DIRECTOR

Teresa-M. Sala

EDITORIAL BOARD (SCIENTIFIC EDITORS)

Mireia Freixa (Universitat de Barcelona)

Cristina Rodríguez-Samaniego (Universitat de Barcelona)

Carlos Reyero (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Tomas Macsotay (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Fátima Pombo (Universitade de Aveiro)

COVER PHOTOGRAPH

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ISBN:  978-84-475-4172-0

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Contents

Introduction. A long-term research project

Anna Calvera

The End of History: the Barcelona Design System Handed Down to the Twenty-first Century

Anna Calvera

Klein Tyres: Advertising and Modernisme in Early Twentieth-century Barcelona

Pau Medrano-Bigas

Things for the Home in Women’s Magazines: Feminal, El Hogar y la Moda and La Dona Catalana. The Construction of a Women’s Market Through New Products (1900-1936)

Míriam Soriano

In Search of Product Identity. Noucentisme and Cultural Policy

Mercè Vidal

The Barcelona International Exhibition of Furniture (1923) and the Beauty of the Modest Home

Alícia Suárez

Carles Barral i Nualart (1879-1936): Poster Artist, Printer and Editorial Designer

Pau Medrano-Bigas

Art Deco in Spain: Mass Culture and Style

Isabel Campi

Mediterraneanism in 1930s Design and its Survival in the Post-war Years

Mercè Vidal

The Graphic Avant-garde and the Radius of Influence of Barcelona: Enric Crous-Vidal (Lleida, 1908 - Noyon, 1987)

Esther Solé

The Radio and Household Electrical Appliance Industries Before the Civil War (1929-1936)

Isabel Campi

“Banned Due to its Unpleasant Colour”. Censorship and Design During the Early Years of Francoism (1936-1945)

Raquel Pelta

The Idea of Design: an Ideal of Modernity or a Model of Modernization? Thoughts on the Idea of Design as it was Formulated in Barcelona in the 1960s and 1970s

Anna Calvera

The Photographs of Xavier Miserachs: Constructing the Image of Barcelona

Maria Dolors Tapias

The Conceptualization of Design: the Contribution of Joan Perucho and the Nature of Graphic Art in the Founding period

Anna Calvera

The First Signs of Pop Art Graphics in Barcelona in the 1960s

M. Àngels Fortea

Biographical notes on the authors

Introduction. A long-term research project

History takes place in differing periods and at different tempos: the day-to-day pattern of chronological events, the cyclical undulating patterns of economic situations, aesthetic trends and cultural movements, and the slow pace, still deliberate even today, so characteristic of long-term phenomena. They vary little and persist down through the centuries, like the ways of thinking and doing things and the customs that shape everyday life and the diversity of cultural traditions, getting mixed up with today’s global cosmopolitanism. This research project, whose results have been revised and are now being presented in English in this online book – formally an epub – belongs to the latter period.

At first sight it may seem rather paradoxical to resort to the slow deliberate pace, so typical of long-term phenomena, and apply it to the world of design. By definition this is a creative and innovative activity, akin sometimes to fashion and, in people’s minds, associated with change and constant renewal. However, the slow tempo is the characteristic that best defines this research, which is similarly long-term and in-depth. The University of Barcelona’s GRACMON research group approached the history of design as a line of research some years ago, in 2003 to be precise, and produced a chronology for the oldest professional designers’ association in Spain, Foment de les Arts Decoratives (FAD). This chronology is published online as a timeline that we take care not to renew too much so that it may continue to be a familiar, easy-to-use tool. It has also been used for other chronologies, like the one that aims to provide data about the formation of the Barcelona Design System, a work still in progress and which complements the studies in this publication. This was the title of some previous research done to sound out the state of opinion in Catalonia about the reality of design as an economic sector and its possible future in the incipient twenty-first century. Developed together with a lecturer from the UPC, it was done for the Innovation and Business Development Centre (CIDEM) of the autonomous government of Catalonia’s Department of Industry (digital publication 2007: >> disseny_cat). Later, we at GRACMON wished to understand the historical roots of this system and we carried out research that was funded by the Spanish government ministry in charge of funding innovation, the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN. Ref. HUM 2006-05252/ARTE). The group, multi-disciplinary and made up of experts with links to different research centres, then set out to observe the old and modern foundations of this system and to review the most disseminated version of the history of local design. It was a good idea to restrict the scope of the research to the local level. It is a condition derived from the methodological approach that consists of modelizing a system. The map of the area studied is similar to the conceptual diagram of a cluster.

The results obtained in these previous research projects give shape to the table of contents in the collective story of the history of design in Barcelona during what is known as the “short twentieth century”, to use Hobsbawm’s famous expression. The book begins in 1914. However, we have changed the end date of the period and we have prolonged it until the economic crisis of 2008, a structural event that, historically speaking, clearly brings the twentieth century to an end and confirms all the forecasts that the specialists were making many years earlier. Our book ended, therefore, at the same time as the Design System presented had just been modelized; it was the end of the story. It was then published by the group in its Singularitats collection and written in different languages. It was entitled The Formation of the Barcelona Design System (1914-2014), a Path of Modernity (Barcelona, Ube, 2014).

In 2013 GRACMON embarked upon a second research project on the same subject, again funded as part of the National R+D Plan of the ministry that, with a new government in power, had been renamed Economy, Competitiveness and Innovation (project ref. HUM 2012-32819/ARTE). The title now took a step forward in the line of the research. It was entitled The History of Design in Barcelona: an Analysis of Productive Systems and Consumerism and Cultural Mediation Systems. This is the research that gives meaning to this epub and provides its title. In fact, the new table of contents is composed of a selection of old studies, those that define the century in Barcelona, chosen with a global readership in mind, a very large readership of specialists, lecturers, students and researchers from all over the world. The articles have been translated into English, but they keep the “continental” academic structure, which is how they and the new chapters were written.

In parallel to projects such as these, the group’s research continued and, under the umbrella of this long line, several doctoral theses have been presented on highly specialized subjects. It is worth mentioning here, albeit in passing, some of the studies that have served to clarify the work of the different generations of design professionals and have helped to identify the country’s graphic heritage. They are Tere Martínez’s research into Alexandre Cirici the designer; the participation of Noemí Clavería in a book about Antoni Morillas written jointly with Anna Calvera; the monographic studies by M. Àngels Fortea on the principal designers of the Pop Art period of Catalan graphic design; and finally, the work by Pilar Villuendas, who has inventoried, documented and catalogued the work of the design studio bearing her name (Villuendas & Gómez Disseny i Comunicació – BCDP). This is a very interesting study about the task of documenting the personal work of a designer with an author’s vocation, but also a businesswoman, the manager of a design services agency. In this way she has organized an author’s business archive, which has recently been deposited in the City of Barcelona’s Historical Archive. All these studies can be consulted in the UB’s digital repository of doctoral theses, but the majority have been published in book form over the years and added to the list of monographic studies on Barcelona designers that have been published in Spain in recent years. This epub provides them with a background and an overview in which to place the various monographs. It may perfectly well be claimed that this line of research has helped to shape the Museu de Disseny de Barcelona’s graphic design collection, especially the material for the generation of the pioneers (see the catalogue “Graphic Design: from Trade to Professional Activity (1940-1980)”, Barcelona, ICUB and MDB 2014).

Other doctoral theses that have helped to drive this research deal with more global subjects. The research by Pau Medrano into tyre manufacturing companies in the early twentieth century and the advertising guidelines used by the French Michelin company in its years in the USA have made it possible to gain far greater knowledge of the Catalan reality of sectors that have generally been largely overlooked, such as the automobile components industry. Through comparison with Michelin’s American adventure and the use of advertising mascots, Medrano has made a detailed study of the advertising graphics of Catalan Modernisme and has focused on the commercial art produced during the Art Nouveau period by highly technified industrial companies, for instance those manufacturing rubber tyres. It is a new look at the effects of the first industrial revolution in Spain, but also at the irruption of mass production and neo-capitalism in Catalonia, a second industrial revolution if we look at it from the international perspective.

Dr Isabel Campi, a very prestigious PhD student with a great career as a researcher, has for her part contributed to the book by reinforcing the stylistic and formal aspect of the period that she has so often studied, the 1920s and 1930s, when the productive foundations of mass society were laid: the consumption of electricity, radios, the first household appliances. In this epub there are two articles by her. The first is a study of the irruption of new electrical appliances, taking into account the new companies’ business culture and management. The second is a review of the style that shaped all these new, modern devices, corresponding to the local adaptation of French Art Deco. Her thesis is a broad study of the theories and the scientific and practical approaches of design throughout the twentieth century all over the world. Moreover, she offers an overview of the writings of historians on the subject of design and an interpretation of the examples of mediation in industrial design. Another recent doctoral thesis is the one by Esther Solé, about avant-garde experiments in Lleida, a city in Catalonia about 100 miles from Barcelona. In a journey there and back to maintain both cities as a reference of her discourse, her thesis helps us to understand the reciprocal influences in cultural expressions between cities not necessarily close to one another, or characterized by a centre-periphery relationship. Her work reflects the adventure of a typographic designer who worked in Catalonia before the Civil War and renewed French typography after the Second World War.

These have been the data and the precedents; also the elements for appreciating the long-term aspect that has dominated a line of historiographical research such as this. The epub being presented here is the heir to all these studies. Its main aim is to disseminate in English the majority of the studies already published by GRACMON in the book in its Singularitats collection. Many essays have been revised to adapt them to an international readership that is not au fait with local and national matters. The intention has been to preserve the collective nature of the book despite the fact that the different essays focus either on very specific particular events and cases, or on certain situations that give a global view. The volume has been enlarged with essays by the researchers that joined the group during the period of the second funded research work. They are contributions arising from the doctoral research carried out in the group, adapting the contents to the specific theme of the research.

Dear e-reader: who are you? What are you like?

“What you have on the screen is clearly an epub, or is it perhaps an iBook?” It doesn’t matter. As it is so long it most likely will be read almost completely on the screen. For a book about design in which many of the writers are also active designers, it goes without saying that the change of support material is a massive challenge and poses many questions about the way of writing and planning the essays. Is a digital book a new product? Is it a communications medium that rethinks the way of communicating and disseminating knowledge, putting ideas and values in circulation? These are the questions that have always so concerned editorial designers: to design, and also to write, one must understand the peculiarities of the environment and the medium, and know what the characteristics of the physical, material and tangible support are.

One also has to guess what the reader is like, the person on the other side of the screen reading, downloading and thinking about what they are reading, in order to better communicate and converse with them, “to share”, as they say now. In fact, the physical support of the medium without doubt affects and conditions the way of writing, drawing and interacting, and acting as an interlocutor with a recipient who has surely changed his profile. It is a change similar to that imposed by the printing press, encouraging the appearance of anonymous readers.

So what is this new target like, to say it in design terms, to whom the epub is addressed? What is an e-reader and what might they be like? These words merely propose a typical exercise of Design Thinking; they point to a way to arrive at future questions about design and to initiate new research. For GRACMON, therefore, this epub is also a small experiment on the new medium of knowledge dissemination in the present environmental context.

Of course, the history of design in the Barcelona of the “long twentieth century” (to paraphrase Hobsbawm again) is still not exhausted: the last third, the period of normalization of the practice of design all over the world, still offers a very rich panorama to continue investigating, using the most varied methodological approaches but also the most habitual and best known in the history of design as a specific discipline. It will thus be necessary to place ourselves in the immediate future.

ANNA CALVERA

Barcelona, 30 October 2016

The End of History: The Barcelona Design System Handed Down to the Twenty-first Century¹

Anna Calvera

1. Design System, a theoretical model created in Italy²

The Design System concept, a historiographical artifice, is a model that is used to visualize in a single diagram, or map, all the agents and actors that, in an economically and geographically well-defined territory, act, interact and relate to one another for professional reasons associated with design, and make an economic impact.³ A system is defined as a closed group formed of bodies, organizations and individual actors, whose activities and interactions set the standards of development achieved by a specific professional sector in a well-defined geographical area or region.

A design system, whether it is intended to represent the situation of a city, a region or a country, highlights the peculiarities and shows the chief characteristics of the design created in this specific area. It points out the aspects and characteristics that best identify it, shows what are the conditions that encourage its growth, and gives guidance about its possible medium-term development. It is also useful for seeing the real impact of design as a specific economic sector because, besides reflecting professional activity as it develops in a particular place, it understands it and places it in a broader socioeconomic context. In this it not only envisages the demand for design services but also the demand for other services and products that professional design generates in other sectors, in other kinds of companies and business areas, in order to meet the demand for design with specific projects and work, and to show the public the results obtained. It therefore reflects the existence of a supply chain formed by both the designers’ clients and the designers themselves, and by the respective suppliers. Therefore, the Design System model also shows how the economic activity of design branches out and impacts on many other sectors. Although it does not directly reflect what the chain of value could be, it does forecast the many chains that can be formed each time a specific design project gets underway. So as a conceptual model with the capacity to describe a specific reality, the notion of a Design System is capable of reflecting the essential complexity of a situation, such as that of the world of design in Barcelona, derived from its own history.

Up to now, it has been quite normal to use the system concept and its modelization as a tool to refer globally to the group of bodies involved and actions undertaken by the authorities when they implement public policies to boost innovation in their respective economies.⁴ This has often resulted in a national or regional organization of a structure of bodies supporting businesses. On a national level, probably the best-known cases are those of the Scandinavian countries; on a regional level, experiences are very varied and diverse, but perhaps the one best known is that of Milan. The city of Milan used the modelization of its Design System to study the place that design occupies in the economy of Lombardy. In fact, it was the Milanese who established the concept of Design System by wishing to see if the sector functioned as a specific industrial district, a cluster, and could be considered thus.⁵ Behind their research lay the desire to understand the reason for the concentration in Milan of businesses with very close links to design, many designers and a few bodies spreading the word about design, quite powerful publicists of new developments. These were the furniture exhibitions; the Triennale, an exhibition venue, and magazines like Domus or Casabella, to mention just the oldest ones, very important internationally. This explains the constant and effective commitment of Milanese design to the dynamics of innovation since well before design became one of the objectives of public policies approved to some extent all over the world around the turn of the twenty-first century. The modelization of their system enabled them to observe the synergies existing between the various actors involved in the sector and to see if they were explaining the dynamism of that city’s design and were the cause of it. The reasons must also be sought in Milan’s complex history of design. One of the consequences has been the conferment of a certain unity and uniqueness on everything done there. At least this was the initial hypothesis of the Milanese.

In accordance with Milan as a point of reference, a Design System is divided into three main groups of actors and four major axes-functions. The actors are:

• Direct actors: a group formed of everything that in Italy is called “project culture” and which groups together designers from all specialities, architects and engineers included, their clients and the respective chain of suppliers.

• Flux actors: these are the machineries of information, promotion and generation of a design culture insofar as they also work to interpret and consolidate what happens in the professional world – formed above all by expert and specialist publications.

• Supporting actors: they are the institutions that train designers, the bodies with the task of protecting the profession and those that promote design.

In order to boost innovation, it would be necessary to also have a further group of actors made up of the characteristic bodies in a local system of innovation and entrepreneurship – quite strong in Barcelona at the turn of the century⁶ – with which the Design System ought to establish connections and facilitate two-way information flows.

Four axes-functions can be identified as:

1) The planning-product axis, defined by the links between supply and demand in the design services hiring market.

2) The assistance axis, in both the project chain and the organization of the resources for the development of design culture; it corresponds to the chain of suppliers.

3) The axis for the visibility and communication of the results that includes the flux actors.

4) The axis devoted to the generation of knowledge and innovation that is split between the poles of specialist training and of the bodies for the promotion and financing of R&D&I.

2. The Modelization of the Barcelona Design System (BDS)

At the start of the twenty-first century, the design created in Barcelona was quite well known abroad. The city was positioned in the international scene and claimed to be a point of reference in it. It was known above all for its innovative use of design in the generation of public spaces and the construction of the urban landscape, but also because the city, rich due to its industrial past, had used design to enter the new, post-industrial economy. In the 1980s design, whether promoted in public or private space, had managed to make people feel proud of their city and feel represented by the new image disseminated thanks to quality design. After the 1992 Olympic Games, this same image was used to attract visitors, workers and talent to the city, as well as investment and businesses. It is usually known as the Barcelona paradigm.7

In order to modelize the BDS, in the cited research, first the evolution experienced by the demand for design services since 1985 was observed, the year in which an initial study about the design sector in Catalonia had been published.⁸ Then, the business structure and that of the management of the supply of design services was observed, using data supplied by research done previously by other bodies, and taking into account the variety of businesses and professionals that work for designers, supplying them with specific services – photographers, illustrators, caricaturists, printers, print makers, sign makers, layout artists, draughtsmen and women, computer programmers, artisans in various materials, prototype technicians, marketing and communications technicians, and so on. The planning-production axis was thus defined. Then, in order to locate the flux and supporting actors, they identified the professionals’ associations, design centres, publishing houses, schools of design, and the exhibition and trade venues that work to defend, promote, disseminate, represent and boost design culture in the city.⁹ Thereafter, and up to 2009, the research into the traditional roots of the system that is presented in this book checked the initial data and observed how the system was evolving, especially after the crisis declared in 2009 that profoundly affected the design industry. The start of a second research project in 2013, considered against the backdrop of the history of design in Barcelona, has made it necessary to revise these data again, even though, in the latter case, the fundamental reflection accepts the changing situation that design is experiencing as a discipline in the context of the twenty-first century economy and society.¹⁰ The conclusions that were arrived at in 2006 are still valid, but it is necessary to contextualize them historically and point out the hypothesis that many are valid only for design linked conceptually to industrial society. Thus, the characteristics of the Barcelona Design System handed down to the twenty-first century are:

• That the BDS had its own well-defined identity.

• That it was made up of a host of distinct actors and functions.

• That it included many very varied activities related to design that go beyond the simple supply/demand economic relationship of design services. The system is larger than the professional market because it has equipped itself with many bodies, entities and instruments that have played the different and complementary roles of flux and support: from promoting design among the public in general and businesses in particular to furnishing an integrated and systematized body of knowledge and provoking constant debate in the world of design thanks to which they have aided and directed a persistent process of updating design as a professional practice and as a discipline.

• That if the BDS went beyond the limits of the restricted sector, this is due to the fact that, traditionally, designers in Barcelona have always wished to create culture and, therefore, to play a culturally important role in the city.

• That the peculiarities of the sector and the management methods that were specific to it have to be sought in the multiplicity and variety of interactions that the different actors establish with one another.

• That the design sector, namely, the group of professionals that supply design services, has been noted for always having a high degree of flexibility, something that has enabled it to adapt promptly and swiftly to new and changing situations as soon as they have appeared.

• That the BDS, despite always keeping a close eye on international currents and trends, is also strongly rooted in the reality of the territory, the country and the economic region in which it is truly established and operates, and it therefore tries for solutions and seeks answers that are suited to the local situation.

To sum it up in a few words, the chief characteristics of the BDS have always been the variety and the great atomization of the many agents that play a part in it. Then there is the constant continuous predominance of private enterprise, as opposed to a public sector that has had little impact except at very specific times and for very specific issues. In actual fact, the contribution of the public sector to the progress of design has been of vital importance when it has acted as a client of designers and architects because it has decisively and courageously increased demand for the most sophisticated design services. This is a role that Barcelona City Council adopted in the years of the transition to democracy and afterwards, especially during preparations for the Olympic Games (1982-1992); indeed, this is the determining characteristic of the so-called “Barcelona paradigm”.

For the local authorities, while in the early years of democracy design was a good instrument for distancing themselves from the dynamics typical of Francoism and demonstrating the many differences between them, it later made it possible to reach the level of what was happening in the rest of the developed world and to do so fully and with originality. The economic crisis of 2008 has forced the public sector to radically downsize its input in the Design System due to the drastic cuts in public works derived from the austerity policies adopted at all political levels and to the reduction of the policy of subsidies with regard to support and flux actions.

Fig. 1 Diagram of the Barcelona Design System according to the drawing by Calvera and Monguet, 2007.

The above figure reproduces the diagram drawn in 2007 to define the poles of the system and to situate the various actors in the scheme as a whole.

Glossary and principal hypotheses adopted in the modelization of the BDS:

Design System: Market for hiring design services + infrastructure devoted to the promotion of international design culture and to the formation of a local culture and, therefore, made up of the flux and supporting actors.

