Ricard Bru In the summer of 2018, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid organised, together with the Fundación Japón, an exhibition dedicated to supernatural Japanese beings known as yōkai. Entitled Yōkai: iconografía de lo fantástico, Yokai: Iconography of the Fantastical, the show exhibited, for the first time in Spain, pieces…
Adela Laborda, Francesc Quílez and Mercè Saura, with the collaboration of Carme Osan The museum conserves in the Cabinet of Drawings, prints and posters some 15,000 bookplates (exlibris), the Latin term used to call those small works of art printed on paper that indicate the name of the owner of a book and that tend to…
The exhibition William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement in Great Britain, which opens today, is a good opportunity to take a detailed look at a far-reaching cultural episode, captivating and dreamlike, which made its influence felt in Barcelona: Dream The portrait of William Morris’s wife inspired a dream in the critic J.E Cirlot,…
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…
Alícia Cornet The museum conserves a collection of portraits of artists taken in the most important photographic studios in Barcelona in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In this article we shall talk about four of these studios: the Napoleón, and those of Antoni Esplugas, Joan Martí Centellas and Pau Audouard. Photographic innovations Three…
If there is one thing that the museums of Catalonia are noted for it is being the result, not of ancient royal collections, as is the case with the Belgian royal museums, or, closer to home, the Prado Museum, but of private collections that have been purchased, bequeathed, donated or ceded to the Museums Board…
The recent renovation of the modern art rooms dedicates an area to Japonism, a fashion which follows the art and aesthetics of Japan. It was born in Paris and spread to the rest of the European capitals during the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. In Barcelona,…
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…
The museum’s library conserves an incunabula copy of the Breviarium cartusianum published in 1491 in Venice by Andrea Torresano. The copy was bought by the Board of Museums from Alexandre de Riquer in 1914, with municipal funds for the acquisition of the work, for the price of four hundred pesetas. The printer: Andrea Torresano (1451-1529)…
