The X-ray of an instant, in feminine
In 1975, the process of creating the newspaper Avui began, the first Catalan-language newspaper to be published since the Spanish Civil War. In order to increase the founding capital, the journalistic company Premsa Catalana, SA called on artists in the country to donate a work of their own. Many responded to the request, sharing the atmosphere of enthusiasm generated by a publication in Catalan and the infinite illusions that this fact aroused. When, finally, in 1976, Avui went on sale, a collection of almost four hundred works had been assembled.
This entire art collection, and that which was incorporated in 1994 after a second appeal from the newspaper, was acquired by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2011, when the company Premsa Catalana, SA went bankrupt, and was deposited in the Museu d’Art de Girona. In 2019, the Museum began to investigate this collection and presented a first exhibition dedicated to the different readings that the variety and richness of the collection can generate. This second exhibition has been proposed from a gender perspective.
After a first part dedicated to showing the works that artists donated to the Art Fund of the newspaper Avui in the seventies, we now present a new exhibition to show the donations that took place during the nineties, when there was another collection of works. Unlike the first, it did not consist of a formally published request, but several artists recall that the request came to them through a specific person linked to the management of the fund. In this case, the growth of the fund was carried out under the curatorship of the historian, art critic and columnist of the newspaper Pilar Parcerisas.
In the previous exhibition we came to the conclusion that, although women supported the project with the same enthusiasm and interest as the rest of the artists, their contribution was not considered equally nor was its relevance valued when explaining this part of the history of Catalan art. However, by the time the works that make up this second exhibition were donated, the political, cultural and artistic panorama had already changed a lot and, as freedoms were achieved, the politicization of citizenship was decreasing.
Over the years, gender prejudices affected the dissemination and exhibition of the collection, as happened in all areas of society. We firmly believe that, from now on, after the two exhibitions that the Museu d’Art de Girona has dedicated to it, when we deal with the Art Collection of the newspaper Avui , this will no longer happen.
The project of the Girona Art Museum complements and adds to the work that the Network of Art Museums of Catalonia is promoting in this sense for the recovery of women artists and for the compilation of their testimony, a project also entrusted to Elina Norandi.
We can see work by:
Montserrat Acosta · Pilarín Bayés · Maria Bofill · Maria Teresa Codina · Colita · Montserrat Costa · Pia Crozet · Begoña Egurbide · Rosa Espinosa Pla · Josepa Filella · Maria Girona · Kima Guitart · Casilda Huguet · Elisabet Mabres · Madola · Assumpció Mateu · Anna Mauri · Mariona Millà · Elena Paredes · Gina Portera · Anna Pujol · Maria Assumpció Raventós · Àngels Ribé · Amèlia Riera · Pilar Segura · Carme Serra Cantarell
There were just over twenty artists who donated. Some, the older and more ideologically aware, made another donation. Political and social criticism had given way to proposals more concerned with the different visual languages that emerged in postmodernity, especially among the younger ones. Thanks to this new collection, the Fund preserves works by essential artists who had not participated in the previous collection. There are some works specially made for the newspaper, where the newspaper is referred to through the presence of its pages or its title. After 1994, more works were added: two landscapes by the painter Pilar Segura, a series of nine pieces dedicated to the Balkan War, by Pia Crozet, and the works of Rosa Espinosa Pla and Gina Portera.
The Art Collection of the newspaper AVUI
In 2011, after the bankruptcy of the company Premsa Catalana SA, publisher of the newspaper, the Generalitat de Catalunya decided to acquire the 604 works that then constituted the newspaper’s Art Collection. The acquisition avoided the disintegration of a historically and artistically significant collection and also the possible export of works outside Catalonia.
The collection was formed from the donation of a work by artists to support the publication of the first newspaper in Catalan, in the 1970s. When the first issue of the newspaper Avui was published on April 23, 1976, the art collection already had a good number of works, exhibited in January 1976 at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, with the suggestive title of “A town makes its own newspaper”.
In the 1990s, the collection was expanded with 69 new donations, under the artistic advice of Pilar Parcerisas. These new additions were exhibited together with a selection of the previous ones in a large exhibition at the CCCB in September 1994.
The entire collection, from 1991, was deposited in the monastery of Vilabertran, where they were exhibited on a rotating basis until 2004. With the bankruptcy of the newspaper, the works were kept in the monastery’s warehouses, and were finally acquired by the Generalitat de Catalunya. After the acquisition, the collection was divided into two large blocks. The first was made up of the 24 original covers commissioned by the newspaper over twenty years from various Catalan artists. This entire set was deposited in the Museum of History of Catalonia, which that same year, 2011, dedicated an exhibition to it that related the originals to the newspaper’s published covers and emphasized the more historical side of the newspaper. The rest of the works, the main bulk, were deposited in the Museu d’Art de Girona, with the aim of reinforcing the collection with works of contemporary art.