Design Market: Contractual relationships between, on the one hand, businesses (factories, shops and service companies) that generate demand for design services and, on the other, the supply of these services by professional designers.

Design Industry: In Spanish, all the economic activity that has a measurable impact on a country’s GDP is considered a sector. It refers to the broad, complex, and varied economic sector that in English is called design industry.11

In the model, it is understood as a subsystem, a well-defined sector of economic activity that impacts on the GDP. It comprises the defined design services market and the network of providers of professional services, materials and technical processes that work for designers and collaborate with them at every stage of the manufacturing process.

Design culture: The group of entities, bodies and people that do activities related to professional design. Their job is the generation and dissemination of the discourse and the culture of design, or supporting and promoting design or its disciplinary culture. In this context, it may be considered a subsystem. They are sometimes designed ‘Mediation factors’ in the English written literature on the issue.

Design community: It is made up of professional designers and everyone that works in the design culture subsystem, promoting it and producing it.

3. The design industry: the identification of actors and principal hypotheses

A sector, an industry, is a group of direct actors. The Italian model establishes an axis that connects supply with demand for design services and includes the many ways of professionally fulfilling the design function. In fact, it would rather speak of a design production system in order to have a more all-encompassing view. In the modelization of the BDS, the option chosen was to also consider demand as a component of the sector, that is, the many companies that order design services from professionals, and very especially if they have design departments or units working in design management actually within the companies that use the design. The aim was to thus include the many existing interactions between the design industry and its clients, who can be found in many economic activities (NCEA), because they that define the design market in the region. Therefore, if the components of this sector are its direct actors, we may consider that it comprises:

1) the demand for design services,

2) the supply of design services,

3) the designers’ suppliers, that is, the group of productive and professional activities that supply components or services for the manufacturing, presentation and promotion of design projects; they are, therefore, the direct actors assisting the designers,

4) the flux actors that publicize the products designed and are responsible for marketing designs.

The demand for design services: available data and general characteristics

If we consider who the companies are that need design services in order to be able to place their products on the market, whatever the sector they work in, then any company can be design demand, even when its activity is far removed from industrial manufacturing or the marketing of consumer goods – as in the case of electricity companies, service companies, and even agricultural ones. There are services, such as the design and management of corporate identity programmes, that are totally transverse and are part of the company’s own culture.

Here, one has to include companies such as advertising and public relations agencies, communications and marketing consultancies, audio-visual companies, and so on, which may either demand or supply design. Public relations agencies and marketing consultancies are in a similar situation to that of designers: they are sometimes the companies’ internal departments, but there are also external agencies that supply these services to all kinds of businesses. Traditionally in Barcelona, advertising agencies – although they may be considered support companies for the design production axis – have more frequently acted as mediators between designers and clients rather than as designers’ suppliers, as has so often been the case in the field of graphic design. In any case, both situations are possible, which shows the flexibility of the system.

Up to now, the various studies that have tried to analyse the economic impact of design and the structure of the sector in Spain and Catalonia have come up against the difficulty of the lack of statistical data to make it possible to know for sure what the real volume is of design activity in the Catalan economy, or what the scope of its market presently is. Some early studies were made of the subject using foreign reference models.¹² The two studies that are still regarded as points of reference for the design market for Spain are those carried out by the FEEPD (Spanish Federation of Design Promotion Bodies) in 2001 and the DDI in 2006.¹³ Both supplied significant data about the expectations of demand for design services but focusing solely on economic activities (NCEA) in which the needs for design are more obvious because they have their own product. The 2001 study also supplied information about what businesses value the most when they seek design services, and it showed this by specialities.14

For Barcelona and its area of influence, a study about the demand for design and the sector was commissioned by the Generalitat’s Enterprise Innovation Agency.¹⁵ According to this study, just before 2005, demand for design by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) in Catalonia was as follows: 35%, the successful businesses, could be considered innovators because they launched more than ten new products per year onto the market. The average lifespan of the manufactured products ranged between four and ten years, but there was a predominance of those that lasted between seven and ten years, except for sectors such as fashion and furniture. In the latter case, given that furniture is part of the economic category of consumer durables, any change requires a prior shift in how the product is viewed.

With regard to the use of graphic design, packaging or industrial design, the perception that the businesses chosen by the study had of themselves was of being on an average, or market, level in comparison to their competitors, but they stated that they wished to position themselves at higher levels. When it came to defining the distinguishing factor that gave their products more value they rarely mentioned the design of the product or the packaging: only 27% considered it decisive as opposed to the 57% that considered technology decisive; 58% mentioned the functional quality and 48% preferred the perceived quality. Next, almost 33% considered industrial design important, whilst graphic design or packaging were seen as averagely important.

By economic sectors, and according to the importance they attached to the various design services, two trends could clearly be seen. The more tech-based businesses continued to consider technological innovation as the most important factor of differentiation and competitiveness; the others preferred to use design to add attributes to their products. In 2005 no businesses could yet be identified that interrelated technological innovation with the application of design factors to obtain overall competitive advantages, even though in Catalonia there were already examples of businesses that practised it such as those that the BDC (Barcelona Design Centre) was then promoting.¹⁶

Surprising though it may be, it was rarely claimed that design services were being ordered from external professionals, despite the fact that when this was done the trend was consolidated, especially graphic design for product advertising, or for the mixed development of new products. Half of the businesses interviewed never hired them, whereas a third always used them. The intermediate values (sporadically, sometimes or for the majority of projects) were really very low in 2005.

The services that were hired the most outside the company were graphic design (38%) and product engineering (25.1%). From all this, it was concluded that designers still had to find their place in businesses, whilst the latter had to be able to identify the jobs in which a designer can optimize his/her contribution. Therefore, it may be said that for so many businesses design was still something halfway between confused and vague with regard to its attributions and expertise at the start of the twenty-first century: for some, designers were artists; for others, they were specialist engineers.

With regard to the use of the industrial protection of design by businesses located in the outskirts of Barcelona,¹⁷ a lack of trust in the patenting system was claimed. Indeed, in 2005, 50% had never applied for any patents in the previous three years, whilst 17% had applied for more than four in the same period. Those that applied for them the most were doing high-cost R&D activities (pharmaceutical and chemical). Measures to protect against industrial espionage had spread to all companies.

As regards taking advantage of public subsidies and businesses’ participation in programmes and actions to boost the use and exploitation of design, the study highlighted the fact that little use was made of these subsidies in Catalonia. Only 20% had enjoyed subsidies, while more than 50% said that they did not know about them. Moreover, those who said that they knew about them were not very satisfied with them for various reasons. Curiously, industrial design has been one of the priority programmes in national R&D plans in Spain since they were first announced in the 1990s, and according to Ministry data it is one of the most successful programmes with regard to the volume of projects completed, especially in Catalonia, and the funding received.¹⁸ It would thus be a good idea to analyse what can be learnt from comparing such contrasting data to see what exactly is considered industrial design in these programmes and which businesses apply for them.

Types of demand for design services

Based on the available data on the demand for design in Spain, the above-mentioned studies have identified the following hiring volumes. In 2005, of 1,000 businesses with more than 20 employees in the sectors that were potential design consumers, hiring was:19

• Advertising and brand design

55.5%

• Industrial or product design

41.9%

• Interior design

14.6%

• Textile and/or fashion design

11%

• Digital and multimedia design

50.9%

• Services design

27.4%

Here the hiring of image management or advertising consultancies was not taken into account, nor that of design management consultancies, an activity that, on the other hand, already existed at the time and had been on the rise, above all among larger companies.

The above-mentioned studies about Catalonia proposed to classify the demand for design services into five main groups according to the type of design required and the marketing process that characterizes the different economic activities.²⁰ It is interesting to include it here because it gives a very truthful picture of the many conditions that operate in the domain in which design works professionally, and of the many determining factors to which it has to respond and satisfy with its work. In research such as that on which this book is inspired they offer a general framework in which to insert the research carried out and to understand the dialogue between supply and demand materialized in specific projects and products. These five groups are:

1) Large-scale consumer products. When they make products addressed to all consumers, companies compete for space on the shelves of the big shopping centres and they have to attract the consumer’s attention from the shelf. The group comprises the food, drinks, household goods, cosmetics and perfume industries. As for pharmaceutical products, although some might belong in this section, their sale in chemists gives them the status of products with a high degree of scientific knowledge when they are prescribed, and this therefore places them in another marketing context.

The decisive market variable for this group is the fact that the consumer has just a few seconds to choose the product and does so according to the physical image transmitted by the packaging and the label. Therefore, the emphasis falls on the design of the packaging and the branding. Trademarks play an equally important part in it, as do advertisements and the marketing plan that accompanies product advertising in the media and situations complementary to those of purchasing.

2) Designer manufactured goods. Defined solely on the basis of the characteristics of the point of sale, they are considered the economic categories most representative of the manufacturing industry of consumer goods addressed to the general public, many of which were part of the previous group. Industrial sectors such as furniture, lighting, textiles, toys and footwear are included. Perhaps for this reason one of its most outstanding attributes is the fashion component that they all share, but they also assume a selective categorization whereby some of these products are recognized for the design value that inspires them.

The key market variable combines product and point of sale. In design, the emphasis falls on the point of sale and the ability to create atmospheres there that encourage choice due to attraction based on the aesthetic accord with the potential consumer. As for the products, they are generally consumer durables and they may be considered large-scale consumer products, on the understanding that they differ significantly according to their working life. In some cases, the working life depends on consumption habits (furniture and lighting for the home, household goods) and they are durables; in others, the working life is limited to a cycle (toys in relation to the ages of children and adults).

3) Industrial systems. Without using the classic distinction between consumer goods, that is, those addressed to the public, or capital goods, directed towards the equipping of manufacturing companies, this category is defined by the fact that competition takes place in technological development and therefore in the product’s technical dimension. Moreover, although it is true that the improvement of functional specifications and the increase in technical complexity are important factors identifying the product, in the case of consumer durables with a high technological component (motorcycles, cars, brown line goods) fashion also plays an important role in it, along with the ability to present and manage the information, in the case of electronic goods. This is an important difference with respect to capital goods, in which the attributes of fashion play a minor part. The same thing happens with furniture and office equipment: they are industries in which improvement in the design and the incorporation of fashion parameters have been very important in recent decades.

In this case, the use of design can go beyond the mere “humanization” of technology – or the domestication of technology, as was said in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century – and of branding and product presentation, as has been the case up to now. Indeed, innovation in functional specifications is a key competitive factor in products such as mobile telephones or consumer electronics.

In the perspective of project culture, mobile telephones and brown line goods can easily be considered designer manufactured goods even though they have a more important technological component than the other goods in the group. Telephone companies have been operating for some time now with very elaborately designed points of sale, using techniques more typical of brand showrooms in the dynamics of service companies.

4) Service companies. Here the companies compete for the success of the interactions with the customer as long as the production of the service lasts. It groups together economic sectors such as those typical of the service sector, that is, health, banking, tourism, local government services and those now appearing, such as e-services and software making. The key variable is corporate identity management with regard to the specifications of the service that includes performance, types and the fitting out of suitable places. We must also bear in mind corporate visual identity, its consistent management and the use made of it for the communication and understanding of the service.

5) Infotainment. Products addressed to the transmission of information or entertainment. The group is defined because companies compete to provoke interaction with the public and to be able to develop successfully. It groups together the industrial sectors linked to the social media, the world of culture, the creative and cultural industries, and leisure and recreation facilities.

The part played by design in these cases lies fundamentally in the physical construction of the media through which the transmission of information, its visualization, will take place. It thus plays a direct part in the construction of the product because it also defines the way in which things are said. In the case of entertainment, its intervention basically consists of the construction of the place and the facility in which a leisure activity will take place (the emblematic case is a theme park, but all of this is valid for many other examples).

The special case of design ‘editors’ companies

These are a special case in demand for design services. They are predominant in the furniture sector, they also appear in the field of household goods or lighting. They produce design but they have no factory. They act as clients of the manufacturing and producing companies. The ‘editors’ companies also deal with the promotion and sale of the products they make. In fact they work like book publishers.

Design editors are companies that use the most highbrow meaning of the notion of design and they use it as a distinguishing factor of their product and, in general, in terms of language. For them, design is an attribute of objects, a way of being that is easily recognized internationally as well as locally. They use design as a strategic element and a factor of product innovation. They perfectly represent the type of company characterized by having a very clear design philosophy, well put over to the public. In fact, they do not so much sell material things but good design.

As to their relationship with designers, it is often the designers themselves who turn to an editor when they have designed a product, or set up their own designer publishing house in order to produce their creations. This is the case with major historic names of design production companies: Tramo, Snark Design, Blauet, Insòlit … to mention just a few of those that are not active anymore.

As many of them specialize in furniture, the domestic and public realm and household goods, it may be considered that most editing design houses are actually a sub-group of group two, those enterprises called “Designed manufactured goods”, and in fact this is so for all sorts of reasons. I have highlighted them here because this kind of company has been very important in the history of design in Barcelona; it could even be considered that their very existence is one of the peculiarities that have traditionally most marked the local Design System. The formula was used to organize the production of design without depending on the major industrial companies and thus making use of the network of craftsmen and quasi-artisan workshops that were still active in the second half of the twentieth century to propose experiments to them, to follow the trends that were arriving or to make use of home-grown ways of doing things. These companies have maintained the distinctive and selective value of the best design and they have always presented it that way. In Barcelona, in 2008 they grouped together as a network of “design companies” in an association, the RED, and they relaunched in 2011, incorporating more than 40 companies from all over Spain.21

4 The supply of design services: available data and general characteristics

Although knowing that the design industry is formed by the hiring of design services, to describe it, the way in which supply is structured, and, therefore, how professional practice works, are both very important. It has thus been necessary to observe the variety of business formulae adopted by designers to be able to meet demand. As everywhere, in Barcelona several formulae co-exist: free-lance designers, who work alone or in small groups and who associate temporarily to do specific projects; design studios usually considered to be small businesses (fewer than 10 employees), and design agencies, which would be larger (more than 10 employees).

Independent professionals are the part of the design industry of which we get the best picture in research into the economic impact of design. They are generally included along with creative companies in the service sector.

There are also designers hired by companies and large-scale manufacturing industries to work in their design departments or technical offices. They are the in-house designers performing the design function, or the design stage into the manufacturing process and often, too, design management. There are several types of internal design departments:

• Technical offices: they do product development. In Catalonia, the majority are staffed by industrial engineers and technical draughtsmen.

• Design departments: made up of designers working inside the company. They are sometimes part of R&D departments and have a powerful experimental side to them. Otherwise they are entire departments of multinational companies that have moved to Barcelona (the case of SEAT since it has been part of Volkswagen).22

• Art Director: a professional figure who coordinates the internal design department, or the departments created specifically for a certain project. A typical profile within creative companies and the culture industry, they are predominant in the field of graphic design and advertising. Counterparts are the corporate identity coordinator and the creative manager in the fields of product design and clothes designing. As a specific function, it is also offered by major studios and design service agencies.

• Design manager: a new professional profile whose function is to structure the dialogue between the company and the design services hired externally for specific projects. In Barcelona they are generally communications managers and company marketing or branding officers. The function has led to the emergence of consultancies specializing in design management, above all in communications, branding and image management.

Available data on internal design departments in companies in Catalonia were supplied to the study mentioned in the previous section.²³ In 2005, only 27.5% of companies stated that they had a well-defined internal design department. The number was similar in existing product engineering departments (36.2%), or those that combine product design and engineering (27.5%). There was a predominance of technical offices following the tradition of industrial companies (60.9%) and R&D&I departments were on the rise (51.5%).

These departments were very often virtually single-person units, and the well-defined function was performed by the manager. Additionally, almost 16% of companies had no one on their staff directly involved in design-related duties; in fact, when the person in charge of design was identified, it was most usual for them to be an engineer, a division head or someone in management with a very varied training background. From all this we see that not even in Catalonia was the professionalization of design inside companies very high and that, therefore, little use was made of the sector’s knowledge and competence.

Characteristics and types of the supply of design services

It is hard to know at this time how many professionals are working, or have been, in the design sector in Barcelona. For Spain as a whole the available data come from the above-mentioned studies on the economic impact of the sector, but the figures still seem approximate and it is therefore difficult to estimate how many designers are working. Nor is it easy to observe how their numbers have evolved over the years. The first data about the supply of design services in Spain appeared in 2001 in the FEEPD study and in 2009 the DDI began a new study to update them. It sent a questionnaire to a large number of designers, studios and agencies, but due to the disappearance of the DDI that year we have no knowledge of the data obtained or the level of response achieved. In 2012 another one came out, for the whole of Spain, which aimed to measure the economic impact of design by working with the available INE (National Institute of Statistics) data based on the NCEAs introduced as a result of the 2009 review.²⁴ The headings and code numbers identifying design as an economic activity had been established that year. This latter study has chosen to incorporate the actors that I have considered to be design suppliers here. Therefore, although it is useful for measuring the true impact of the design sector, it does not reveal the number of companies and professionals that supply design services. Nor does it include the differences by specialities despite mentioning the four traditional ones, and it clearly shows that design, in the digital world, has been integrated in NCEAs referring to activities that are more productive than project-based.²⁵ Needless to say, a statistic derived from NCEAs cannot register the number of designers working in internal design departments. It is extremely difficult to obtain this data.

Referring specifically to Catalonia, other studies must be considered. In 1984 and 1985 the three volumes of the Llibre blanc del disseny a Catalunya (White Paper on Design in Catalonia) were published, commissioned by the Generalitat. Twenty years later, the above-mentioned article by Aleix Carrió appeared in which he tested a methodology for obtaining suppositions because he had no reliable statistical data. Ten years after that, the BDC published online studies of the chief characteristics of the supply of design services in Catalonia.²⁶ For both these and for the White Paper, the sources for locating businesses and professionals were the BDC databases and the directories of associates of the various groups active in the city. We therefore do not have a list of the businesses and professionals supplying design services, just mere estimates of the total numbers. Moreover, the use of samples by these studies, although it is a guarantee for the credibility of the results, only allows us to make hypotheses about the number of people working in design. In 2003 and 2005, for example, the BDC worked with an initial sample of 300 registers referring to product design, and 850 to graphic design. To have reliable data, it is no longer necessary to hope that the fiscal code for design introduced in 2009 is operative, only that all designers adopt it – at least those supplying design services.

The estimated quantitative data relative to the first half of the 2000s are a combination of the data supplied by the above-mentioned studies. In 2001, a total of about 1,600 design services companies – free-lancers, studios and agencies – were located by the FEEPD in Barcelona and its area of influence. The figure included architect’s studios that also did product design and engineering consultancies in product development. In relation to Spain as a whole, in 2000 the importance of Barcelona was notable. It amounted to 38% of the total supply in almost all the specialities considered (graphic, interiors, fashion and multi-sectorial), whilst in product design it exceeded 40% (FEEPD 2001, pp. 39-40). Conversely, the 2012 study shows a reduction of the predominance of Catalonia, which is in second place with regard to both the number of businesses in the sector in absolute terms and to the volume of business (ENISA 2012, p. 15).

For Catalonia, the estimates put forward by Aleix Carrió in 2004, obtained by extrapolating the data about Great Britain, are still indicative. Carrió estimated that in 1999 “the value of Catalan GVA (gross value added) corresponding to design-related activities amounted to €2.9 billion, the equivalent to 3.1% of Catalonia’s total GVA […]. In terms of employment, 3.4% of the working population of Catalonia was employed in design-related activities, 93,345 people”. (2004, p. 67) He estimated that 5,600 people were employed in the supply of design services in 1999. The economic activities considered included, besides designers, the networks of suppliers and those of support for design production.

The economic crisis of 2008 makes it necessary to revise these data because many of the indicators, such as the dynamics of members entering and leaving professional associations, besides showing the on-going generational change, suggest that the scenario of design-associated businesses and activities may have changed massively.

An important change over the last decade has probably been the classification of the supply of services by specialities. Thus, for example, between the White Paper of 1984-1985 for Catalonia and the FEEPD’s 2001 study for Spain, the specialities remained virtually unchanged. They were the traditional ones of graphic, industrial and product design, interior design (interior décor) and textiles and fashion design. In 2001 businesses were already appearing handling several or all of the design specialities (multisectorial), which indicated a sea change in the way design was understood and practised, no longer depending on the traditional specialities. By 2009, when the BCD’s directory of professionals was open to everyone and was updated for the last time, the number of specialities considered had also increased. It had organized them according to the needs of businesses seen as expertise well defined by the market. Along with the classic ones of graphic, product, interior and textiles design, and the relevant sub-specialities, the directory included these new services:²⁷

• Multimedia-website: animation, audio-visual graphics, infographics, games and interactive products, websites.

