The archives of the MAC and of the MAM: a bit of history<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
When the International Exposition of 1929<\/a> finished, Barcelona City Council transferred to the Board of Museums some of the buildings that had been expressly built for the Exposition. The Catalan art collections<\/a> of the Museum of Art and Archaeology and the art collections from the 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> centuries of the Museum of Fine Arts were moved to the Palau Nacional, where part of the collection of the Provincial Museum of Antiquities was also deposited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The proximity of the Palau Nacional to strategic\nmilitary targets during the Civil War obliged the art works to be moved to\nOlot. With the War over, the works returned to Barcelona. The collections from Romanesque until the\n18th century returned to the Palau Nacional, and the\npainting and sculpture collections of the 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup>\ncenturies were installed in the Palau de la Ciutadella, where in 1945 the new Museu d\u2019Art Modern was\ninaugurated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1990, the Parlament de Catalunya approved the Museums Law, as a\nresult of which the Museu Nacional d\u2019Art\nde Catalunya<\/strong> was created. This\ngathered together under the same roof, the Palau Nacional, the collections of\nthe Museu d\u2019Art de Catalunya, the Museu d\u2019Art Modern, the Gabinet Numism\u00e0tic de\nCatalunya, the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints (created in 1989) and the General\nLibrary of Art History. On 16th<\/sup>\nDecember 2004, the Museu Nacional d\u2019Art de Catalunya was inaugurated with all\nits sections open. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Museum Archive<\/a>, created in 1995, initiated a project of documentary management, the aim of which being to recuperate and make accessible all the information available of the collections and activities of the museum. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The documentation of the MAM and of the MAC reached the Archive in a partial and dispersed way, without normalized references. The files were not the result of the procedure related to any activity; they were informative dossiers that gathered together all types of information: original documents, press cuttings, photographs, copies, etc. They even followed diverse classification criteria. When the Museum Archive took on the responsibility for this documentation, technical criteria were applied and suitable tools were created so as to ensure the conservation of this documentary collection and to facilitate the consultation by the researchers, both internal and external. <\/p>\n\n\n\n From the beginning, these two archives applied the current classification chart of the museum, which groups and encodes all activities hierarchically. The classification chart<\/a> consists of eleven entries, which correspond to the functions of the museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Delving into the collection of these archives means\ngetting to know the projects and experiences of the predecessor\ninstitutions of the Museu Nacional\nd\u2019Art de Catalunya and of its collections. \nHere is a brief overview of what can be found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The collection of the MAC gathers together\ndocumentation from 1955 to 1991, mostly textual documents in paper format. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are exhibition files. It is worth highlighting the organisation of the exhibition Romanesque<\/a> art<\/em>, which was carried out simultaneously in Barcelona and Santiago de Compostella in 1961. It made known internationally the wealth and diversity of Catalan Romanesque art. Organised by the Spanish state, and under the auspices of the Council of Europe, there were works from all over Europe and from American museums. It filled 31 rooms of the Museu d\u2019Art de Catalunya, spread over two floors, it allowed the museum\u2019s collection to become known. The mural paintings of Catalan, Italian and French Romanesque, as well as manuscripts and artworks from the rest of Europe deserve a chapter apart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the press of the time, it was the most important cultural event of the year and received more than 100,000 visitors during the two months that it was open to the public. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The file contains the economic, administrative and staff management of the exhibition. We can also find there documentation of the preparatory meetings, the setting up of the rooms, correspondence or transport of the works. The most numerous part corresponds to the information sheets of the works that were included in the exhibition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n An important part of the collection is taken up by the\ndocumentation related to cultural and educational action. This includes everything from educational\nprogrammes to didactic material, reports, statistics or visitor surveys. Educational experiences are also collected,\nsuch as \u201cPicasso at school\u201d. Barcelona\nCity Council, among the commemorative activities for the celebration of the\nbirth of Pablo Picasso held in 1981, organized an exhibition which was\npresented in different schools, accompanied by complementary material. