The Spanish avant-garde: Madrid, Barcelona, Paris


April 25 – June 13 2024

Late nineteenth-century Spain was in a state of flux, characterised by competing aesthetic ideas between tradition and the modern, religion and the secular, passionately-felt regional and national identities. Nowhere was this more strongly articulated than through Catalan modernisme (modernism), a cultural movement centred on BarcelonaWe will examine these various seminal influences focussing on the early artistic endeavours of four key figures – artists Pablo Picasso, Juan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and the architect Antonio Gaudí – and their collaborations with other significant cultural figures, in our search for ‘duende’, an elusive term signifying the essence and soul of Spain.