• Product development: modelling, models and prototypes, manufacturing plans, mould plans, 3D simulation, rapid prototyping systems.

• Consultancy: design management consultancy, strategic consultancy, brand naming, art direction, brand management.

In 2009, when the current research ended and we reviewed the same available sources of information about working professionals, it did not seem at all that the total number in Barcelona had varied significantly since the study of the BDS had been published in 2006. Then, the most numerous entity, the FAD, had 1,338 members among all the groups comprising it; the ADP (Association of Professional Designers), much smaller, had 100. In 2004 the Official Association of Catalan Graphic Designers was established and 550 members had joined by 2005. We must bear in mind that quite a few professionals were and still are members of more than one association, that not all associates are professionals working in Barcelona, and that many professionals have never joined. These associations life continued managing difficulties along the crisis years (at least 2008-2017). To observe the evolution of members, the generational substitution and the new demands members propose to societies should be an issue to research further and know how the design field became from the designers perspective.

As to the BDC’s directory of professionals, in 2009 there were a total of 384 registered, including free-lancers, design studios and agencies. Many of them were diversifying their duties and appeared in several categories at once. This directory was never a census proper, quite the contrary, but it may be considered a good sample of the professionals who were working in the city, especially those who were using the existing Design System. In 2012, the BDC shut down the service, the reason why the current directory is no longer a usable sample.28

For the type of company, before the 2008 crisis, the characteristics of the supply of design services in Barcelona were like those described by the FEEPD in 2001. There was a predominance of small studios, with eight people on average and a very variable structure to adapt to changing times and economic circumstances. Flexibility and the capacity to adapt were prioritized. Although attempts had been made in Barcelona since 1985 to create large offices (the cases of AD, Quod, Morillas and Associates, Moradell and Associates, Summa), the crisis of 1993 forced many to downsize. In 2009, in accordance with the sample offered by the BDC directory, of 384 entries, 26% were free-lancers, 64% studios and 10% agencies. Some have opened offices in the rest of Spain, especially in Madrid (Summa, Morillas).²⁹ Since 2010, many studios and agencies have reduced the structure to a minimum, and have often ended up as micro enterprises or even free-lancers. Some early inquiries have been done concerning new labour profiles adopted by designers and other creative industries involved in the changing structure of labour, in the collaborative enterprises and working on the dominion opened by the web. To say the truth, another research needs t be developed concerning the productive industrial enterprises still remaining in Catalonia with significant design departments.

With regard to the generations of professionals, if, in line with what Eugeni d’Ors said, there are 15 years between each generation, at the turn of the twenty-first century there were four generations working in Barcelona. In the 2000s the pioneering generation started to retire, the one that had founded the groups of the FAD in 1960 and 1961. By the 2010s, designers from the second and third generations began retiring.

As to gender, from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, women came into the profession in all areas of design. Still quite invisible – only two national prizes for design have been awarded to women, one in her capacity as a businesswoman and the other as a designer, and in the most recent awards – the formula has predominated among women of going into partnership with male professionals, and not just for family reasons. Other women have chosen to go freelance, and then they have often gone into partnership with other women for specific projects;³⁰ they have generally sought very flexible formulas to enable them to constantly change the way the office works. There are, logically, quite a lot of examples of studios set up by women, and the companies are named after them.

The network of assistance: Support for design (suppliers and logistics)

As was said above, this third network features all the manufacturing and professional companies from other sectors that work for designers when it is necessary to develop projects or implement them. They are considered to be of two types:

Project design services, that is, for design as an activity. They include photographers, video artists, computer programmers, audio-visual technicians; printers, print makers, creative artworkers, sign makers, type foundries (now digital); layout artists, prototyping companies, carpenters, metalworkers … Sometimes, when their work corresponds to a very specific stage of the design process, these professionals can work in design studios or agencies. In this context, mention must be made of a shop almost 100 years old that has become an institution among designers: Servei Estació. It has always sold everything needed to make models and all kinds of constructive tests and trials.

Design creation and production services. They are companies that implement the designs once they have been planned – for example, Signes de Barcelona, a company that creates the signs in a corporate visual identity programme and puts information signs in place. This group includes all the artisans and workshops that collaborate with designers in making prototypes or constructing small series: carpenters, metal workshops, locksmiths, industrial painters, building workers; the makers of stands for fairs, graphic arts in general and also the large industrial paper and special paper factories, and so on. How important these networks are in the work of designers was very well reflected when graphic designers mounted a small, brief, very specialized graphic arts materials and graphic design supplies fair. Beginning in 1989, in 1995 it changed its name to Expocodig. It was organized every year until 2005 at least.

Almost all the professionals and companies in the support network work in a two-way direction; they can be both demand and suppliers.

Throughout history, printers for example have often been good customers of the designers for whom they worked, and they have commissioned them with important jobs.31

Distribution and commerce: mediation with the design products market

The commerce of design is specialized, formed by a network of shops and wholesale and retail points of sale devoted to the marketing of articles and products characterized by their careful design. These are part of the international group of products that are recognized everywhere as designer goods. These establishments are known for taking a great deal of care over how they treat the points of sale. They are also very careful with the graphic signs that make up their corporate visual identity. In the case of Barcelona, the emblematic shop was unquestionably Vinçon, doubly so for its decision to operate in just one city and become part of its brand.³² Unfortunately, Vinçon was forced to close down in June 2015.

Around it Vinçon created a sort of shopping centre called “Àrea around la Pedrera”, the Gaudí’s famous house. It included shops and boutiques in the surrounding streets with varying degrees of success over the years (Àrea, Insòlit, DBarcelona, Gaston y Daniela, Dos y Una). The latest one to have opened is the designer rug and carpet shop Nanimarquina.

This group of actors also includes the showrooms of the design publishing companies, which often function as shops too. They are predominant in the furniture and household goods sectors. The most spectacular showroom – due in large part to the restoration of an emblematic building of Catalan Modernisme which used to be the Thomas lithographic printing press, designed by Domènech i Montaner – was BD Ediciones de Diseño. It was open from 1979 to 2006, when the building was purchased and altered by Muebles la Favorita. Santa & Cole had also chose an emblematic building for its showroom in town. It was located in a street a long way from the city centre. The building is a very modern pavilion from the 1929 exhibition, rebuilt and restored. It does not function as a shop but as a space in which to exhibit new designs and to sign relevant contracts. The same spirit informs the renovated showrooms built by Roca a company, a familiar company became a transnational and multinational company,

At the turn of the twenty-first century, some designers, especially the younger ones, opened shops to market their creations as they joined the profession.³³ This is very habitual in the designer fashion and accessories subsectors; the novelty lies in the fact that industrial and product designers also began to do this, with the marketing of small household goods. When lighting and furniture designers have done this, the idea is very similar to that of the fashion sector. It is worth pointing out that these new formulas have shifted the focus to new districts. Whereas the shops and showrooms of the most established companies traditionally chose to open in the right-hand side of L’Eixample neighbourhood, the small shops of experimental designers go for Ciutat Vella, in La Ribera, the medieval area of the town, and El Raval, also belonging to the old city. Later, Internet helped this schema transferring the shops to the virtual space as websites.

The picture of design in Barcelona would not be complete without mentioning international companies’ shops and distribution centres. Terence Conran’s Habitat opened a shop in the city centre in the mid 1980s. IKEA has opened two centres, one to the north of the city in 1996 and the other to the south more recently. There is a third one in the west border. Vitra opened a shop in La Ribera neighbourhood in 2001.

In the years when the Design Spring Festival was organized (1991-2003), it gradually became the norm to organize exhibitions and parties to present the latest new designs by Spanish and foreign companies in places chosen specially for the purpose. Companies themselves organized them. After that, the FAD’s exhibitions hall, in the old town area until 2014, was the place most used for this kind of event.

5 The design cultural subsystem: flux actors and supporting actors

Understood also as a subsystem, it is made up of the group of entities, bodies and facilities considered to be the infrastructure of the design community. They serve and support the sector as a whole.

The design culture concept has several meanings established by the international community. In accordance with international literature, in the 2006 study I used the term “design culture” with a double meaning: within the system, it was used to group together and name the group of actors that make up what, internationally too, is often known as the “design infrastructure”.³⁴ It is all the machinery with which the design industry has equipped itself to project itself socially and promote itself economically, and, on the other hand, to show and highlight what these same actors were producing and achieving, generating a culture (and a favourable environment?) that recognizes design as a discipline and ensures it a place among the country’s cultural expressions. Therefore, in this study, “design culture” is the name for the subsystem formed by all the actors – people, bodies and entities – that work to promote and boost design in a certain region. Thanks to their performing, a local culture of design is formed. The term “culture of design” is thus also used to call the more or less systematized set of knowledge about design that the majority of people in a community have and share.35

On the other hand, the existence of this design culture and the fact that for many reasons it is almost shared internationally explain the selective sense that the design word and concept often has becoming both a value and a criterion of quality in products designed conscientiously and with the wish to become a design piece. Given that the formation of this culture is the result of a lengthy effort full of discussions, analyses, contributions and criticisms, it is also a consequence of the work of different supporting bodies that have made its formation possible and have actively contributed to its development. The flux actors and the supporting actors belong to this subsystem. In it we find, then, the tools for the dissemination of design and for knowledge of design (publications and specialist press); venues and events, such as fairs, exhibitions and other shows, to raise the profile of design; bodies working to promote design among the public and businesses, and those that deal with the protection of professionals (professional associations); those that evaluate and award prizes for design and, also, those that generate knowledge, systematize it and disseminate it (museums, research centres and groups). Finally, among the supporting bodies that generate the most design culture and knowledge there are the institutions that train designers, the schools and universities.

The main players in the design culture subsystem in Barcelona

Bodies working to implement policies for the promotion of design among the general public, spectators and consumers; among the demand for design services, and abroad as a factor of exportation.

In the history of design in Barcelona, several entities have fulfilled the function of promoting design, and still do. The BDC (Barcelona Design Centre) has been working exclusively on this since 1973. It is a private body that depends on the Chamber of Commerce. It was created on the initiative of a group of designers following the model of the British Design Council. Together with the foundation of the first design professionals’ associations, the founding of a design centre, or a design council, marks, according to so many historians, the beginnings of design in a country – in fact, it is the third type of origin that design can have in a particular area, as has been said elsewhere.36

The BCD was created to promote design among businesspeople, but also among the public. That is why it was set up in premises with an exhibitions hall where a selection of products was displayed, presented as models of good design. The wish was thus to guide consumption as much as to show what design could do for businesses. The BCD selection was a good instrument for promoting design and publicizing a model of good design in Barcelona. The BCD is well known outside Catalonia and is very prestigious abroad. It is a member of the ICSID and the BEDA, bodies that it has presided over at different times in its history.37

From 1987 the BCD introduced and organised the National Design Awards in Spain and obtained financial backing from the Ministry of Industry. The awards were recognition for a designer’s career and a company’s design policy. The last time the ceremony was held in Barcelona was in 2008, because the PSOE government’s Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN), in yet another display of militant centralism, decided to move them to Madrid, thus ending collaboration with the BCD, the entity that had created and promoted them.³⁸ The move has changed the way they are organized: it is no longer the bodies of the culture sub-system representing the design industry that put names forward, but everyone enters on their own personal initiative.

Before the creation of the BCD, design was promoted by the FAD and its groups organized by specialities (ADI, ADG, AA, ARQIN). The body had been founded in 1903 to promote decorative arts, which the initials originally stood for (Foment de les Arts Decoratives). In 2008 the name was updated and now FAD stands for “Foment de les Arts i el Disseny”. The FAD groups, which have grown in number over the years, organized the presence of design at fairs and exhibitions and organised the first important design congresses (ICSID 1971 Ibiza, Graphic Design and Visual Communication Menorca 1987, the Open Design annual congresses from 2012-2015). They have also organized conferences and courses and put on exhibitions. The body awards design prizes in different sectors: the FAD one for Architecture and Interior Design since 1958; the Delta one for industrial design since 1961 and the Laus one for graphic design and advertising since 1970, after an initial attempt in 1964. They are the oldest and most prestigious awards in Spain, and allowed the FAD to spread the word about Catalan design abroad through the foreign members of the panels of experts they invited, as well as appearing in local newspapers and promoting design locally. More than any other body, the FAD has marked the process of professionalization of design in Barcelona.

Being an association of designers created to protect them professionally, over the years the FAD has fulfilled these and many other functions, including, of course, that of encouraging a greater use of design; mainly developing its culture. Currently, as a result of other associations bursting in on the scene, it has positioned itself precisely as the body with the task of generating discourse and leading the discussions about design. In this way it has contributed to the formation and dissemination of the local design culture.

The promotion of exportation was a recent action in the Barcelona design scene, and it has had a great influence on its history. It became institutionalized at the turn of the century through government agencies, such as the ICEX for Spain as a whole and the COPCA for Catalonia. Prior to that, both BCD and FAD had been working for Barcelona to be present on the international design scene. However, it is the SIDI, a private body created to help design manufacturing businesses to go to the major international fairs, that has contributed most to the dissemination abroad of the design created in Barcelona and Spain.

Entities at the service of businesses to raise the profile of designer products and disseminate “the Culture of Design”

Trade fairs, specialist exhibitions

In Barcelona, the town Trade Fair (Fira de Barcelona) has been running uninterruptedly since it was settled down as a company in 1932. It organizes the International Trade Fair every year. Over the years it has added specialist exhibitions by sectors. Design has been present at several of them, although none has specialized specifically in design: this clearly shows the transverse nature of design services. One year the SIDI wished to put on a monographic design exhibition, the MID, of which a second edition was held in 1994, but it was withdrawn.

The FAD had been concerned to make room for design at fairs and did so either by helping to organize specialist exhibitions (the case of Hogarotel from 1961 to 1976),³⁹ or by mounting the most spectacular stands that it could (at Hogarotel and other sectorial fairs such as Graphispack, Sonimag, Construmat, Expohogar …). This was very important in the 1960s and 1970s. Now the various bodies representing the world of design have small symbolic stands at different fairs and exhibitions (Graphispack, Expohogar), and they often collaborate at them by organizing activities such as conferences or talks.

Associated with the journal On Diseño, SIDI is an entity already mentioned that had coordinated and taken charge of presenting the design lade companies at international fairs by setting up a distinctive and innovative stand. It was founded in 1982 to take part in the Valencia Furniture Fair in 1983 and later,the SIDI stand has frequently been at the Milan Furniture Fair and at some other furniture shows. The criteria for selecting the companies promoted were very demanding and only products that could be recognized as design and accepted as such by the international market were approved [this is a very important principle that is now suspected for all sorts of reasons and this has led to a lower profile for good design everywhere]. Being a point of reference with regard to the exportation of design, SIDI has been consulted repeatedly by the Spanish government in its policies to promote internationalization. However, in recent years it had to face up to various crises, and the design companies association, the RED (Design Companies Network), has replaced SIDI in this role, although it is achieving a very different degree of visibility. Present READ focusses on the Brand Spain, given that the associates now come from all over Spain.

Just before the crisis that began in 2008, BCD had also embarked upon a programme of boosting the image of the companies that create design abroad by collaborating with the Spanish Government Institute for Exports (ICEX) in specific cases, or rather acting on its own initiative. It set up the Barcelona Design Export programme and envisaged actions to boost the presence of design made in Barcelona at foreign fairs and exhibitions (such as Hong Kong and Shanghai). It is worth saying that BCD actions raised the international profile of design made in Barcelona from 1985 onwards. This year it coordinated the presence of design at the Europalia exhibition held in Brussels.

Specialist museums and exhibition halls

Specialist museums play an important part in the dissemination of design and its culture because they display companies’ most representative and interesting products to the general public. Companies that produce consumer goods use museums and temporary exhibitions to publicize their creations and consolidate their brands among people. Museums, like exhibitions halls, contribute as much as fairs to raising the profile of the design industry. For specialist visitors, the museum is an important source of information and, from the traditional perspective at least, a place for research and for the training of professionals.

In Catalonia, besides the Barcelona Design Museum (Museu del Disseny de Barcelona), there are several museums that have specialized in subjects associated with design. Some derive from provincial museums that exhibit old industrial techniques and systems, such as the Paper Mill Museum in Capellades, that of the artisanal casting procedures in Ripoll or Toys in Figueres. Others, like the Museum of Science and Technology in Terrassa, despite having been created thanks to industrial archaeology, have an exhibitions policy that shows the relationship between technological development and design. Their collections are an excellent source of information about the evolution of many objects design. They contain pieces from all over the developed world. Notable among them are the collections of motorcycles, automobiles, office machinery, machine tools, calculating and information processing machines, and household electrical appliances, especially brown goods (radio and television).

With regard to textiles, we must mention the Study Centre and Textiles Museum in Terrassa and the Museum of Printed Textiles in Premià de Mar. Both have important collections and documents concerning fabrics made in Catalonia.

In Barcelona, since 2012 the design museum of reference has been the one that opened under this name. The new centre is the heir to the historic Barcelona Museum of Decorative Arts (MADB), which depends on Barcelona City Council’s Institute of Culture. The new museum presents several different collections together: decorative arts, ceramics, the former cabinet of graphic arts now enriched with a graphic design collection, the textiles and clothes collections, and the industrial design collection started at the Primavera del Disseny in 1993.

This museum has a long history, covering almost the whole of the twentieth century, and it could be said that it dates back even further.⁴⁰ People began stressing the need for it in the nineteenth century, in the midst of the debate about the regeneration of art manufactures, their eyes fixed on the horizon of the South Kensington Museum in London. It eventually opened as the Museum of Decorative Arts in 1932. Since then it has constantly enlarged all its collections. In 2008, a very ambitious project prepared to occupy a building totally new and design for the museum, proposed turning it into a multipurpose institution, the Design Hub Barcelona. This was intended to be a centre for design and research, a meeting place for several initiatives. In 2012 this plan was changed and Design Hub became the name of the building, which would house the FAD and the BCD offices together with the Design Museum. Collections were moved there in 2013.

Barcelona also has virtual graphic design museums. MVD Creativity, a firm and journal editor, is the work of the collector Albert Isern and was set up in 2001., The University of Barcelona has also included in his virtual museum the Josep Artigas poster collection, a donation to the library by this pioneer of graphic design.41

The most active exhibitions halls have been the one placed at the Architects’ Association, especially when design arrived in Barcelona, and that of FAD placed in the different sites it occupied along the century.

The defunct Sala Vinçon was the space with the most systematic exhibitions policy over the longest period of time. In 1989 a second gallery specialized in design and architecture, H20, opened. Experimental design has habitually been presented in a network of small galleries, designers’ showrooms and shops mostly all placed at the old city area. The Catalan Craft Centre took shape as another hall where the world of design can try to exhibit, although the purpose of the centre is clearly craft production.

Events organized ad hoc

Barcelona Spring Design Festivals (1991-2003). Held every two years, these festivaks called upon the entire culture subsystem, part of the sector and other bodies to organize series of conferences, exhibitions and various design-based events for three months. The authorities took part in it by providing funds to pay an organizer for each edition, the publication of a catalogue and the organization secretariat. The City Council awarded the Barcelona Design Prize to an outstanding personality for their professional career and a monographic exhibition of their work was organized. Other important institutions in the city, especially the museums network, took usually part in the event by organizing their own exhibitions. The Design Spring Festivals offered a very good opportunity for the fourth generation of designers to introduce themselves to business people and the public.

Perhaps the most outstanding thing about these Festivals were the many different events organized by the bodies of the culture subsystem, such as private or public design schools, either to publicize their latest activities, or to organize meeting points and work meetings with national and international experts. The bodies themselves funded the events, the shows and the activities they organized. As the event became consolidated as an important date in the international diary, more and more companies chose it to present their latest designs there.

