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Throughout the eight decades since the unveiling of Guernica in the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Paris World´s Fair, Picasso’s painting has become our culture’s Tragic Scene, a paradigm of death and violence administered in the context of modern war, and of the fragility of life itself.

Spain: Art and Society in the 1959s and 1960s sets out an analysis of the Spanish artistic landscape following the Civil War and World War II. It focuses on the uniqueness of the time as a turning point in the return to experimentation after the trauma created by the conflicts. To illustrate the discourse, the visit takes us through works by artists including Eugene Smith, Antoni Tàpies and Equipo 57.

The idea of this guided visit is to give Senior Citizen groups a comprehensive view of the artistic events that took place between the final years of the 19th century and the 1930s, a time when numerous artistic proposals were juxtaposed and interconnected. Participants are invited to take an active, critical approach stemming from considered thought about just what their adoption of the concept of Modernity might have meant to the artists of the classic avant-garde.

The Spanish Civil War was not just a dramatic historical event, but it also served as a catalyst for a range of artistic strategies and attitudes. This guided visit highlights just how the situation was to influence the cultural landscape that existed before the outbreak of the war and would maintain its sphere of influence throughout its course and even once the conflict had ended.

Not only was the Spanish Civil War a dramatic event, it was also the catalyst for diverse artistic strategies and attitudes. This guided visit spotlights how this circumstance would influence the cultural scene that existed before the outbreak of war, upholding its sphere of influence throughout this period and once the conflict had ended.

This guided tour for school groups aims to generate a vision of the series of events in art that occurred from the end of the 19th century to the 1930s, where a diverse range of artistic output was juxtaposed and connected. Therefore, the pupils are encouraged to adopt an active and critical stance stemming from a consideration of what the acceptance of the concept of modernity meant for classical Avant-garde artists.

In the early decades of the 20th century a new society was being defined by habits, modes of production and the relationships between the people that defined it, changes that were reflected in the cultural context, where artistic experimentation with highly diverse results took place. In Avant-garde Views, pupils will perceive these circumstances through an analysis of one the Avant-garde’s favourite themes – the representation of the artists’ surroundings and the spaces encircling them.

Collection Stories is an educational program aimed at helping audiences reach a better understanding of the collection. Through it, viewers can take a special look, every two months, at a specific room or rooms in the Museum. The idea is to encourage visitors to draw connections, between the works within the space visited and also between these works and the rest of the collection.
On this occasion we will be visiting the two rooms dedicated to the Lettrism movement (room 403 and 403bis). This movement, founded in post-World War II Paris by Isidore Isou, proclaims the destruction of poetry and puts forward an aesthetic based on letters and signs, which goes beyond the usual limits of the visual arts and encompasses all facets of knowledge and creation.

During the Franco dictatorship, a series of political and artistic movements emerged and assumed a position of antagonism to the regime. On this occasion, two of the Museum's exhibition rooms will be visited: the first is the one dedicated to Estampa Popular, a movement that favoured art that was involved with the world, that was comprehensible and accessible, far from the elitism of the abstract avant-garde.

This program of commented visits uncovers the lines of discourse present in the exhibition on the origins and evolution of the worker-photography movement, which developed in the 1920s in connection with the international workers' movement. The purpose of the visit is to take a new look at the worker-photography movement, a key moment in the history of photography that is often marginalized, forgotten or repressed, and put it back in the centre of debates on the nature of photographic activity between the wars.

On this occasion we will be looking at three rooms in Collection 2 (4th floor) that take us back to the Spain of the late 1940s. During these years attempts to renew artistic activity were slowly being made, attempts that would later materialize in the 1950s, an essential period in the configuration and development of the Spanish cultural and artistic context.