New collectors’ volume devoted to Catalan avant-garde art

Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Togores, Torres-García... all shook up the art world, a “new phenomenon in the history of our art,” says Joan M. Minguet, the author of the fourth collectors’ volume of Catalan painting that Enciclopèdia Catalana has devoted to the art avant-garde (the three previous volumes dealt with the Romanesque, Gothic and Modernist periods).

The new large-format book (2,000 copies at 595 euros) delves into an artistic period “full of splendour,” according to Minguet, who has chosen 150 extraordinary artworks by 40 painters from the era, with each one including comments from a dozen art specialists.

Minguet convinced the publishers that the book had to go beyond painting and embrace other visual works, to include such things as calligrams, posters, photos... and even manifestos.

One such is the 1928 Yellow Manifesto of Salvador Dalí, Lluís Montanyà and Sebastià Gasch, which sums up the challenge posed by a generation of artists who wanted to leave the trodden path but who came up against “a wall” represented by the ruling noucentist style. And this reveals the two facets of avant-garde Catalan art: the light of its triumph in European and American centres of art, and the darkness back home. “They had no other option than to leave. Simply to survive,” Minguet points out.