The last Spring Festival coincided with the centenary of the FAD, an anniversary that managed to capitalize on the event and its tradition. This is something to research upon. It has often been said that they were very intense but also very erratic with regard to the level of what was organized in them. They rarely achieved a degree of consistency to make it possible to identify each one by a specific theme. Private initiative has also consequences. Without doubt, this is a legitimate criticism, but it is also true that Barcelona Design Spring Festivals served as a showcase of what was really being done in the city and they made it possible to take the pulse of what was going on in the local design world. Since they are no longer held, the level of design-based activity has fallen and present Barcelona Design Week doesn’t concentrate so many different initiatives. As both a sector and a system, design no longer makes waves and an opportunity has been lost to have a platform on which to observe where trends are heading. Since 2003, as was the case before 1991, the activities that are organized around design have lost the umbrella that united them, and they therefore seem sporadic and one-off. In 2012, however, the FAD and the BCD picked up the baton and produced their own events, near to one another in the calendar. These included the awarding of the different FAD prizes and BCD’s Barcelona Design Week. Both occupy the same position in the system as they always did, FAD making waves and giving a voice to design as a factor of culture, BCD addressing itself to companies, but now they complement one another. It may be an option for the future.

Bodies devoted to the protection and representation of professionals

Professional associations including those with territorial validity and groups of associations. In Catalonia there are three associations with the job of promoting and protecting design practice professionalism. They are however different in nature and in what they do: they are the different groups of the FAD (ADI-FAD, ADG-FAD, ARQ-INFAD), the ADP (Association of Professional designers) and CODIG, the official Graphic Designers Trade Corporation of Catalonia. Created as an association, it was established as an official corporation in 2003. The first ones and the last one are clearly sectorial, while the second brings together professionals in all design specialities. The first ones came into being with a desire for representation throughout Spain; the territorial reach of the last one is limited to the regional area. ARQ-INFAD and ADI-FAD establish a bridge between the world of design and architecture. The association of reference from the perspective of the businesses that produce, publish and sell design is at present READ .

Associations and entities are members of international bodies that represent and defend professional designers: ADG-FAD and CODIG are members of ICOGRADA; ADI-FAD of ICSID; ADP and BCD of BEDA. In 2000 the boards of ICSID, ICOGRADA and IFI decided to set up an NGO. This was Design for the World (DfW), based in Barcelona. Working on a volunteer basis, it supplied design services to other NGOs such as Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. This task has been one of the constant obsessions of André Ricard, one of its first two presidents. In fact, Ricard wanted to set up a project to tackle the most pressing social issues when he was a member of the ICSID board in 1960s. Management and funding problems have forced DfW to change its formula and it became an association funded by membership fees. In the process, it has lost its international scope and in 2009, after approving a new board, it may be said that it disappeared from the scene.

Bodies devoted to research, promotion and design research management

• Design for All Foundation. Design for All, or Universal Design, is an approach to design in the formulation of which the Barcelona foundation played a very important role since it was created in the mid 1990s. It offers research and advice to designers and businesspeople about people’s accessibility – all kinds of people – to things that are designed and made. In the city, the foundation has provided very important input when streets and buildings have been adapted to eliminate architectural barriers. It is currently considering how to apply this approach to other design and technology specialities, ICTs included. It consists of taking into account the implications deriving from demographic changes in matters such as the ageing population, the social integration of people with disabilities or different cultural realities from a perspective that always aims to be integrationist and respectful of diversity.

• History of Design Foundation. Created in Barcelona in 2008, it is a private foundation run by an international board of trustees. Its three main objectives are research, dissemination and promotion of the history of design on a national and international level. It helps first-time researchers in their work and facilitates the sharing of the processes and results of the research.42

• Specialist press and publishing houses. Catalonia has always been an important publishing powerhouse and design was an important area of publishing. However, Barcelona and its design system are not well known for the production of design discourse. Although this is changing, translations still prevail over the publication of books by local authors.

The most important publishers specializing in design have always been Gustavo Gili – with several collections devoted strictly to design – and Guia Creativity, a journal that became the yearbook of Catalan design. Other publishers that have taken part at some time in the design book sector have been Blume, Paidós and, above all, Índex Book. The latter was created by a distributor of foreign books on design in Catalonia that was the most important supplier of information about what was happening in the rest of the world. In the digital publishing sector, ACTAR has been during his years of existence the publisher of reference, although architecture predominates greatly over design.

As to the specialist press by sectors, in Barcelona several magazines addressed to the general public are produced, or have been produced, with huge circulation figures, following the model of the women’s decoration magazine. They were published by major groups (Hymsa, RBA Revistas, MC Ediciones) whose numbers have been reduced through takeovers. Many have important historical forerunners in the sector (El Hogar y la moda … the basis of Hymsa) that go back to formulas experimented with before the Civil War.

There are several specialist magazines in the sector: On Diseño was founded in 1978 and still is being published; it is aimed at design trendsetters – that is, architects and builders; Creativity News: begun as a magazine in 1989, became a yearbook in 2000; Proyecto Contract, of the MC group, and Temes de Disseny, a scientific journal with variable periodicity, which was the publication of reference in design research during its early period (1986-2006). Both are still active. Eben is the only magazine published in Catalan in the field of interior design. None of them has made any notable international impact. Magazines that were traditionally very important, such as DeDiseño (published by Croquis, Barcelona, 1984-1987) and ARDI (Grupo Z, Barcelona, 1988-1993), were successful internationally as well.

The EINA School published a small monthly magazine, Plec, with reviews and articles about design. It kept people very well informed about what was happening on the scene in Barcelona. Later it came out in digital format only with news about the school’s activities. An unresolved matter is still journals produced by associations, although there have been countless attempts since G-FAD’s launched a legendary lonely issue of Azimut in 1966. The latest examples are the three issues of Criteri Gràfic, a quarterly journal of graphic design that is the Association’s organ.

Finally, Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme, published by the Barcelona Architects’ Trade Corporation since 1944, is a publication of reference in the founding era of industrial design, during the 1950s and 1960s. Design always appeared in it in relation to architecture and the development of the Modern Movement in the country. In the 1970s there was also CAU, the journal of the Quantity Surveyors’ Association, with a more pop-art design.

Bodies working for the generation and maintenance of design culture

Rather than needing new entities, performing this function has been the consequence of the many activities carried out to promote design. In fact one of the habitual criticisms of the Barcelona design community has been that of thinking about promotional activities addressed more to designers themselves than to real stakeholders or to designers’ direct interlocutors, businesspeople. However, they have been useful for developing a design culture and giving it an identity. Through them a design community has taken shape and a home-grown culture has developed

Design awards have been very important for promoting the quality and the standards proposed as a model at each moment in history. This function has been fulfilled above all by the groups of FAD, which organized the oldest design awards, the Deltas and the Laus, and the activities associated with these awards, such as the Fórum Laus, addressed to students and professionals, or other series of conferences. The FAD has constantly been concerned with helping design students and providing openings for them by presenting specific awards (the ADI Medals), offering them a place to meet, develop their activities and publicize their work. The FAD members’ assemblies, or annual parties, have always been a good place to meet for the entire design community.

Schools of design have been important centres in the organization of activities to develop design culture. They have put on series of open conferences and work seminars. The participation of all of them in the different editions of the Design Spring Festivals was very important.

The organization of specialist congresses has not been particularly constant in Barcelona, but there have been some important experiences. Apart from the legendary ICSID congress in Ibiza (1971), two AGI congresses were held in Barcelona, in 1971 and 1997 respectively, as well as several BEDA, ICSID and ICOGRADA board meetings. Two by the ATyPI were also held. In 1999 the first Meeting of Design History and Design Studies was promoted and organized at the University of Barcelona. Over the years, this meeting turned into the biannual congresses of the ICDHS, the International Committee of Design History and Design Studies. In 2003, the University of Barcelona organized the fifth edition of the European Academy of Design congress, which attracted scholars and researchers from all over the world. The Innova Disseny symposium was also held in the autumn of the same year, organized by the BCD. The following year the periodic International Congress of the Design Management Institute of Boston was held in Barcelona, organized by the BCD. Advertising or sectorial congresses, such as the press designers’, are not listed here, although they have been held in the city several times.

The training subsystem

Made up of a very diverse network of centres that have adopted all sorts of formulae over the years, for some time now Barcelona and its metropolitan area can be considered a design training cluster, given the size of the offer that exists.

In 2010 every higher education centre adapted to the EFHE (European Forum for Higher Education), whose objective is to harmonize systems and levels of education among the different countries of the EU, and to thus encourage the free circulation of professionals throughout EU territory. In Spain it has served to clarify the design education scene with the establishment of well-defined missions and competences for each of the options in accordance with the structure of the labour market and the professional expectations of the sector, something that has been very useful. Therefore, by 2010 the education scene had changed quite a lot.

In 2004, when the process began, there were at least five different types of centre. The University of Barcelona had been offering design studies at PhD level since 1995, and at degree level as a speciality, or as a curricular pathway according to the studies plan then in use, as part of the general Fine Art degree (since 1981). In the Barcelona area, at least seven centres offered their own design qualifications in a regime of private education. They were the higher level design qualifications, equivalent to a degree but without actually being one because they were not recognized officially, only by universities (paradoxes derived from the Spanish university education laws in which the prestige of the school and the university and, therefore, of the qualification, had to make up for the fact that it was not an official qualification). The centres were Elisava (UPF), Eina (UAB), Massana (UAB), ESDI-URLI, Bau (Univ. of Vic), Lai (1979-2009, UIC) and a BA title at the UPC.⁴³ Since 2009, with the adaptation of Design Higheducation to the EFHE in 2010, higher-level design studies as well as the former speciality of the degree, have become university degrees in design (BA with hons).

In Barcelona, only Elisava offered a degree in Industrial Design Engineering and Product Development, approved in Spain in 1994 and introduced in 1997. This degree was the equivalent of a first level in university studies within the old system (a technical diploma).

The above are university-standard higher education courses. We must bear in mind the higher-level studies but with a special regime that places higher-level design studies in the context and the pathway of vocational training. These centres also teach the baccalaureate in arts (the equivalent to A-Levels). This group includes the oldest school of them all, Llotja, founded in 1775 as the crafts and decorative arts school. It was born as a free school of drawing addressed to prepare workers for the calico printing and other craft industries. By the turn of the twenty-first century it had ceased to be the Official School of Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts and had become a Higher School of Art and Design. It now also offers higher-level design studies that are the equivalent to university degrees in the context of the EFHE. On the other hand, the Massana, the former municipal School of Sumptuary Arts, was founded in 1929 as an Arts & Crafts School. With a long history teaching design, was in a similar situation than Llotja, but an agreement with the UAB allowed Massana to initiate higher-level design qualifications. Both schools still offer medium and higher-level degree courses in design, baccalaureate on arts and higher-level studies in design, besides arts and crafts vocational studies. Later, Llotja undergone a further transformation in 2011 whose purpose was to review all the vocational studies related to arts.

The Catalan network, then, is structured as follows:

To complete the picture of the educational possibilities we must mention the existence of a Chair of Design Management at ESADE, a business private high school, that is part of the institution’s curriculum with a high presence of PhD studies. In the early 2000s, the offer of post-graduate and master’s programmes of professional specialization grew exponentially, organized by the different higher education schools mentioned.

Infrastructure for design research

With regard to research infrastructure, although there are no bodies fully devoted to it apart from university activity, organized research groups and some specialist facilities such as the libraries of the higher education centres have been appearing. Elisava’s Enric Bricall Library opened in 1988 and it was a benchmark for design community in the 1990s. Attempts have been made in the UB Art Library to organize a design documentation centre. For its part, the Design Museum is building up and a Library and an archive on design (since 2010) which is highly used at present, whilst the Library of Catalonia and the City’s Historical Archive both entities have important graphic design collections.

Among research groups, at the UB the GRACMON has been established grouping Art History and Design History people. The group is the author of this e-book (www.ub.edu/gracmon). It is devoted to the history of contemporary art and design and its main expertise are Art Nouveau (Catalan Modernisme) and other isms of 20th Century. It has also formed a documentation centre for these movements and also the local decorative arts history. It is gradually being expanded with materials about design. In recent years, other high schools are trying to organise research groups and develop research projects as well.

In 2008 the private Foundation of Design History was born in Barcelona (FHD). Its main aims are to support and encourage research in this field and help to preserve local archives and documentation. Since its birth, FHD has offered grants to research or to attend conferences abroad, organised seminars and courses and, allied with the British DHS, organise its annual conference of 2011. In 2015 launched a first conference on Spanish Design History serving as meeting point for researchers.

To conclude, an idea to raise the profile of the BDS

By way of conclusion, the description of the various bodies involved in the BDS can be summarized through a simple diagram in which the specific actors are placed in accordance with the elements of the system.44

For the time being, their place depends on the function they fulfil, but also on the trend observed with regard to their future position in the system as a whole. The initials correspond to the bodies mentioned throughout the chapter.

During the years of writing and drafting the final conclusions of this study, in 2008 the Barcelona Design Centre together with the Chamber of Commerce, the Generalitat de Catalunya and Barcelona City Council, have managed to establish the Barcelona design cluster. It has been hosted by Barcelona22@, an emblematic and municipal body to manage the place that the city ought to occupy in the global economy of the twenty-first century.⁴⁵ The creation of the design cluster meant things such as the confirmation of the existence of a very dynamic and economically significant sector in the life of Barcelona, and also the definite acknowledgement of the very existence of the BDS as an asset to the city, its economy and its cultural life.

Later, in this same year of 2008, the capitalism structural crisis arrived, and so many entities described in this text changed nature, had totally disappear or turned into new bodies and formula; some others continued its life. While finishing this review, crisis seems to have been a little bit overcome; however the world we are living now has completely changed. To understand the new world and the changes brought during the crisis periods, needs further research. A new period thus opens for design made in Barcelona, a new founding moment that could take advantage of and continue all that has been done up to now. It is therefore a very good moment to look back and see in perspective the historic moments that have decisively influenced and conditioned the situation in which we, the Barcelona design community, now find ourselves.

Klein Tyres: Advertising and Modernisme in Early Twentieth-century Barcelona

Pau Medrano-Bigas

In the late nineteenth century the people walking around Barcelona were accustomed to coexisting with, and dodging, the traffic on its streets and avenues. The familiar horse-drawn passenger-carrying vehicles and goods wagons had recently been joined by the electric tramcar. The everyday scene was further enlivened by bicycles, gleaming and chaotic, which wove in and out trying to find the stretch of road least damaging for the fragility of their structure ... and the safety of their rider.

This already complicated ecosystem was soon to be altered by the appearance of the first automobiles driving on the streets of the city. Although the initial experience in 1890, the car with a German Daimler engine and a hand-built chassis, owned by the industrialist Francesc Bonet i Dalmau, was short-lived and anecdotal, by 1901 there were more than 20 cars driving on the roads of Barcelona.

The Catalan automobile industry

The turn of the century also witnessed the shift in focus from the bicycle to the automobile. The painter and poster artist Ramon Casas understood this. In 1901 he took down the splendid oil painting that had hung on the wall in the lounge bar of Els Quatre Gats since it had opened in 1897. Owned by Pere Romeu, it was the place to meet par excellence for Modernista intellectuals in Barcelona. This painting, Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu on a Tandem, which depicts the love of cycling that both friends shared, was replaced by a new work entitled Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu in an Automobile, more in keeping with the progressive modern spirit of the times. It is significant that when both images were reproduced, facing one another on successive pages in the July 1901 issue of the magazine Pèl i Ploma, edited by Casas and Miquel Utrillo, they were explicitly captioned “End of the Nineteenth Century” and “Start of the Twentieth Century”.

The posters that papered the walls in the streets and which decorated the fronts and interiors of establishments and shops, as well as the small graphic advertisements in the form of picture cards, postcards, ink blotters and fans, began to popularize, as they had done previously with the bicycle, the image of this new machine that was a product of modernity. The automobile became an aspirational object for people who could not afford one – the great majority – and an object of ostentation that could only be afforded by the wealthy bourgeoisie and a decadent aristocracy, idle and accustomed to exhibiting their opulence.

This is what happened in the more advanced cities in other countries, for example neighbouring France, whence came much of the Art Nouveau artistic influence of the time along with the majority of the makes of cars imported to Catalonia. In the first decade of the century French makes, such as Clément, Darracq, Charron, Peugeot, Berliet, Renault, De Dion Bouton, Panhard-Levassor and Delahaye, among others, monopolized local motorists’ interest.

Barcelona responded to this invasion with the drive of businessmen and industrialists prepared to invest in a booming business. The city became the indisputable heart of the Spanish automobile industry. Besides being the cradle of dozens of small businesses, as dedicated as they were inconsistent, short-lived and scarcely productive, it witnessed the creation – especially fruitful after 1912 – of successful companies. Important examples were Elizalde, F. S. Abadal, Talleres Hereter, F. Batlló, David, De la Cuadra and the famous Hispano-Suiza, founded in 1904. Production began that year in its garages in Carrer Floridablanca, moving in 1911 to the La Sagrera neighbourhood of Barcelona.

The need for these new companies to publicize themselves contributed to the development of every aspect of advertising and to the rise of the sports press, supplying different magazines and newspapers with content and advertising revenue, and it also led to the proliferation of posters, catalogues, postcards and all kinds of short-lived graphic material. Publishing and printing houses, photographers, designers, graphic artists and illustrators saw their horizons broadening.

The local rubber market

These two means of transport, the bicycle and the automobile, evidently differed in one basic thing: the mechanism that propelled them. However, they both shared the pressing need to line their wheels with some kind of material to cushion the shuddering produced by contact with uneven ground. This material, rubber, was an essential component of complex industrial machinery. It was also part of people’s everyday lives, used in items of clothing, such as elastic braces and shoe soles, or in waterproof boots, bootees and raincoats. People walking around the streets of Barcelona could stop, in 1900, in front of one of the posters designed and illustrated by Barcelona-born Antoni Utrillo Viadera (1864-1944) advertising Mackintosh raincoats, manufactured in Manchester by Chas. Mackintosh & Co., and imported under the El Gallo label.

Turn-of-the-century Barcelona looked on in admiration at the progress being made in neighbouring countries at a much faster rate than in impoverished Spain. The desire for progress of a number of middle-class entrepreneurs – Georges Klein, the subject of this study, is a prime example – and the advantages for the movement of goods and ideas offered by its geographical location, between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, made it possible to hopefully set in motion a delayed second industrial revolution that would meet the needs of a constantly expanding city.

France, the origin of much of the artistic influence of the time and of the majority of automobiles imported to Catalonia, was established as the model to follow. During the early years of the twentieth century the cars being driven on the roads of Catalonia began to popularize numerous foreign makes of tyre.¹

In Barcelona, the sale of automobiles through garages and import agents was associated with the marketing of articles, accessories and spare parts, which included solid rubber tyres and tyres with hard outer casings and pneumatic inner tubes. Each vehicle was equipped with four rubber tyres or bandajes – as they were called, adding yet another Gallicism to the many already in use in the motorist’s vocabulary – fitted to their respective wheels. They had a limited useful life due to the difficulty of driving on roads and tracks with unsuitable surfaces. An advertisement in 1901 by the Barcelona company Baldomero Ferraz y Cía., which made its own Ferraz bicycle and motorcycle tyres and imported Bergougnan car tyres, recommended the latter “for velocipedes, motorcycles, automobiles and horse-drawn carriages. Chauffeurs, racers and tourists use them”.

In 1902 we find the second reference to a Barcelona-based tyre manufacturer. It was Francisco Quintana. His workshops in Carrer Aragó manufactured tyres and pieces of bodywork for the roofs of carriages and automobiles. This was an exception to the trend in most companies, busy obtaining licenses to represent, distribute and sell various reliable and renowned imported makes. This was the case with the important Autogarage Central, in Carrer Consell de Cent, the representative of Michelin, Dunlop and Continental, and of other competitors like the Autogarage Términus, in Carrer València, or the Taller García y Gómez, among others. A few years later the only tyre maker in all Spain would materialize, whose reign was to last almost two decades: the Barcelona company G. Klein.

Klein Tyres

Georges Klein Daeffler was born in 1856 in the town of Hoerdt in Alsace. In 1885, after successive trips to Spain for business purposes, he es components for industrial machinery, purchased some land in the Poblenou neigh tablished himself in Barcelona. Four years later he founded a company making rubber bourhood of the district of Sant Martí de Provençals – at 489-491 in the old Carretera de Mataró, in 1907 renamed and renumbered Carrer de Pere IV, 323 – and built some workshops, starting production with 30 employees. G. Klein’s administrative offices were in the city centre, at Carrer Princesa, 61.

