but without ceasing to make incursions into other places in the Catalan territory.
The exhibition is based on exhaustive research in public and private archives, and will synthetically collect the enormous activity of Club 49, showing its invitation cards, its internal life, but above all reconstructing some of the activities that they programmed in those years. With this, we will be able to analyze, both in the exhibition itself and in the publication that will be published, the difficulties that those characters had to keep a cultural modernity alive in the dark times of the Franco dictatorship.
The exhibition is based on exhaustive research in public and private archives, and will synthetically collect the enormous activity of Club 49.
Cultural life under the Franco dictatorship was an obstacle course for those who, in the times of the Republic, had sniffed out modernity. Suddenly, the military victory of fascism stopped all the processes of cultural openness that had overcome the frameworks of Noucentisme. The Republic and, above all, the war years accelerated those processes, but they were hastily cut short. This modernity had, in the thirties, had had several ways of unfolding and from all social classes. The petty bourgeoisie of Barcelona launched an initiative with great repercussions: ADLAN (Friends of New Art) between 1932 and 1936. After the hardest years of the dictatorship, some of the protagonists of ADLAN carried out an adventure with similar characteristics, although careful not to upset Franco’s leaders: Club 49.
Club 49 carried out regular activity in the cultural field between 1949 and 1971, carrying out more than 500 activities. l, as they had done in the ADLAN years, with behaviors full of modernity, even if it was a monitored modernity: they maintained an intense collaboration with entities that were already rooted in cultural life: the Hot Club Jazz, the Sala Gaspar, the Institutes of culture of democratic countries…; they programmed events that encompassed the entire cultural arc, without distinctions of rank or prestige: from classical music to jazz, from the painting of great names to that of emerging authors, from photography to video, they held events in public places, but also in private homes; they focused their events on the city of Barcelona, but without ceasing to make incursions into other places in the Catalan territory.
The exhibition is based on exhaustive research in public and private archives, and will synthetically collect the enormous activity of Club 49, showing its invitation cards, its internal life, but above all reconstructing some of the activities that they programmed in those years. With this, we will be able to analyze, both in the exhibition itself and in the publication that will be published, the difficulties that those characters had to keep a cultural modernity alive in the dark times of the Franco dictatorship.
Exhibition hall