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And all this documentation has been the basis for the\nartistic work by J. Ferreiro in Pneumothorax<\/em>:\neducational projects that are carried\nout in different museums of the city, <\/strong>such as the Museu de Geologia, the Museu\nPicasso, the Museu de la Cer\u00e0mica, the Museu de Zoologia and the Museu d\u2019Arts\nDecoratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another function of the MAC that can be seen reflected\nin the documentation, is the management of the museum heritage: loans for\nexhibitions, inclusion of artworks, acquisitions, deposits, donations,\nlegacies, offers, etc. The file of the installation of the Bertrand Collection,\nfor example, shows us the plans, the budgets, and the layout of the pieces in\nthe museum\u2019s rooms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The art archive also counts on an important number of\nfiles of intervention in heritage, works from outside the museum that the\nRestoration Service then intervened in. This is the case of the works which\nwere incorporated in the restoration workshop on the occasion of the exhibition\nBarcelona Restores<\/em>, organized by\nBarcelona City Council, and held in the Sal\u00f3 del Tinell in 1980. Works of art\nwere exhibited from the 2nd<\/sup> to the 20th<\/sup> centuries from\nthe Museus Municipals d\u2019Art, restored by the Restoration Service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The documentation of\nthe Museu d\u2019Art Modern, which covers the period from 1945 to 1990, is also\nmainly made up of textual documentation, and includes press clippings, pamphlets\nand photographs, which document the files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through this\ndocumentation, we can delve into the study and the trajectory of institutions\nwhich have now disappeared and also of relevant cultural events. An example is\nthe documentation that remains of the disappeared Museu Clar\u00e0, from the period in\nwhich it depended on the Museu d\u2019Art Modern, from 1981 to 1990: the management of the economic\nresources and the personnel, and the problems of security, lack of surveillance\nand incidents in works of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This exhibition in 1969 fostered\nthe revaluation of modernist decorative arts and promoted donations and\nacquisitions. The exhibition, which was inaugurated at the Cas\u00f3n del Buen\nRetiro in Madrid, was held in 1970 at the Museu d\u2019Art Modern, under the\nsupervision of Joan Ainaud, then general director of the art museums of\nBarcelona (1948 -1985), and Joan Barbeta, technical director of MAM since 1967.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the occasion of the\ncentenary of the death of Mari\u00e0 Fortuny, in 1974, the Museu d\u2019Art Modern hosted\na commemorative exhibition. This exhibition travelled also to Madrid and Reus.\nIn the corresponding file, there are the lists of selected works, transport and\nassembly documentation, press cuttings, lists of lenders and documentation of\nthe movement of works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also documented are the\nprocedures that culminated with the donation to Barcelona City Council of a\ncollection of sculptures, paintings, drawings and various objects by Juli\nGonz\u00e1lez, Juan Gonz\u00e1lez, Concordio Gonz\u00e1lez and Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Educational activities<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is with these collections\nthat Jordi Ferreriro has been able to recover documentation of the educational\nprojects that the museums of Barcelona promoted and to bring them to light,\nthanks to the Pneumothorax <\/em>project. These\ndocuments show us the pioneering role of Catalonia as a driving force in\npedagogical renovation and the role of museums in this transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deepening in these archives is to know the projects and the experiences of the museum and its collections. It is also to know the role Barcelona’s museums already had in the field of education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reme Barbero PNEUMOTHORAX A perforation in the lung-archive of the Museu Nacional is a proposal of reflection of the artist and educator Ferreiro. It was born from his incursion in two of the art archives of the museum: the one of the Museu d\u2019Art de Catalunya (MAC) and of the Museu d\u2019Art Modern (MAM). These…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":17390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,18,1,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-exhibitions","category-general","category-research","author-reme-barbero"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fa\u00e7ana-1929.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4tWCI-4wG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17402"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17410,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17402\/revisions\/17410"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fa\u00e7ana-1929.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fa\u00e7ana-MAM.jpg\")
The organisation of the documents<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Relevance of the collection in the cultural and artistic history of the country<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The archive of art of the MAC<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/EL-ARTE-ROM\u00c1NICO.-\u00c0LBUM-54-CR\u00d2NICA-GR\u00c0FICA-1024x726.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Exposici\u00f3-Barcelona-restaura-\u00e0lbum-71.jpg\")
<\/a>The art archive of the MAM<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/activitats-educatives-1-1-1024x764.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/li>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/activitats-educatives-2-1-772x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\nArt archives, educational projects and the Pneumothorax<\/h3>\n\n\n\n