Fig. 1. Lithographic advertising cartoon showing the G. Klein factory in Barcelona, c. 1904. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The blocks of pará rubber, the raw material derived from the initial processing of latex from the rubber tree, were unloaded in the port of Barcelona after their transatlantic voyage from the shores of Brazil, bound for the Klein factory. To obtain different qualities of rubber, such as ebonite, similar milky materials were also used, obtained from other species of tree like the gutta-percha and the balata, generally used for pieces and articles that needed greater tenacity and less elasticity in the waterproofing of fabrics and in insulation jackets for electrical cables.

The industrial premises adapted and grew as new challenges presented themselves. In 1900 a tannery was incorporated for the production of special tanned leather for making belts, both leather and of woven fabrics, cotton or hemp, and camel or ox animal hair warps. Another range of products was those derived from the use of asbestos fibres impregnated and covered with bituminous substances and rubber, for example in pieces for deceleration mechanisms such as carriage brake shoes, due to their great resistance to wear and tear and friction.

Different leather and rubber articles were being added to the Klein catalogue such as belts, waterproof tarpaulins, gaskets for boilers, rubber heels for footwear, hosepipes and tubes, cables with insulation jackets for electric lighting, telephones and telegraphs, as well as building materials. In 1905, production began of tyres and inner tubes for automobiles, and two years later for motorcycles and bicycles, as well as a small line in solid tyres for vehicles. According to an article published in 1907, production rose to nearly 10,000 tyres a year.

On 10 September 1911, the magazine Industria e Invenciones published the list of applications to register trademarks. Next to the word “Bayer”, written horizontally and vertically, forming a cross, and inscribed inside a circumference (applied for by Federico Bayer y Cía., the Spanish subsidiary that since 1889 had represented the now omnipresent pharmaceutical multinational), the name “Pneu-Klein” appeared, presented in an anodyne logo with the reference number 19.609, to personalize the bicycle, motorcycle and automobile tyres made in Barcelona.

A period of transition began in 1914 for the company, whose factory by now employed almost 400 workers, men and women. On 12 June, an item in La Vanguardia newspaper announced the death, the previous day, of don Jorge Klein, who was buried in Montjuïc cemetery. The burial was attended by his widow, his three sons and two daughters, workers in the factory and the commercial offices, the municipal authorities and a delegation of different bodies with links to business, industry and the French community in Barcelona, of which Klein was an active member and benefactor.

The business remained under the family’s control, managed by Georges’ son Ernest Marcel Klein Ducrocq. According to an article of October 1915, the capital invested was somewhere in the region of three million pesetas, including the stock of raw materials, the industrial machinery and the manufacturing moulds. This was not counting the immovable property. Productive capacity was 100 car tyres a day and annual sales amounted to about six million pesetas.

On 7 December 1916 the company’s trading name was changed to Klein y Compañía. At that time the company possessed a commercial network with its own warehouse and distribution centres in Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, Seville, Valencia and Zaragoza. In continual expansion, it decided to look for a new factory location to enable it to maintain a geographically central position from where to supply the entire peninsular market. In 1920 it relocated part of the production, moving it to the new premises built and fully equipped on the La Dehesa estate in Segovia, 75,000 square metres of land, 10,000 of which were for the factory buildings. The entire complex stood next to the railway station and it had two waterfalls, also belonging to it, which provided all the electricity it needed.

In 1917 a new competitor added its name to the list of Klein’s rivals in the tyre market. Moreover, it disputed its position as the only Spanish representative, a status it alone had held for years: Neumáticos Nacional, produced at its factory in Manresa. This company’s output was very small. Then in 1924 it went into partnership with the Italian firm Pirelli, which had had its own factory in Vilanova i la Geltrú (province of Barcelona) since 1902, devoted exclusively to the production of pieces of rubber and cabling and solid bandajes for lorries.

In 1929, the year when Klein moved its head offices to Segovia, over 170 workers were already working in the factory there; their numbers grew as it took on the production of articles previously made in Barcelona. The original factory in Poblenou was thus reduced to manufacturing minor products, until it closed down in 1934.²

Promotion on wheels

Klein was present at the major events in the industrial sector and the car-manufacturing world, at fairs and shows, and in the sponsorship of motor racing and cycling events. All these endeavours were reflected in the press, in both illustrated reports and articles and in advertisements proclaiming the brand’s merits and achievements.

Klein was one of the 100 exhibitors – together with other foreign makers of bandajes – taking part in the International Exhibition of Motoring, Cycling and Sports, held in May 1907 in the Palace of Fine Arts in the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid. It repeated the experience in September, at the International Exhibition of Hygiene, Arts, Crafts and Manufacturing, also in Madrid. It was furthermore present at the Hispano-French Exhibition held from May to December 1908 in Zaragoza, which had 5,000 exhibitors and over half a million visitors.

In its attempt to expand the business abroad, Klein sought international recognition by taking part with its own stand at the tenth edition of the prestigious Salon de l’Automobile in Paris, held in the Grand Palais from 12 November to 1 December 1907. Across the Atlantic, it went in search of the South American market by representing Spanish industry at the International Exhibition of Railways and Overland Transport, held from May to November 1910 in Buenos Aires, a city in which it had an active commercial office. The previous year it had begun competing in the motor racing events held in Argentina, in July 1909 winning first prize in the Second Buenos Aires Circuit; in April 1910 it won the Córdoba to Buenos Aires race, victories that were exploited for promotional purposes.

Georges Klein for his part was a member of different bodies and committees of events linked to industrial activity and the world of motoring. He was chairman of the Initiative and Internal Order Committee of the exhibitors in the Barcelona Automobile and Cycle Show, set up in the pavilion built for that purpose on land at Turó Park. The show was open from 22 March to 13 April 1913, although it was officially inaugurated on 29 March. Klein products were also present in the First Barcelona Motor Show, organized by the Syndical Chamber of the Automobile, and in the successive editions held. About 60 exhibitors displayed their products to the public from 3 to 12 May 1919 in the Palace of Fine Arts.

Because of their public repercussions, it was in the major sporting events where the different tyre brands competed with one another. A place on the podium meant a commercial triumph too, an endorsement of the quality of the tyres and of the resulting regard by cyclists and motorists. Klein established prizes and incentives for the drivers taking part in the first two editions of the Catalonia Cup (1908 and 1909) who crossed the finishing line using Klein tyres, although competition was fierce due to the incentives promised by rival brands such as Continental, Bergougnan, Peters Union and the absolute king, Michelin. In the 1908 race, four of the 19 cars that started were using Klein, but the podium was filled by Michelin and Continental; in the 1909 race six of the 13 cars in the race used Klein, which obtained a meritorious second place, behind the vehicle fitted, once again, with Michelin tyres. In the 1910 edition of the Catalonia Cup, the last one, the superiority of Michelin was overwhelming, as six of the nine racers that started were using Michelin and they included the first four past the chequered flag.

In its efforts to advertise its range of bicycle tyres, a substantial part of its catalogue, Klein was already offering additional prizes in the form of tyre casings and inner tubes in various cycle races such as the Catalonia Long-distance Championship in December 1908 and the Spanish Amateurs’ Championship in December 1909. It even organized the important Klein Grand Prix, held in Barcelona in September 1917 and which had 141 entrants. The second edition of the race was held the following year in Madrid. The key to understanding the promotional aspect of the competition was in its rules, which specified that use of its make of tyre was compulsory in order to enter.

Press advertising and tyre mascots

G. Klein’s first advertisements in the press were limited to advertising modules with printed messages, placed in the specialist press of the industrial sector. Obviously, pieces of rubber for machinery were neither interesting nor attractive to the general public. The programme changed from 1905 onwards, with the launch of its tyre casings and inner tubes.

Klein’s advertisements began to include allegorical images and highly symbolic figures. One of the most curious, which advertised its bicycle tyres, was the figure of a satyr in the saddle of a bicycle, a habitual resource for illustrating the confrontation between the magical and pagan beliefs of the past and the science and technology of the present.³ On other occasions we find Klein advertisements with illustrations on a motoring theme, with no defined graphic line, the result of the inventiveness of the head illustrator of the publication in which the advertisement had been placed. This was the case for example with the draughtsman Argemí in an advertisement published regularly in the magazine Progreso in 1906 and 1907.4

Fig. 2. Advertisement for Klein bicycle tyres, 1909. © Pau Medrano Bigas-Collection.

From 1912 to the spring of 1917, Klein preferably used two figures in its press advertisements. On one hand, the driver created by the draughtsman Carles Barral i Nualart, appearing regularly in the newspaper Mundo Deportivo; on the other the uniformed chauffeur drawn by Pere Montanya who for five years appeared regularly in the advertising pages of Stadium magazine, published in Barcelona. This constant presence was the local response to a series of characters imported from other areas of advertising, ambassadors of rival foreign brands that shared space in the pages of the same magazines and often in adjacent modules (a solution nowadays unacceptable), competing with one another to grab the reader’s attention.

Fig. 3 Klein’s “chauffeur” and the imported mascots of rival brands in the sector. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

Thus, the famous knife grinder Sam appeared with his faithful dog Floc, badges of the French maker Hutchinson, created in 1911 by the illustrator and poster artist Michel Liebeaux, “Mich” (1881-1923); the smartly dressed and bearded Mr Dunlop, an idealized personification of John Boyd Dunlop, the founder of the tyre industry, representing the Spanish subsidiary of the English brand of the same name; the ancient Gaul Vercingetorix as the standard bearer of Bergougnan’s Le Gaulois tyres, from Clermont-Ferrand; or even Mephistopheles dyed red and with the face of the famous racing driver Camille Jenatzy, used in different countries to represent German Bosch spark plugs. In 1916 other pneumatic mascots joined this great family, such as the German Continental brand’s Ottokar the clown, devised in 1908 also by Mich; or the stone giant “Colossus of Roads” – a pun on the Colossus of Rhodes –, also used in Spain by the American Firestone.

For its part, the doyen of tyre characters, Michelin’s Bibendum (the Michelin tyre-man), did not appear very much in Spanish advertisements. In France, a long list of well-known Art Nouveau artists, draughtsmen and caricaturists – some of them regulars in popular satirical magazines like Le Rire – had stamped their signature on posters for Michelin et Cie., drawing its mascot in different poses. On the contrary, the few Michelin posters for the Spanish market, apart from some French adaptations, had resorted to bull-fighting scenes and other kinds of folkloric images, produced in a run-of-the-mill academic style, far removed from modern trends. This is the case with the virtually unknown Michelin poster by the painter Julio García Mencía (1851-1914), made in about 1910, in which a gigantic Michelin Man is holding a tyre in his arms against which a woman is leaning, wearing an Andalusian dress, a shawl, and flowers and a decorative comb in her hair.5

Carles Barral i Nualart

Many of the posters to do with the world of motoring and motor-racing were printed in the workshops of the Barral brothers. This had a lot to do with the fact that both of them were among the small number of founding partners – which also included Ramon Casas – of the Automóvil Club de Barcelona (RACB),⁶ in 1906. Lluís, almost nine years older than Carles, had gone into partnership with the versatile artist Adrià Gual (1872-1943) in October 1899, creating the Gual y Barral lithographic workshop. Gual broke up the partnership in 1901 and the business was taken over by the two brothers, renamed Barral Herms. In 1924 it was relaunched as Industrias Gráficas Seix y Barral Hermanos, when they became associated with the publisher Francesc Seix i Faya, one of the creators of the car manufacturer Hispano-Suiza.

Carles Barral i Nualart (1879-1936) was the artist of the family. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Valladolid, the city where his family lived before returning to Barcelona, where he continued his education. His talent for drawing, and close contact with some of the best poster artists, who had their work printed in the family workshop, enabled him to adapt his style to the different commercial commissions he did. He had a restless and inventive mind that, from his office at Seix y Barral, he applied to numerous creations in the form of toys and the publication of educational books that he himself wrote and illustrated.

The artist was also a fan of the technology of his time, very keen on photography, the movie camera … and motor racing. Among his personal papers there are newspaper cuttings and photographic albums that he himself made that demonstrate his presence in the 1908 and 1909 editions of the Catalonia Cup, with pictures of different scenes in the event, the grandstands and the ladies dressed up for the occasion, the cars of the people in the crowd and of the drivers in the race. The posters of the three editions of the competition, held from 1908 to 1910 – the first one by Ramon Casas and the last two by Pere Montanya – were printed in the Barral Herms. workshops, as well as the poster for the Barcelona Cup motor race, held on 4 June 1911, designed by Carles Barral i Nualart.7

The character created by the artist to advertise Klein tyres first appeared in the pages of Mundo Deportivo in December 1912. The black-and-white sketch was a frontal portrait of a racing driver in his overalls and wearing a cap and goggles; he had a tyre over his shoulders and in one hand he held a lit car headlamp while raising the other as a warning signal. It was an adaptation of the original colour poster that the artist had designed for Klein in 1909. There is a testimony in the family album that shows the artist dressed this way, in a preliminary self-portrait for the poster.

Fig. 4 Lithographic poster by Carles Barral i Nualart for Klein, 1909. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

Next to the work, a photographic portrait of the artist dressed as a racing driver, in a preliminary study for the design of the poster. Photograph ©Barral family archive, with permission to publish for this particular article.

Ramon Casas and motoring

Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866-1932) was one of the founders of the RACB, the body that was the forerunner of the Reial Automòbil Club de Catalunya (RACC). In 1913 he was on the board of directors along with Lluís Barral, Georges Klein and Francesc Seix, among others.⁸ He was also noted for being one of the first artists of Modernisme to incorporate the automobile as an artistic point of reference, in both his more personal work and in advertising commissions. This can be seen in the poster advertising the Autogarage Central, in Barcelona (1902); in the posters for the Catalonia Cup (1908) and Tibidabo Cup (1914) motor races, and in the series of humorous postcards on a motoring theme for Wertheim sewing machines (c. 1910), or the Chauffeuses collection of picture cards (1903) with attractive lady drivers. Casas also worked for Klein. The tyre maker published a postcard that, captioned “Pneu Klein”, reproduced one of his drawings. It is the portrait of a lady leaning against a tyre, in the style of the poses that the artist used repeatedly in many of his compositions.⁹ This postcard was an adaptation of the poster – hitherto unknown and deleted from the catalogue, and which I had the opportunity to see in a private collection – that Casas did for Klein in about 1907, printed by J. Thomas lithographers.

Fig. 5 Advertising poster for Neumáticos Klein, by Ramon Casas, undated, c. 1907. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The Klein poster competition

On 1 September 1917, Klein announced a poster competition in Spain. It was thus following in the footsteps of the Catalan industrialists who had resorted to this type of competition in search of publicity and the best of the options that the great poster artists proposed to advertise their brands and products. Earlier poster competitions are very well known, such as the one for Anís del Mono, the anise liqueur produced by the Badalona industrialist Vicente Bosch, and for Codorniu sparkling wine, made by Manuel Raventós’s bodegas in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia (1898); the two editions for Manuel Malagrida’s Cigarrillos París, the first one in Argentina, with entry limited to local artists (1901), and the second one international (1902); the one for Amatller chocolates, whose factory was in Poblenou (1914), or the one held in the Cercle Artístic de Barcelona by the Madrid company Perfumería Gal to promote its Heno de Pravia soap (1916).

However, the creation of advertising illustrations for the campaigns of the peninsular market was not restricted to local artists. Catalan industrialists also resorted to the best-known European poster artists. We see this in the poster by the German living in France Walter Thor for Conejo bleach, manufactured by Hijo de S. Casamitjana Mensa (1893), or the posters by Leonetto Cappiello (1875-1942) for Miquel Serra of Lleida’s Anís Infernal (1905), and for Agua de Vilajuiga mineral water (1912), printed at the Vercasson workshops in Paris.

Setting the rules

Klein’s first announcement of the competition and the competition itself were reported in magazines and newspapers, the sports press and other kinds of publications. This competition was mentioned in Barcelona papers La Vanguardia, La Veu de Catalunya, La Publicidad, Stadium, Mundo Deportivo, Vell i Nou and L’Esquella de la Torratxa. In its pages the latter encouraged Catalan artists to take part: “The well-known company ‘Pneu Klein’ has just announced an important competition that will almost certainly interest draughtsmen from Catalonia and elsewhere […]. Come on, cartoonists, get cracking!”¹⁰ Papers published in Madrid also reported on it, including El Sol, La Correspondencia de España, El Heraldo de Madrid, España Automóvil y Aeronáutica and Heraldo Deportivo.

The competition rules referred to different aspects, like the standard size of the posters (65 x 100 cm), the use of a single legend Pneu Klein, or the habitual respect for the participants’ anonymity: “Every entry must be accompanied by a folded sheet of paper that will contain the author’s name and address and a legend that is the same as the one appearing at the bottom of the poster, which will bear no signature or monogram whatsoever”.

Each artist was free to present more than one work, provided he did so before 15 December. The prizes were considerable and in total amounted to 12,000 pesetas, distributed in the following way: a first prize worth 5,000 pesetas, a second prize of 3,000, a third of 2,000, a fourth of 1,000, a fifth of 600 and a sixth of 400. As was the custom, the prize-winning works would become the property of the competition organizer, which reserved “the right to reproduce them in any form, size and by any process that it deems appropriate”.11

The panel of judges proposed by Klein for this occasion was made up of renowned artists, all of them born in Barcelona: the painter Modest Teixidor Torres (1854-1928), the landscape painter and art critic Manuel Rodríguez Codolà (1872-1946), the set designers Salvador Alarma i Tastàs (1870-1941) and Maurici Vilumara Virgili (1848-1930), and the draughtsman, musician and writer Apel·les Mestres i Oñós (1854-1936). Mestres had ironically depicted the misfortunes of the first automobile drivers, at the mercy of punctures and dispiriting mechanical repairs, in several plates reproduced in a series of picture cards for the chocolate maker Amatller entitled Cotxes (Cars, c. 1908); they were in triptych format, as each scene was composed of three different cards fitting together.

The verdict of the panel of judges would be subjected to the criteria of its own members and to that expressed in the 15th and last section of the rules: “The panel of judges (and regardless, naturally, of each work’s artistic merit) will very much bear in mind the essential qualities of any poster destined for industrial advertising: originality in the subject, clarity in its development and an attractive impression in its appearance”.¹²

The outcome of the competition

La Vanguardia was the first newspaper to publish the press release facilitated by Klein – at the start of the third week in December – with the details of the competition results.¹³ The first prize went to poster No. 112, Más fuerte que el acero (Stronger than Steel), by Federico Ribas; second prize to No. 230, Chascat, by Pere Montanyà; third to No. 120, Jack, el mono ladrón (Jack, the Thieving Monkey), by Josep Triadó i Mayol; fourth to No. 93, Cosmopolita (Cosmopolitan), by Fernando Albertí i Barceló; fifth and sixth prizes, respectively, to No. 191, Vincitor, and to No. 195, Tigris, both by Carlos Verger. All in all 520 posters were entered, making it a heavily subscribed competition if we compare it to the participation in other more famous ones like that for Anís del Mono in 1898, with 162 posters; the one for Codorniu in 1898, with 173; the international one for Cigarrillos París in 1901, with 555; the one for Amatller chocolates in 1914, with 595, and the one by Gal in 1916, with 500.14

All the originals that were entered for the competition remained on display from 1 to 20 January 1918 in the Palace of Fine Arts in Barcelona so that, as it said at the end of the report on the competition results, published on Christmas Day in Mundo Deportivo, “their artistic value may be judged and the competence and impartiality of the panel of judges appreciated”.¹⁵ Part of this exhibition, made up of the group of prize-winning posters and those that had been given a mention – to which were added those that, despite not having won a prize, were acknowledged for their quality and which were purchased directly from certain entrants – travelled later to Madrid and were displayed from 20 June to 20 July in the spacious premises of the car manufacturer Hispano-Suiza in Calle Alcalá.

