Francesc Quílez This last year, those of us who love the work of the painter Marià Fortuny have been very fortunate. Two temporary exhibitions have given us the chance to contemplate the talent of one of the finest nineteenth-century European painters. Since November 2016, the show A Time for Daydreaming. Andalusia in Fortuny’s Imagery has…
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Francesc Quílez Ramon Casas is a paradigmatic example of the modern artist in any literal sense of the term. Critics and historians have pointed him out as a great painter and the creator of some of the most emblematic and iconic works in the history of Catalan art. With his nonconformist attitude, Ramon Casas managed…
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Paris, circa 1889 A painter, who we cannot identify, poses seated before the camera lens of a photographer, whose identity we do not know either. The artist has a proud air about him, satisfied with the work he has just done and whose results he is showing in public. The roomy bright surroundings in which…
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At the end of the 19th century, the publicity poster reached a renowned level of popularity, becoming one of the main emblems of the modern society. The major commercial brands supported the development of posters, aware of the possibilities that, for the diffusion of the advertising message, they offered a very attractive visual resource. The…
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The collection of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya conserves a large number of works in which the image of the woman takes on a major prominence, and becomes an authentic advertising claim. Far from perpetuating the most conventional iconic stereotype that projected a fixed cultural cliché, which associated the woman with certain maternal behaviour…
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The society of the end of the 19th century didn’t hide its fascination for machinism. From the 1850s onwards, the universal expositions made room for the power of human ingenuity, with the desire to subdue nature. This attraction for the idea of technical-scientific progress was directly reflected in commercial art. Many of the posters from…
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