Albert Estrada-Rius The month of January, as is well known, is named after Janus, the Roman god of gates, crossroads and transitions, who is usually shown with two faces, one looking back to the past and the other looking forward to the future. This symbolic image invites us to take stock of the year that…
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Martí Casas As the Christmas festivities approach, just about everyone at home is clear about which figures can’t be missing in a crib, just as it should be: the Holy Family, the ox and the mule, the three wise men with their pages…and of course we can’t forget the caganer! Taking a look at the…
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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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Juan Carlos Asensio How are the images and music of the Romanesque related? The manuscripts of Gregorian songs and Visigoth songs allow us to put forward an answer: the contents painted on apses and the frontals of altarpieces, the carved figures on chests and capitals, and even the ritual formulas carved in commemorative inscriptions, have…
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The artist and curator Francesc Torres has spent the past two years delving into the stores of the museum to extract some censored, mutilated artworks, hidden for political reasons or destroyed for multiple reasons, and he has presented them in apparent disorder, in the exhibition The Entropic Box.The Museum of Lost Objects. This article has been…
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Here is the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya’s programme of exhibitions for 2018, centred around two major exhibitions, international in scope and dimension. These involve collaboration with international museums and the display of themes and artists directly related to the museum’s permanent collection, building bridges and establishing new interpretations with the major international artistic movements….
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In the museum we continually receive postgraduate and masters’ degree students, doing internships. Today, we have invited David Fernández to explain his research experience, almost like a detective, which has allowed the puzzle of fragments, corresponding to four doors from different places around the city, to be reconstructed. David Fernández When Jordi Casanovas proposed this…
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Alícia Cornet Most of us associate post-mortem photography with a custom belonging to other cultures, other countries. We see it as a distant practice, which was performed beyond our frontiers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Photographers here took this kind of portrait photograph too. It is true that the photography of the deceased…
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One of the best photographers in the history of photography in Catalonia, Joan Colom, passed away this week. Without doubt, a leading figure within the collection of photography of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Accountant by profession, he was self-trained and joined the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya in 1957. Taking photos with his Leica…
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Martí Casas Have you ever wondered why we Catalans fem dissabte (clean the house on Saturday)? Or why we eat bunyols (fritters) for Lent? Or why we make slaughtering the pig, an essential source of food in our cuisine, a big public event, but not slaughtering the lamb or the calf, animals that are also…
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