The current whereabouts of the original posters are unknown, although during the research I have carried out to make this study I have been able to find and put together the images of the six prize-winning ones, which are reproduced here.¹⁶

Fig. 6 Panel of the six prize-winning works in the Klein poster competition, 1917. From left to right and top to bottom: No. 112 (colour poster: first prize), Stronger than Steel, by Federico Ribas; No. 230, Chascat, by Pere Montanya; No. 120, Jack, the Thieving Monkey, by Josep Triadó i Mayol; No. 93, Cosmopolitan, by Fernando Albertí i Barceló; No. 191, Vincitor, No. 195, Tigris, both by Carlos Verger. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The prize-winning poster artists: Federico Ribas Montenegro

Federico Ribas Montenegro (1890-1952), from Galicia, was an illustrator, poster artist and art director at different magazines and publications. He trained by working in Argentina and Paris, where he arrived in 1899. He lived there for nearly four years and broadened his knowledge of Modernisme through contact with the great French draughtsmen and caricaturists who, like him, published in the satirical magazine Le Rire. He returned to Spain in 1916 to establish himself in Madrid, and that same year he won the first prize in the poster competition for Gal, who hired him as the firm’s art director, a task he combined with other advertising posts and his work as an illustrator for different magazines. Mention must be made of his intense professional relationship, between 1928 and 1936, with the theorist and doyen of advertising, Pere Prat Gaballí, then working for the Madrid agency Véritas, which handled Gal’s account.¹⁷

The prize-winning Klein poster – in which a blacksmith replaces the anvil with a tyre – presents dense and forceful graphics, far removed from the elegant and decorative Art Deco style that Ribas used in many of his later advertising assignments.

Pere Montanya

About Pere Montanya, a member of the Cercle Artístic de Barcelona, very little is known.¹⁸ The illustrator and poster artist Montanya’s signature is printed on a large number of posters, some of them associated with the world of motoring. He made the promotional posters for the second (1909) and third (1910) editions of the Catalonia Cup. Before entering the Klein poster competition, Montanya had already worked for the company’s advertising department. In January 1913 he created the character of a uniformed chauffeur with an oversized tyre over his shoulder, an image that was to become one of the badges of the brand and which was used in its adverts until the middle of 1917. The poster that won second prize in the Klein competition showed, in the foreground, a boy frustrated when he finds out that the trap he has laid on the road – a plank of wood full of sharp, pointed nails – has not had the desired effect; in the background of the composition, a car is driving away as if nothing had happened, immune to punctures, because it has been fitted with the right tyres.

Montanya was closely linked to the lithographic activity of Barral Brothers, and later to Industrias Gráficas Seix y Barral Herms., where most of his posters were printed. These include the ones made for the bicycles imported by BBL-Brown Brothers Ltd. of London, on a bull-fighting theme (c. 1900); for the film Don Pedro el Cruel, by Hispano Films (Peter the Cruel, 1911); for Vino Sifón Medicinal, by the José Mª Torras pharmaceutical laboratories (1915); for the zarzuela (popular musical) Si yo fuera el Rey (If I were the King), by the Odeón record label (c. 1915), and for Freixenet cava (1920). Pere Montanya also entered two works in the Heno de Pravia poster competition held by Gal (1916), and although he was not among the three prize-winners his poster was purchased by the company and used in advertisements.

Josep Triadó i Mayol

Of all the prize-winners Josep Triadó i Mayol (1870-1929), from Barcelona, had the longest career and was the best known. His solid academic training and his mastery of drawing were reflected in his pictorial, decorative and mural artwork, and in numerous graphic facets. He was charged with the design and decoration of several magazines; he illustrated books, he created trademark badges and became one of the most outstanding promoters and draughtsmen of ex libris. His style had evolved from a symbolist Modernisme, of English and neo-Gothic influence, far removed from exaltation, and he eventually became one of the major artists of Noucentisme. The poster for Klein tyres showed a primitive chimpanzee, juxtaposing it – in a contrast much used in the advertising of the period, and in today’s too – with a high-technology product, the tyre.

Fernando Albertí Barceló

The Madrid-born painter, illustrator and poster artist Fernando Albertí Barceló (1870-1950) was trained at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts; he sat for his oposiciones (professional examinations) and was awarded the title of Professor of the School of Industrial Arts. He enjoyed acknowledged prestige in academic circles because of his mastery of drawing and anatomy, virtues that he also applied to his publishing and poster-making work. He published regularly in the magazine Blanco y Negro.¹⁹

He won fifth prize in the Codorniu poster competition in 1898, second prize in the one for Cigarrillos París in 1901, and fourth prize in the Klein poster competition. His entry showed a lady crouching down, fastening the retaining brackets of a spare tyre attached to the side of a car. Given the similarity the artist probably got his inspiration from the August 1913 cover of the American magazine Good Housekeeping, by the illustrator Clarence Coles Phillips (1880-1927), considered one of the figures of the Golden Age of American illustration and of the Modern Style in the USA.

With respect to this author, there is another poster that did not win a prize which, in my opinion, is also by him. In the list of projects entered for the competition there was a section that grouped together 23 posters with a mention. Among these mentions was No. 70, identified with the legend Veni. In a Klein advert of 1921 this same legend appeared next to the portrait of a nude male model, wearing a cap and driving goggles, who is holding a tyre. The sitter’s pose refers us to Albertí’s academic training and to his mastery of the human figure; moreover, the design and drawing of the letters in the word Klein are similar to what he had used in the entry with which he won fourth prize.

Fig. 7 Veni. This is probably the poster entered by Fernando Albertí Barceló in the Klein poster competition. It did not win a prize, but it was given a mention by the panel of judges, 1917. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

Carlos Verger Fioretti

The painter, engraver and poster artist Carlos Verger Fioretti (1872-1929), born in Paris and living in Madrid, won Klein’s fifth and sixth prizes. He was a teacher at the School of Arts and Crafts and Professor of Chalcographic Engraving.²⁰ He made a series of posters in a markedly Art Nouveau style for the sherry bodegas Díez Hermanos and their Oxygenated Cognac. Verger entered for the controversial second edition of the competition held by Barcelona City Council on 7 January 1909, as part of the promotional campaign “Barcelona, a City for Winter”, run by the Committee for the Attraction of Strangers and Tourists. The rules envisaged a single winner, but the panel considered the first place void and stipulated that the prize-money, 5,000 pesetas, be shared out among five runners-up. The ruling, moreover, stated that only the first two works in the list, by order, would be used and eventually printed: the posters entered by the Englishman John Hassall (1868-1948) – an artist known and well thought of in Catalan art circles – and by Carlos Verger, a work that is now conserved in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.²¹

The poster that won fifth prize, with the legend Tigris, played with a recurrent metaphor in tyre advertising: the image of a feline – in this case a tiger – holding a tyre in its jaws with the aid of its claws. Despite everything, it remains intact and inflated. His other piece, Vincitor, showed – in a pronounced frontal perspective – an allegorical figure that moves among the clouds and has a car wheel with metal spokes attached to its forehead. It was probably an allegorical depiction of the goddess Fortuna as a guide and the turner of the wheel that governs our fate – a fate unfailingly prosperous if you fitted your car with Klein tyres.

Conclusion

Many of the works entered in the numerous competitions held by Catalan industrialists – like the Klein poster competition – and by different bodies constitute a veritable catalogue of Modernista poster art and of the artists who designed them. The advertising and graphic side of Klein & Cía., a company founded at the beginning of the twentieth century and active until the start of the Civil War, promoted and shared in Modernista art and the different trends that marked the artistic activity carried out by illustrators, poster artists and graphic artists of each generation in the Barcelona that was home to them.

Acknowledgements

To Marilí Barral, the daughter of Carles Barral i Nualart. And to her children, for sharing the family archive and the stories about the poster artist’s life and work.

To Carlos García, director of Foment del Treball’s Archive Library in Barcelona, for his kindness, availability and professionalism.

Household Goods in Women’s Magazines: Feminal, El Hogar y la Moda and La Dona Catalana: the Construction of a Women’s Market Through New Products (1900-1936)¹

Míriam Soriano

The historical context

At the beginning of the twentieth century an awakening of Catalonia’s collective consciousness took place. We find a liberal middle class made up of the industrial haute bourgeoisie, shopkeepers, the petty bourgeoisie, civil servants, employees and intellectuals. This middle class was interested in avant-garde movements and in the new ideas coming from Europe. They were people that believed in progress and the modern world. To a certain extent, one might even say that they were also open to women playing a part in public life.

It was in this liberal bourgeois atmosphere open to foreign trends that Catalan women also opened up to modernity. Women like Carme Karr² were the spokeswomen for this female liberalism: “To date, the Catalan intellectual, scientist, artist, has lived without doing anything for women, without taking any interest in them, as though they were no more than child-bearing machines or luxury items … we believe the time has come to properly guide the intellect of our women, who already feel, and make us feel, an urgent need for it”.³

Women’s magazines

When I say women’s magazines I am referring to the periodical publications that “whether because of their title or sub-title, or because their writers say so, or because of their subject matter, are chiefly written for women”.4

They first appeared in Catalonia in about 1850. The first one was La Madre de Familia in 1846, edited by Narcís Monturiol.⁵ Written in Spanish, eight issues of it came out. It maintained that the woman’s place was the family, doing the household chores and looking after the children. And as the people bringing up children, Monturiol defended the need for women to be given an education.6

The first magazine for women written in Catalan was La Llar (1871), edited by Dolors Monserdà.⁷ The sub-title specified that it was a magazine devoted to the instruction and the education of women.8

From the late nineteenth century onwards, a series of changes was considered in publications written for women. The polarity between the weight of tradition and the desire for innovation and freedom was becoming increasingly obvious. In Catalonia, the first feminists were the writers and editors of women’s publications. They were women from liberal progressive families, like Carme Karr, Dolors Monserdà, Maria Josepa Massanés⁹ and others who had been brought up to believe in a person’s right to freedom. Their cultural level was high, they were up to date with innovative foreign trends and they were familiar with the American and British feminist movements. Like the suffragettes they called for women’s right to vote and to be educated, but they never agreed with them when their ideas became radical and called into question women’s role in society as wives and mothers. The majority of Catalan women defended the family and, obviously, their role in it.10

At the turn of the century Catalan magazines were addressed to women in well-to-do positions who, obviously, could read. Their publishers wanted them to be educated women, restless, capable of practising the different arts (painting, singing, music) and that they should also be “modern” women, dressing à la mode (of Paris), doing sport, being concerned about health, beauty, and looking after their figures. But none of these intentions ever called into question the foremost basic quality, quite the contrary: they had to continue being housewives. This is what all the magazines and writers proclaimed as the guiding principle of a social and moral code: the Catalan woman, angel of the house, was above all else a wife and mother.11

We see, then, that women were set new challenges determined by the times that society was living through. On one hand, middle-class women were elegant, reflecting the family’s social wellbeing. But now, moreover, they had to meet new challenges, and one of the most important referred to health, their own and the family’s. Women who had acquired proper hygiene habits and who did sport were healthy women who would be able to bring up their children with these habits. These women who looked after themselves needed to adapt their clothes and their homes to the new times. Fashion would adapt to the new ways, and homes too. It would be women’s magazines that guided them in the change with regard to hygiene, doing sport, fashion and keeping house.

The magazines Feminal, El Hogar y la Moda, and La Dona Catalana

I have chosen three of the most representative women’s magazines that were published in Barcelona between 1900 and 1936, that is, from the start of the twentieth century to the Spanish Civil War. I have chosen them for the duration, for quality in both the edition and the prestige of the contributors who wrote for them, and for the success they achieved. They are Feminal (1907-1917), El Hogar y la Moda (1909-1987) and La Dona Catalana (1925-1934). They therefore mark the period of the construction of a modern society. Through these publications I have monitored, in the first place, how the image of the modern woman was constructed – a housewife but someone attentive to new ideas – and I have observed how magazines went about shaping her in these early years of modernity. Secondly, I have discovered how important the products destined for the home were as they began appearing on the market as a major point of reference in the organization of a mass society based on consumption, and gradually on consumerism. Finally, we shall see if this is how a market was formed for all the kinds of products that, after the Civil War, were identified as design.

For all these reasons, I have analysed whether or not women’s magazines, as a form of social media, have been a pathway for introducing new products to society and creating a consumer market, and to begin with I have focused on advertising as the chief resource for publicizing new products. Obviously, the texts of the articles have not been overlooked, as they are the main route for inspiring and upholding the need for social changes. I have realized that the reality of society is reflected in the texts whereas advertising is a way of reaffirming the evidence of the reality that the articles present. In reference to the texts, I have also paid attention to the authors: they were generally men and women with open minds, with progressive ideals, who felt the need to know everything that was going on in the world.

Fig. 1 Covers of the magazines La Dona Catalana (10 December 1926), Feminal (29 March 1908) and El Hogar y la Moda (15 March 1923). Private collection.

We shall learn about the characteristics of these publications in order to place them in Barcelona at the turn of the century, a time of profound social and economic changes that affected life and customs. The years I am considering in my analysis formed a period in which the journalistic formula of the magazine was already fully consolidated.¹² The new industrial graphic reproduction techniques made a new type of publication possible. This was when magazines appeared illustrated with photographs. They were carefully presented publications, very high quality, with a page composition and design that made them pleasant and easy to leaf through and to read. Ease of consultation and the industrial progress that made it possible to produce large print runs made the presence of the magazine, as Joan Manuel Tresserras says, “one of the signs of the progress of the transformations that led to mass-media societies”.¹³ The three publications that I have chosen to study have all these qualities and more.

Feminal (1907-1917)

It first appeared on 28 April 1907 as a supplement in the newspaper Ilustració Catalana.¹⁴ Its editor was Carme Karr, a well-known writer and poet. She believed in the advancement of women and was convinced that they needed a school and an education to put them on the same intellectual level as men. In the magazine’s introductory article, “Our purpose”, she said that, “Feminal … comes to women as a friend who, in their own language, will talk to them about everything they may find useful, everything they may like and which may interest them in these artistic, industrial and social times”.¹⁵

Written in Catalan, it was published weekly. Inside it were articles about literature, poems, musical pages, society news and a pamphlet. The articles included news about Barcelona, questions of social care and charity, the everyday life of the middle class, literary festivals (Els Jocs Florals) and society occasions (weddings, children’s beauty contests, sporting events, and so on). Articles also appeared showing off the homes of well-known personalities in Catalan society, and others introduced sportswomen and women artists, painters and writers. All these articles were accompanied by photographs.

As contributors we find the most outstanding representatives of female intelligentsia in the Catalan middle class. They include names from the magazine Or i Grana¹⁶ (October 1906-February 1907) such as Dolors Monserdà de Macià, Agnès Armengol de Badia, Maria Domènech de Canyelles, Joaquima Rosal, and other, new female writers like Víctor Català,¹⁷ Sara Llorens de Serra, Mercè Padrós, Isabel Serra, the Countess of Castellà, and many others.18

The editing of the magazine was first class: typographically, it was printed in two inks and every page was edged with a border. The Modernista-style cover featured a photograph of an important person or of some topical event, and the publication’s name was printed inside a rectangular border richly decorated by the artist Casademunt. Sometimes the whole cover had a background drawing with a floral air, also by Casademunt. It had 20 two-column, profusely illustrated pages and almost every page included photographs.

Proportionally, it left little room for advertisements. They only appeared on the last page and the back cover. The advertisements are very varied in both size and presentation. Some were full-page and others were inscribed forming a mosaic of different sizes, mostly rectangular in shape. In their composition they were very different: they could be text only, combining different types of lettering, or they could be accompanied by illustrations or photographs. As to the style, we find clearly Modernista ones (Mosaichs Escofet, Mobles Busquets), Noucentista ones (Perfum Pompeïa) or more classical ones (Confeccions d’Antoni Rosich, Magatzem Las Novedades). They were in black and white, so the way they attracted attention was defined by the composition of the advertisement.

It could be said that Feminal was a feminist publication; obviously not in its more radical and emancipatory spirit, but it is a fact that it tried to advance women’s roles in the society of the day. Its editor, Carme Karr, defended a project in which women had to be capable of harmonizing their roles as wives and mothers with the most refined intellectual and artistic culture. Although she was very clear about the fact that women’s activity had to be focused on the home and the children, the new times and the new fashions advised her to take a step forward. She therefore encouraged women to cultivate themselves with poetry, music or the plastic arts, and to take an active part in cultural life. They were also recommended, for their health and wellbeing, to do sport. What is more, as women who cared about the less privileged, they had to be involved in charity and some philanthropic and social activity. In this way, the magazine perfectly defined the place that women had to occupy in this “modern” society and at the same time it tried not to invade the place that men “occupied” (or which belonged to them).¹⁹

El Hogar y la Moda (1909-1987)

It appeared for the first time on 7 June 1909. It was founded by Juli Gibert Mateus, a businessman, and his brother Salvador, a journalist and writer, together with the printer Joan Pijoan and the investor with connections in the world of publishing Josep M. Borràs de Quadras. The magazine had no introductory editorial.

It was written in Spanish and came out every week. As a magazine devoted principally to fashion, it gave advice on how to dress and presented the latest fashions. From time to time it devoted an issue to patterns only. Every page was illustrated with sketches of models, sometimes in colour. To complement the subject of fashion, they also published articles about beauty, health and women’s sport, very often signed by doctors. A lot of page space was devoted to the fashions being worn in Paris, where they had a correspondent who wrote in every issue. A new section, never before used in women’s magazines, was a section of questions and answers, featuring letters written to the magazine by readers. The topics were to do with clothes fashions and the magazine’s editorial board replied to them. Other subjects that appeared regularly were interior decoration and design. They featured articles accompanied by illustrations showing the latest trends in household decoration and furniture. Very often readers were shown how to make small objects such as lights, cushions, curtains and auxiliary furniture. They also provided ideas for the decoration and distribution of the various rooms (entrance halls, children’s bedrooms). A subject that began to appear in the 1920s was the cinema. From 1924 onwards, a new section appeared, Del Cinematógrafo, devoted exclusively to news and gossip about actors, the films that were being made or those being released, directors, storylines, and so on. Of course they were latest American films. The text was accompanied by photographs of stars and scenes from films. From 1929 onwards, the section Cosas del cine appeared in virtually every issue and besides the latest news about the cinema, other topics were dealt with such as fashion in the cinema, or the elegance of the actresses. It also included entertaining literary articles, poems and short stories.

The texts were direct, they echoed the modern atmosphere that was prevalent in Europe and gave readers up-to-date news immediately. They spoke about things still new for women, such as doing sport, travelling and driving automobiles – in short, the practices typical and characteristic of the mass society that was being formed in those years. They were for dynamic, feminine women. From the 1920s onwards articles appeared related to women’s rights, in defence of working-class women, or about women’s education.

As contributors we find Concepción P. Mariné, who wrote the editorial; María Luz Morales, a Philosophy and Arts graduate who was the editor, and Doctor Fanny, who wrote about health and the importance of physical education. Abigail Mejía, first, and later Helvig Thiellement were its correspondents in Paris. Writing the literary articles we find names like Carme Karr, Eduardo Zamacois and Ramón Pérez de Ayala.

It was carefully produced and printed in two inks. The cover showed the figure of a woman dressed in the latest fashions. To begin with, they were shown using line drawings, single line sketches that were gradually shaded in more and more. In them we see how the characteristics of the drawings changed with the years. In the magazine’s early days, we find a detailed drawing with the figures framed in carefully described rooms, but by the 1920s the woman’s body was stylized and the details were left out. We could say that the realistic portrait disappeared and the “sketch” appeared with a far more schematic drawing that moved away from the natural female body to concentrate on the clothes. The models appeared in rather empty but well-defined exteriors. At the end of that decade the magazine began using photographs on the cover, combined with drawings. The magazine’s masthead also changed typographically. To begin with it was at the top, inscribed in a rectangle, but the letters soon began to be incorporated in the drawing and we can find them in any part of the cover.

The number of pages increased: to start with there were 16, then 20, in the 1920s 36, and by the 1930s it had grown to 50 pages. The composition was in two columns and every page had fashion illustrations that took up one of them. The middle pages were all illustrated with sketches on the same theme (evening dresses, spring clothes, and so on). The combination of text and illustration created spaces easy to identify and made the magazine light and pleasant to leaf through.

It gave a lot of room to advertisements. There were full-page ones and an advert also appeared at the bottom of every page. They had to do with the concerns of women, presenting beauty products and perfumes, pharmaceuticals associated with the whole family’s health and hygiene, household products (cleaning, cooking), educational academies, and other products were also advertised such as typewriters, sewing machines, radio receivers in the 1930s,²⁰ pianos, gramophones, books, and so on. The adverts were very different in size and composition. The small ones normally only included text, while the larger ones were accompanied by a picture of the product. The adverts at the bottom of the page featured one or two lines of text in which the name of the product was highlighted in larger or darker letters. This system was also used for text-only adverts: people’s attention was caught by the size, the depth of the colour and the shapes of the letters. They were resources often used by page layout designers when it was necessary to fill up a page and there was no more text.

El Hogar y la Moda was a women’s magazine with fashion as its main theme, but it reflected the standard interests of women in that period very well. It lasted a very long time and it managed to adapt to the different women’s fashions and needs as they appeared. Something altogether different is whether the magazine also played a part in those changes and whether it actually led them. It was always a product designed with mass consumption in mind and it therefore reached a relatively large readership. In its early days, before the war, the period this article is about, it always stood up for women’s rights and their new place in society while at the same time informing them about clothes fashions, health, decoration and so on.

La Dona Catalana (1925-1934)

It first appeared on 9 October 1925, sub-titled “Revista de modes i de la llar” (A magazine for fashion and the home). Its editor was the journalist and filmmaker Magí Murià.²¹ In the first issue it stated its objectives: “To everyone. From the publishers – LDC will be an extremely useful magazine, for in its pages there will be a regular place for all aspects of women’s culture. Fashions, embroidery, music, literature (the novel, poetry, features), lessons in practical things, home decoration, and all with the graphics that are required for a better understanding of the lessons, in full detail, leaving nothing out”. It was to be “a magazine to complement domestic life, a loyal friend of the home”.22

It was written in Catalan and came out every week. In it we find all sorts of information: fashion, pages of original stories, needlework, patterns, music, sports, the latest films, entertainment, a children’s page, and so on. It also published cookery recipes from the courses that were given at the Women’s Institute of Culture and Popular Library, directed by Francesca Bonnemaison.²³ Every page was illustrated with sketches of models and it used photographs for articles about fashion, topical events and the cinema. The presence of literature was very important. We find pieces by writers such as Gabriel Alomar, Josep Carner, Clovis Eimeric, Àngel Guimerà, Josep M. Folch i Torres, Maria del Carme Nicolau … and by Magí Murià too.24

Anna Murià,²⁵ Magí Murià’s daughter, began her literary career in this publication. She contributed to it for five years using different pen names, such as Roser Català, Hortènsia Florit or Marta Romaní. Her articles were about aspects of life that might interest women: from the literary and cultural scene in Catalonia to topics associated with the history of fashion, interior décor or bringing up children.

The cinema, so new at the time, was heavily featured in the magazine. From the start the section Actualitats cinematogràfiques appeared, with news about the films being made in the United States and those on release in the city. The text was always accompanied by photographs of the best-known stars and film stills. In 1929 the section changed its name to Pàgina cinematogràfica (Film page). Around this time the city’s cinemas began advertising their bills and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presented its new releases.

The section Decoració interior (Interior décor) appeared quite regularly, presenting items for the home while describing how to decorate the different rooms in the house. The feature La llar-jardí (House and garden) dealt with subjects associating the home with health, such as the need to air rooms, the importance of letting sunlight in, the use of plants as a natural element in homes, and so on. These texts were always accompanied by very detailed illustrations.

Other subjects dealt with were Informacions gràfiques (Photo-news). News of topical events was given using photographs. It also included a section of readers’ letters to the magazine, Entre nosaltres (Between ourselves), which other women’s magazines had already incorporated. Of note were the poetry, drama and short story competitions organized by the magazine, encouraging readers to send in their literary efforts.

From time to time articles appeared about feminism, women’s jobs, their education … articles that reflected the different opinions on issues that were so topical everywhere at the time.

It was a well-edited magazine. To begin with, the cover was illustrated with fashion sketches that were included in the space without any established rules (the figure sticking out of the framed landscape, taking up one side, etc.). The magazine’s masthead was always at the top and the sub-title “A magazine for fashion and the home” was set on the page according to the drawing published on it. These illustrations were almost always signed by well-known draughtsmen of the time.26

Quite soon, however, photography took over and then every cover would have a photo showing the bust of a fashionably dressed woman. From then on the cover would always follow the same compositional pattern: the masthead at the top and a framed photo in the middle. The visual points of reference were the decorative fringes in which prints and drawings for hanging were framed.

At first there were 16 pages, which soon increased to 24. The composition was in three columns and every page had illustrations or photographs of fashion models. The middle pages were only illustrated with fashion sketches. These drawings were very stylized and at the same time detailed, with a clear Art Déco influence in both the settings in which the figures were inserted and the compositions. They used spaces framed in different boxes and Art Déco-style borders in the blank spaces. Many of the figures bore the name of the dress designer (always French).

The space set aside for advertising normally took up page two and the last ones. We also find small text-only adverts at the bottoms of the pages. The products advertised are quite varied, but logically related to the readers’ interests. It could be said that the same products were advertised as we see in other women’s magazines of the time: beauty products and perfumes, pharmaceuticals related to health and wellbeing, house cleaning materials, books, educational centres, cinemas, furniture or clothes shops, sewing and embroidery machines, radio receivers, and so on.

The composition of the advertisements was very varied. It ranged from a brief text at the foot of the page, or in a small box, to full-page adverts, with illustrations or photographs. The style of the illustrations could vary according to the product. There were figurative drawings with all sorts of details and other, more modern, stylized ones (women with short hair, Art Déco settings with straight-lined furniture). The lettering used was very varied, with no predominant tendency.

La Dona Catalana was basically a fashion magazine similar to other women’s magazines of the time. Conscious of its role as a disseminator of the latest trends in fashion and social life, it reported on everything that modernity meant for the role of women open to change. It never stopped reporting on the events taking place in the places that were then leading the way in modern trends: Paris for fashion and sport, America for films. However, unlike other publications, this magazine had certain peculiarities. It was the cheapest of them all (30 cents), so it could reach a larger segment of society. Moreover, besides being interested in everything going on elsewhere, it also took an interest in events taking place in Catalonia, which suggests that the magazine was also designed as a tool to create a national spirit by having a direct impact on the lower levels of Catalan society at the time. Remember that among its contributors we have seen illustrious representatives of Catalanism, beginning with the editor, Magí Murià. This publication, in fact, may be considered to have been complementary to the cultural operation conducted by the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà, which disseminated the Noucentista socio-political programme among the well-to-do classes. This is why they did not compete with one another, or hinder the other’s huge circulation. In this respect, La Dona Catalana may also be thought of as an example of the efforts of militant Noucentisme and of Catalanist ideology to understand mass society and to use the resources typical of it. In fact, it appeared at the height of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and lasted only until the first years of the republic, years when popular culture exploded.

The contents of fashion magazines through the texts and illustrations

Despite the fact that the point of reference and the model woman that these magazines were constructing was the modern middle-class woman, between them the three magazines covered all parts of the market. It may be considered that the part of society to which they were addressed gradually grew as mass society burst in on Catalonia. This phenomenon was clearly seen during the years of the First World War, but newspapers and magazines had been announcing it for some time. Feminal spoke directly to its peers, the ruling classes, as did D’Ací i d’Allà, a very important magazine that has been studied elsewhere. The former presented women’s new role for the first time; the latter confirmed it, also spreading the more highbrow and intellectualized version of mass society by interpreting its culture. El Hogar y la Moda was created, and consequently evolved, as a mass-market product addressed to large-scale consumption and it appealed to everyone regardless of class differences. La Dona Catalana, on the other hand, was a product of the resistance that emerged during the dictatorship that became another ideological proposal, as the opinionated press had been before the irruption of the mass media, addressed to the working class in order to integrate it in bourgeois and mass society.²⁷

Bearing in mind the premise that the points of reference were bourgeois habits and customs typical of the middle class, the content featured most frequently in all these magazines was always topics that it was thought might interest housewives the most. As we see, some depended on the latest developments imposed by mass society and pointed to the updating and modernization of society; others stemmed from topical debates at the time, such as the latest versions of the social hygiene movement. On the whole, they were chiefly about fashion, hygiene, sport and comfort in the home.

Fashion

One of the principal objectives of these magazines was to report on the latest trends. This they did by publishing commentaries about the fashion of the moment and generously filling every page with fashion sketches to visually complement the explanations. Towards the end of the 1920s, photography was introduced to present the dresses, although sketches of them continued to predominate.

The stylized drawing of models was how these magazines presented fashion, but at the same time they were also a reflection of the aesthetic and social changes that women experienced in this period. In the early years, the illustrations showed rigid and detailed models in familiar places (interiors, terraces and gardens) or with no background, in static poses with very little movement. They are almost “academy drawings”. Little by little, however, they began to move, they became stylized and showed a slender, svelte and nimble figure moving around new exteriors, like gardens, the countryside or sports clubs, or in elegant interiors, usually sophisticated modern lounges.

The main protagonist was the dress, but reference was also made to the importance of accessories such as hats, belts, jewellery and headscarves. Readers were thus shown everything referring to the latest fashions. The articles, for their part, advised on how and where these different dresses could be worn. It was a way of educating women in “poise”.

Therefore, the evolution of their role in society was seen through fashion. Fashion magazines talked about the proper clothes for doing sport, for bathing in the sea, or walking in the mountains. We even find clothes for driving automobiles or travelling. They were thus a series of situations and activities that, although they seemed elitist to begin with, defined the habits and customs of mass society and the twentieth century as they became available to everybody. Fashion adapted to the new roles that women were taking on and it became lighter and more practical to ease bodily movement.

Fashion’s role is to reflect the new and, obviously, the city that at that time was the epitome of modernity and the centre of good taste was Paris. Every magazine had correspondents there to tell readers at first hand about everything that was going on. Needless to say Paris had experienced a profound transformation in the fashion sector and since the turn of the century it had introduced haute couture, an institution that completely changed the process of publicizing clothes and criteria of taste.

From 1914 onwards Paris was also the centre of the health and beauty movement, ideals that had originated in English social thinking, which Paris had managed to translate into fashion. Sport made its appearance along with fashionable new clothes for doing it, giving women’s clothes a whole new look. In 1920 the fashion for short hair, à la garçonne, which would change the way women looked, also arrived from Paris. From then on, “chic” was a byword for the natural look: the absence of anything that might look artificial.

Hygiene

In the mid nineteenth century, hygiene and health movements began raising awareness among the upper classes, and this was reflected in the concern over the subject that appeared in these women’s magazines. It became more important from the 1910s onwards. The social hygiene movement had taken root strongly in Catalonia ever since Ildefons Cerdà had mentioned it in his Plan for L’Eixample (1859), but in that period hygiene became a domestic issue, habits that the population had to adopt. In 1916 we find articles referring to personal health in virtually every issue, but keeping the house clean, eating properly, physical exercise and body care, especially in children, also became important. In Spain, as one article says, women had no idea of cleanliness: “passing a cloth over their face when they get out of bed is their idea of obeying the laws. Having a bath, whether due to the difficulty of doing it or to the lack of means, is unknown in the majority of Spanish homes”.²⁸

The flu epidemic that hit Barcelona and Madrid in 1914 made people even more aware, and hygiene was recommended to women in the name of their duty to society. Hygiene advice was signed by “doctors”, and right from the start a great deal of importance was attached to the mouth and looking after the teeth, something apparently quite neglected by readers.

Sport

Sport was already an important social issue by the end of the nineteenth century: the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya²⁹ (rambling association) had been founded in 1876 and Fútbol Club Barcelona, in 1899. CD Espanyol was founded shortly afterwards, followed by those in the city’s neighbourhoods, and the first private tennis and showjumping clubs came into existence. But it was not until well into the twentieth century that sport began to play a notable part in women’s social lives and featured among their social values and customs. In 1914 it was mentioned that, “It is now three or four years since a notable physical beauty movement began in Europe. With Swedish drill – scientific gymnastics …”.30

Obviously, health was one of the principal objectives of doing sport: it was useful for strengthening the body and physical wellbeing. Most significantly, however, these magazines focused on the issue by talking only about sports that were considered suitable for women, such as tennis, golf and Swedish drill. As possible women’s sports we also find cycling, bathing in the sea, mountaineering, rambling and winter sports. Women still did not take part in sporting events, something that would be a long time in coming.

This growing popularity of sport was inextricably linked to the changing styles of women’s fashions, which had become much lighter and more functional. The appreciation of hygiene and sport dignified the “natural body” and made it possible to show it as it is, without the suits of armour and trickery of clothes. The simplification of clothing in the 1920s in favour of clean, sober forms was the response to this new ideal of sport, lightness and dynamism.31

The first women’s tennis and swimming champions appeared in 1920 and, from 1925 onwards, El Hogar y la Moda called for working-class women to be able to do sport as well. At the end of the decade letters were published in this magazine from readers asking for addresses of inexpensive clubs where they could go to play tennis.

The home

The subject of interior design in the home gained in importance in those years as a typically female matter. The three magazines that I have analysed dealt with it, but in different ways. For example, Feminal chose to present, intermittently (monthly or bimonthly), the interiors of the homes of well-known personalities of the Catalan middle class. The styles in which these houses were decorated were shown and explained with a short text accompanied by photographs. The choice is highly representative of the processes of spreading the fashion and the tastes of a society that did not yet function in accordance with mass culture; criteria of taste had not yet been professionalized and therefore the reference models were established on the basis of social class and the cultural upbringing of the ruling classes. As for the styles observed in them, we find influences of Catalan Modernisme, Catalan country houses – a model that Noucentisme was to reclaim as a benchmark of the wisdom inherent in local traditions – and the more classical styles, like the recurrent versions of the French Empire or Spanish Isabelline styles that had been in vogue throughout the nineteenth century. On the whole, though, they reflected comfortable, cosy homes.

Furthermore, the fact that the issue was becoming more important during the period is demonstrated by the fact that the other two magazines, El Hogar y la Moda, first, and La Dona Catalana, later, devoted a section or articles to it in virtually every issue. The home had appeared on an equal footing with fashion in the masthead of the magazine El Hogar y la Moda since the moment it was created (1909). However, only in the 1920s did articles about the home begin to appear in practically every issue. Signed Yarka, the texts were highly descriptive, accompanied by drawings also by her. The illustrations were very detailed and easy to understand.

As for La Dona Catalana, on its cover it tells us that it is the “first Catalan magazine for fashion and the home”. It devotes several sections to it, La vostra llar (Your home), La llar-jardí (The home and garden) and Decoració interior (interior décor), to present the new ideas referring to interior design. All the articles appeared with drawings to make the text easier to understand. They dealt with a wide variety of topics, from new ideas for decorating different rooms to specific items of furniture and fittings (folding beds, lights); decoration with flowers and the entry of natural light are also touched upon. In 1934 it reported on the exhibition La taula parada³² (the laid table), a show that was the subject of one of the interesting debates about design between Noucentista-inspired interior decorators and the representatives of the rationalist avant-garde organized in the GATCPAC.

In every article the home is associated with the idea of “comfort”, and so articles are written to instruct women in the art of decoration. New lines of furniture appear and advice is given for a better distribution in the home; there are also articles about the importance of flowers and indoor plants, and the entry of sunlight in the house is upheld as a principle of hygiene and wellbeing: “If the sunlight does not come through your balcony, you will soon be seeing your doctor coming through the door”.33

Once more it was Paris that laid the guidelines for modernity and new ideas on the subject of decoration. Besides reporting on fashion, the correspondents in the city also wrote about interior décor.

Illustrations: drawings and photographs

Every text in magazines was accompanied by illustrations. Sometimes they were there to complement what was written, but when fashion was the topic pictures had pride of place. Fashion sketches were featured on almost every page. On pages about literature, the illustrations were sometimes the work of well-known draughtsmen of the day, but most of them were unsigned. The drawings that illustrated the fashion texts and the sketches were anonymous.

The sketches were hand drawn, in black and white to begin with, and later in colour. They are pictures that due to their composition, the poses, the model’s gestures and the setting, do not just display clothes; they also contain many other implicit messages and transmit them. They are about poise, taste, change, modernity and personality.

At the end of the nineteenth century, technological progress in cameras led to a greater use of amateur and professional photography. The improvement of the offset system used in printing encouraged the use of photographs in newspapers and magazines. Having real pictures gave rise to a new model of communication within reach of any reader, as the code of the images was accessible to more people.

Catalan women’s magazines began using photography in the early twentieth century. Feminal is perhaps the one that used photography the most. It used it to present all the topical news items as well as the section devoted to the homes of outstanding personalities in Catalan society. For their part, El Hogar y la Moda and La Dona Catalana, focusing chiefly on women’s fashions, used photographs to show some styles of dressing, and continued using drawings to present fashion and accessories, and also to discuss decoration.

As the 1920s progressed, photography began to be used more; it was also used to deal with other topics of the day, for instance scenes from films and film stars, society news (parties, weddings, sporting and social events), current events, and to show faraway places.

Drawings continued to be used in advertising to present new products, as photography was not used until the late 1920s and only very sporadically.

The consumption of modernity: advertising

Advertising began to appear in women’s magazines after 1870. To begin with it was small adverts composed of text only, describing and praising objects in fashion and perfumes in particular. Towards the end of the century some adverts began to appear illustrated with drawings.

In the first issues of the magazines analysed we find adverts for women’s products from France: colognes, perfumes and beauty creams, and other products like corsets and hair-removers. Advertisements for Spanish products were mostly for pharmaceuticals, such as a large number of pills and other remedies for stomach ache, bronchitis, anaemia, toothache, and so on. After the turn of the century, with certain taboos about feminine intimacy having been overcome, adverts appeared for pharmaceuticals to remedy problems exclusive to women, such as labour pains or period pains. When women began to take care of their bodies as regards health, sport and beauty, products were advertised for making women’s bodies more beautiful, achieving statuesque physiques, improving their bust, and so on.

Besides the wide variety of products for the body, there was also a series of products for other purposes, such as transforming the home, making housework easier, improving women’s education, presenting new commercial establishments, and so on. The products advertised are mostly furniture and decorative accessories; sewing and embroidery machines (Spanish and foreign makes); typewriters; cleaning materials (soap, polish); washing machines; language, general knowledge and shorthand academies, and books.

The advertisements presented the products, pointing out their advantages and high quality. They gradually introduced a liking for change and a curiosity about all that was new and modern coming onto the market. To describe the products they were advertising they used phrases such as: “wonderful machine”, “superior materials”, “incomparable”, “extremely elegant”, “practical and simple”, “unique, special and exclusive”, “a masterpiece of human ingenuity”, “really economical”, “quick and convenient” “nothing beats it”, “quality and perfection”, “without getting tired”. To describe the positive consequences of using these products: “forever young”, “beauty”, “a healthy mouth”, “smooth white skin”, “20 years old forever”, “beautiful healthy teeth”, “pleasant feeling”, “slender shapely figure”, “relaxed living”, “enjoy the pleasure of sport”. And they never forgot that they were advertising new, modern products: “ahead of its time”, “the latest invention”, “from Paris”, “modern hygiene treatment”, “now fashionable in Barcelona”, “in vogue in New York”, “latest novelties”.

The quality was backed up with phrases like “science tells us”, “what the doctor says” or “the products have been analysed and approved by the top municipal laboratories in Spain”. They also mentioned the product’s origins or the make: “American machine”, “Wertheim machines”, “Schweizer embroidery”, “Bouilleur hot water supplier”, “Steinway & Sons pianos”, and they obviously proclaimed the international acknowledgement obtained: “winner of the 1st Medal”, “Grand Prix Diploma at the National Pharmacy and Hygiene Competition in Barcelona”, “Paris and Berlin. Grand Prix in Gold Medal”, “Grand Prix Election Berne 1914”.

Via women’s magazines, advertising, the undisputed medium for presenting new products and ideas at the time, displayed the latest developments clearly, quickly and directly. We could say that women’s magazines helped to introduce everything that was modern, up to date and new to everyday life.

Interlopers in the modern home

Using the word “interloper”, as Isabel Campi does to refer to the appliances that were constantly being introduced to the home,³⁴ in this section I shall analyse the various “modern interlopers” that women’s magazines showed their readers in the period we are studying, 1900-1936. I am referring specifically to those that, thanks to technology, made housework and chores easier and helped people enjoy life more fully, according to the advertisements. To do this, I have chosen the products that were advertised most persistently and which I consider to have been the most innovative. They are:

1) Sewing and embroidery machines: several companies presented these machines. They were mostly foreign brands such as Wertheim, Naumann, Köhler and Durkopp, but there were also Catalan ones like Santasusana, Alpha, La Mecánica and Videns.

2) Lighting: there was a wide range and each one tried to distinguish itself from the others by the method used to produce light. We find petrol lamps, gas lights and electric lights. Light without the smell was mentioned.

3) Kitchenware: in this section we find cooking rings, gas ones by Dinkie and petrol ones by Volcán. There were also devices for making soda water at home (Prana Sparkets Sifon) or boiling water (Bouilleur), pure aluminium pots and pans (Quillet), Bavarian crockery (Quillet) and kitchen knives (Quillet).

4) Washing machines: steam ones were advertised and they stressed the functions of boiling, disinfecting and cleaning (Emilio Jahr).

5) Radiators and stoves: the radiators were powered by hydroelectric steam (Velotherm) and stoves were advertised as an ideal form of heating.

6) Typewriters: from abroad, like the American one (L.C. Smith-Visible).

7) Talking machines: within the wide range of talking machines, phonographs and gramophones stood out. They were advertised as machines that allowed people to listen to music and plays at home, and which made learning foreign languages easier; therefore, some language academies advertised them in the leaflets in which they presented their courses. In this field, we find Spanish and foreign makes. Odeón was the most important maker of discs adapted to these devices.

8) Baths: at that time they became very important because it was the period when good hygiene habits were beginning to be introduced. We find different easy-to-install models; water-heating baths were the big novelty.

9) Water sterilizers: the advertising jargon always referred to health: if the hygienic quality of the water is improved, fewer diseases are contracted.

10) Refrigerators: this is a product associated with comfort (Electrolux) and modern hygiene that made them essential for preventing stomach problems during hot weather (Ideal).

11) Vacuum cleaners and floor polishers: they were presented as elements of comfort indispensable for modern homes (by Electrolux).

12) Radio receivers: they did not appear until the 1930s, the case of a couple that provided hours of happiness at home (Kolster International); the purity of the sound was mentioned.

Fig. 2 An Electrolux advert. Three elements of comfort. Floor polisher. Vacuum cleaner. Refrigerator. Published in El Hogar y la Moda, 15 June 1929. Private collection.

Fig. 3 An advert for a Kolster International radio. Published in El Hogar y la Moda. 25 February 1933. Private collection.

Consumption and design

In making this thorough review of the advertisements published by the magazines analysed, we have seen that the introduction of new household appliances was still somewhat in the minority between 1900 and 1936 in comparison with other products. In amongst the hygiene, beauty and fashion products, new appliances regularly appeared that were the result of technological progress and which were advertised either to make housework easier, or for looking after one’s health and hygiene; in a word, to make living at home “comfortable”. It is interesting to see that the word “comfortable” no longer referred to upholstery or the heavy curtains that prevented sunlight from entering in order to preserve the furniture, so characteristic of nineteenth-century homes; it was now used for functions such as making cleaning easier, brightening up rooms and contributing to the physical wellbeing of those living in them. For a bourgeois society such as the Catalan, which now felt a longing for modernity and a desire for change after so many years stuck in the past, all these new appliances arrived with an air of newness, bearing a promise of wellbeing. They were presented as innovations, and indeed they were. They represented to perfection the concept of technological innovation that generates new things, not just replacing those that already existed. Moreover, they had been created to find rational and functional solutions to specific needs, and so their function, in these early days, was the principal, most important advertising angle.

Advertising urged people to consume these new appliances, stressing the wellbeing that they generated, their functionality, but also the pleasure of consuming and using them. Therefore, good reasons to buy them ranged from an increase in domestic comfort to the aesthetic quality of the product, but they were already emphasizing the importance of individual choice with regard to what they really were, a novelty.³⁵ For all these reasons, it could perfectly well be said that deep down, the advertisements published in women’s magazines from 1900 to 1936 were seeking virtually the same objectives as those that we find in women’s magazines today. From a historical point of view, however, there are things that place them in and of their time. Then they were authentic novelties, things that had never existed and whose use had to be explained.

In Search of Product Identity: Noucentisme and Cultural Policy¹

Mercè Vidal i Jansà

In the years from the beginning of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, two significant events took place. They were the proclamation of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya (1914), which provided a certain degree of self-government with respect to the centralism of the Spanish state, and the restoration of the Generalitat (1931), in the context of the Second Spanish Republic. Both political situations enabled Catalonia to make an important qualitative and quantitative leap forward in all areas, from education to the economy. However, we must also bear in mind that it was not a continuous period: it was interrupted by the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), which had regressive and repressive consequences for all areas of society. After the proclamation of the Second Republic (1931), what had been initiated earlier was resumed. Therefore, knowledge of the political developments is fundamentally important in order to understand how brief the period was in which processes took shape that tended to parallel twentieth-century Europe, but had a limited amount of time in which to develop.

Artistically speaking, in the first decade of the twentieth century the regeneration of taste signified by the period of Modernisme (begun in the last third of the nineteenth century) was seen as an attempt at modernity, but at the same time with too many foreign elements, whether because of the importance of foreign movements that acted as direct points of reference, such as Art Nouveau and/or the Modern Style, or the penetration of a market, above all the Central European, that to some extent held sway in domestic environments. This climate of disorientation was even felt among young architecture and design graduates with regard to styles that were seen as outmoded, since they were considered to be hangovers from the nineteenth century. In 1903 the architect Jeroni Martorell (1877-1951) expressed certain doubts in several speeches and essays when comparing figures such as Otto Wagner and Otto Rieth.² He valued what Otto Wagner signified – he paved the way for the entire Viennese Secessionist movement and the creation of the Wiener Werkstätte workshops directed by Hoffmann – and the underlying recovery of the classical aspects of Viennese tradition; Otto Rieth on the other hand was more in tune with the Art Nouveau style. Jeroni Martorell, therefore, valued Otto Wagner’s consideration of his country’s own tradition and he seems to have deemed this a good example to be applied in Catalonia.

The alternative to imitating foreign models and styles involved, as we shall see, taking Catalonia as a point of reference, but with the effectiveness represented by Central European innovations. In 1913, another witness to the period, in this case the art critic of La Veu de Catalunya, and later historian and museologist, Joaquim Folch i Torres (1886-1963), produced an overview of the previous decades and came back to the same theme: “The 1888 Exhibition saw the start of the German penetration, the very new art of Otto Rieth and Otto Wagner, and more recently Olbrich, the famous architect of the Darmstadt colony”.³ No longer was it merely Wagner’s Vienna – the Darmstadt colony of artists that had just been formed in 1901 was taken to be a sign of modernity and a model for the unification of the world of the industrial arts. This shows us that there was knowledge, sometimes even direct, of what was happening in Central Europe. One must also include the architect from Girona Rafael Masó (1880-1935)⁴ in this brief list of points of reference. In 1912, while on his honeymoon, as well as visiting the usual places (Verona, Venice and Florence) he also saw an opportunity for study that took him to Germany to visit the Matildenhöhe in Darmstadt and the Hellerau furniture factory. This first-hand knowledge confirmed him in his aesthetic ideas and he considered the Deutsche Werkbund to be far more interesting. Some of his works would be influenced directly by those Central European examples, although this did not prevent him from being a defender of popular traditions and reclaiming them.

A basic tool: the training of industrialists

Throughout the nineteenth century, if the debate and the links between art and industry became important with respect to what was meant by competition in the products available in the markets, whether due to their quality or their characteristics, there can be no doubt that behind it all there was a training system that was regarded as basic. In Catalonia, the promotion and the organization of the teaching of the industrial arts really gathered momentum at the beginning of the twentieth century. Firstly, the Industrial School of Barcelona was created in 1904. Despite the fact that the government’s budgets were meagre and funding by the Diputació and Barcelona City Council was necessary, it was free to employ specialists from both Catalonia and abroad.⁵ To this end effective professionals were sought, who would become its teaching staff.

The preparation and establishment of the Industrial School began with the committee formed initially by Josep Albert Barret, August de Rull and Emili Riera, which was set up in 1901 after the law by which industrial schools were created in Spain was passed. The Ministry of Public Works (Foment del Treball) set up this committee to publish the guidelines through its journal, El Trabajo Nacional,⁶ which was already talking about the wish to create a “Technical University”, one of the names by which the Industrial School of Barcelona would eventually be known, as well as the “New University”.

Secondly, in 1907 Enric Prat de la Riba, the president of the Diputació de Barcelona (provincial government) – and of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya a few years later – gave it crucial backing, as he was wholly convinced that “technical education is a modern form of education”. In the presidential Memòria of 1910 and in 1912 in Mancomunitats⁷ he stated:

[…] we need a major industrial education centre in which our industrialists and our artisans of all kinds can be trained, in both the professions where the people’s skill is the machine, and in those in which they find the elements of technical skill, the scientific basis of their profession or of their industry and knowledge of art and good taste applicable to every speciality.

This was when the Industrial School was elevated to the rank of Industrial University, and within it the way was clear for the creation of different technical schools.

The Textile Industries Section was the first to begin functioning; it was the most important industry in Catalonia. Nevertheless, classes did not start properly until the beginning of October 1910. Art History classes were given to provide a more complete education. The press dwelt on these aspects:

It is necessary, then, to invest artistically in collective work, which is in short the art of the machine, considering it to be a tool for meeting modern social needs […]. Let us once and for all create the art of the machine, which will be the art of our democracies, and which, as the direct result of our period, we may compare with the sumptuary art shown us by periods of seigniorial rule.⁸

Repetition is by no means an element of contempt; it understands that all forms have a rhythm and it must be sought:

This is how the English Pattern was created, and the great manufactured goods of Egypt; the forms of their naturalistic art rhymed, in beautiful compositions of continuous motifs, so we must organize these small crumbs of our sensibility, the forms that we create.

In the period of Noucentisme, the debate in the world of the industrial arts about what could be called “design”⁹ became especially interesting, as it was the moment when the decision was made to respond to the international market with the creation of Catalonia’s own products, clearly showing not only “good taste” but also an identifying brand – aesthetic reasons that corresponded to the ideal of simplicity and political reasons that sought an identity in tradition. Moreover, the debate was not restricted to disseminating ideas in low-circulation media, such as specialist journals. Its scope grew broader when the newspapers became interested in it, and La Veu de Catalunya played an outstanding part in this process through its Pàgina Artística, which was the mouthpiece of the dominant political party, the Lliga Regionalista.

Speaking about the Barcelona School of Textile Industries, Alexandre Galí said:

[…] it became completely different from the other similar schools on the site and even from the two state schools where textiles was taught […]. Those who were in one way or another linked to the profession went there […] it was, then, a class-based school perfectly adapted to Catalan industry in which the bosses managed their own factories, and for the auxiliary tasks they could make use of the experts coming out of the official schools.10

And so, the sons of the factory bosses, who would later be bosses too, went there. The artist and educationalist that we find in charge of the Textiles Department teaching the subject “Artistic drawing applied to textiles” was Francesc Canyellas (1889-1938),¹¹ who remained there for more than 20 years. He was trained in France, Italy, Belgium and Germany. In 1912 he set out on the journey to Germany to get to know the main industrial technical schools. As an educationalist he also disseminated his ideas through La Veu de Catalunya,¹² where he said that he took life drawing and repetitive samples of exotic fabrics as models, clearly showing the constructive nature of industrial drawing as a result of mechanization:

Our study of Art applied to fabrics is therefore to be found right in the midst of the noise of the machines that in the end have become our loyal friends, from which we will never again be separated. Around them our conversations get mixed up with the colorants and sulfactures. Needles, cards and jacquards are spoken of, as well as damasks and brocatelles from Lyon, the beautiful examples that are made in other countries and those that have been made in the past.

Giving the Art History classes that were soon to become the subject “the History of Fabrics” was the historian and museologist Joaquim Folch i Torres,¹³ who guided knowledge of textiles by organizing students’ visits to the Barcelona Museum of Art. Josep Pascó i Mensa’s outstanding textiles collection had been purchased in 1912, at the express request of Enric Prat de la Riba. Apart from enriching the museum, this acquisition was meant to be a mainstay for the training of the school’s future industrialists. The basic educational principles shunned all deliquescence and ornamentality that did not stem from the systematic analysis of the shapes of beings, whether animate or inanimate: as with the idealism of Noucentisme art became a moralizing, and at the same time a socializing and democratic asset. We could place the new Noucentista aesthetic within these parameters, since it tended stylistically to highlight the structural and constructive value of forms.

Furniture and interior design

Another sector, furniture making and interior design, became important in the debate about the new artistic trends as a result of the idea by the sculptors’ and carvers’ associations of Barcelona to hold a Carved Projects and Furniture exhibition at the end of 1910. The Cabinetmakers’ Association soon joined in this initiative, whose vice-presidents were Joan Esteva (1874-1957), of Casa Esteva i Companyia,¹⁴ at that time one of the most renowned companies in Barcelona, and Joan Busquets i Jané (1874-1949), a distinguished furniture maker of Casa Busquets.¹⁵ The initial idea gradually moved towards an International Exhibition of Furniture and Interiors that it was hoped to put on in 1913, but which in the end did not take place until 1923,¹⁶ due to the outbreak of the First World War. The debate took place in the pages of La Veu de Catalunya and La Publicidad, and it tells us a great deal about what was going on in Barcelona in those years. For example, it was said that the public was interested in artistic matters and that the press (especially the newspapers) had contributed to it. But it was also clear that “the sin of foreignness is widespread in the work of the furniture makers in this country”, as Joan Busquets claimed,¹⁷ and Antoni Saló¹⁸ believed that as it was to be an exhibition of interiors the other industrial arts should also be represented in it, not just cabinetmaking. Obviously, one of the most important voices in the new trends was that of Joaquim Folch i Torres, who wrote, “Our artistic principles are profoundly, radically traditionalist in the essentials and structuralist in the formats”.¹⁹ Above all he believed that if it was held and became international, there would first have to be a regeneration of furniture-making art, making the point of asking how they wished to compete with furniture if all they did was copy foreign models. Indeed, there was a lack of character in Catalan furniture and the Catalan house, which was where the real tradition lay, and towards which production had to turn: “One has go in search of models in situ, make drawings of them, take photographs of them, study them and then bring them up to date”.²⁰

In August 1912 Folch, with this set of Noucentista ideas, gave a speech to the Cabinetmakers’ Association in which he said: “I think that the regeneration of all the fine crafts has to begin here […] there is no shortage of artists here, but a lack of direction, of knowledge about our traditions, understanding of the characteristics of Catalan furniture”. And obviously, this look at Catalonia’s own traditions meant:

We must not imitate the forms of other countries but the process they have used to create them; not the object, but the slow task of extracting the spiritual essence of the people. […] We should not reject the lessons that come to us from more powerful nations; all lessons are welcome, all foreign examples! But we have to say “Welcome to Catalonia” and in order to say that there first has to be a Catalonia: seeing as it does not presently exist, there first needs to be a collective personality.

And he ended by remarking:

The path, the true path is Popular Art. Young architects have set out on the path, but our industrialists have not. Just as men of letters have made our language an instrument of cultural expression, we too must refine, ennoble and adapt these rural examples to life. A compilation must be made of all the works of Popular Art, to take from them the universally valuable modern harmonies.21

The debate that this future exhibition had generated, and the fact that Joaquim Folch i Torres saw that models had to be rediscovered in the country’s tradition in order to produce works that would be an expression of the country’s identity, by taking popular art as the source of regeneration, was not too different from the scene taking shape in other countries in those years.

Fig. 1 Interior of the Jaume Balmes People’s Library in Vic, designed in 1922 by Ramon Puig Gairalt (now demolished). The furniture was presented at the Barcelona Furniture Exhibition (1923) as an example of the decor of the People’s Libraries.

Before the First World War broke out, some industrial arts exhibitions – such as the “Ideal Home” held at Olympia in London (1913), which included a section devoted to Russian popular art, or the issues that the magazine The Studio (1910-1913), entitled “Peasant Art of Europe”, dedicated to presenting examples and products from different nationalities (Sweden, Iceland, Lapland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Italy) – corresponded to this national pattern, but generally speaking an ethnographical and folkloric approach prevailed. On the other hand, the Noucentista aesthetic ideal looked to these popular sources, conceptualizing and analysing the forms in order to take from them, based on this study, an updated modern idea. Hence, as I have said already, the fact that the tendency was towards a certain formal simplicity corresponds to the wish to focus attention on the aspects that value structure, the construction of forms, which remove anything ornamental and superfluous from them. Over the years, it would be precisely this quest for simplicity, in architecture, furniture making and interior design – remember the competition promoted by the FAD entitled “The Beauty of the Modest Home”²² – that enabled many Noucentistes to move towards moderate modernity, towards what the avant-garde dismissed as the “false modern”, but which a majority saw as “modern”: Art Déco. Therefore, two models coexisted, which in some cases would be re-readings of the furniture of the rural world, even of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and on the other hand, the more “cultured” one maintained a liking for what was “foreign”.

If the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs emerged from the exhibition held in Paris in 1900, now, in 1913, the plan was to put on a major exhibition that was to take place in 1916 in the French capital, but the political situation forced it to be postponed until 1925. It was the exhibition that this “false modern style”, Art Déco, was named after. However, whether via the magazines that were arriving in Barcelona in which many of the decorative projects of people like Louis Süe, Ruhlmann or André Maré were reproduced, this style had made a great impact on Catalan taste, above all among the Barcelona bourgeoisie, who demanded it from local furniture makers. But we should also be aware that in what the French were presenting there were formal and stylistic aspects that were quite concomitant with the styles of Noucentisme, something that led some decorators and furniture makers to create pieces along these lines. Thus, when the International Exhibition of Furniture and Interiors eventually took place in 1923, our furniture makers obtained recognition there: this was the case of Josep Palau i Oller (1888-1961);²³ Antoni Badrinas (1882-1969) (with whom he worked on the application of inlay in furniture), painters such as Josep Obiols and Marià Espinal, and also prestigious interior decorators like Santiago Marco (1885-1949), president of the FAD (1921-1949) and about whom the first monographic study would be published in 1926, written by Joaquim Folch i Torres.²⁴ And Josep Mainar (1899-1996), who started out in interior decoration in 1928 and worked with Santiago Marco in the 1930s.

Noucentista Aesthetic Idealization: from the Small Object to the Big City

In the climate of euphoria that the proclamation of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya had generated, and at the same time of increased awareness of applied art, in the middle of 1914 a manifesto was published, entitled Manifest de El Gremi de les Arts Aplicades (Manifesto of the Guild of the Applied Arts), that was addressed to all the citizens of Barcelona and all the Catalans and which stated the following:

The architects, sculptors and painters that are members of the Applied Arts Guild, with regard to the plastic nature that unites their arts, announce to you a common endeavour. […] The Guild’s objective is to make the city beautiful and its work will be addressed to equipping it with new street furniture worthy of our traditions, its own ceramics, tasteful fabrics, good embossed dies, books that are as good to look at as they are to read, beautiful mural paintings, pretty glass items, large buildings and gardens with everything in which plastic beauty is expressed.²⁵

The signatories of the manifesto were Francesc d’Assís Galí, Xavier Nogués, Josep Aragay, Ramon Reventós, Francesc Labarta, Francesc Canyellas, Jaume Llongueras and one Comas.

Through this manifesto we see that the artists are eager to get involved in the social changes that were being promoted by politicians and, therefore, the artistic sector publicly proclaims the union of all the Arts (major and minor); they are also eager to turn creativity into art involved in “making what is useful beautiful”, as Noucentista thinking had it, and, allying themselves with education, to convert the new schools and classrooms – by making, as was also said, “school beautiful” – into places where schoolchildren, through aesthetic education – imbued with echoes of Schiller – would attain new civic values and could be taught by the beauty of the place.

We find the majority of the signatories giving classes at the Higher School of Fine Art, which had been created on 18 May that year on the site of the Industrial University, or directing it. Lastly, public sculpture began to appear in the urban landscape, as did fountains – remember the one in Avinguda del Portal de l’Àngel, by Josep Aragay – and also urban gardens designed and laid out by Nicolau M. Rubió i Tudurí.26

In 1917 Barcelona City Council embarked upon a wide-ranging policy of school building via the Culture Committee (created in 1916) to alleviate the high degree of illiteracy and the precarious state of the few existing schools. The plans for these schools in Barcelona (Àngel Baixeras, Pere Vila, La Farigola, Lluís Vives, Baldiri Reixach, Milà i Fontanals and Lluïsa Cura, Bonaventura Aribau, Ramon Llull, Dolors Monserdà, Francesc Pi i Margall, Jacint Verdaguer, Escola Maternal Forestier, Escola del Mar and Escola del Bosc, Collasso i Gil) were scattered around different neighbourhoods of the city and for their construction they had bequests from private individuals. The architect Josep Goday (1882-1936) planned them;²⁷ one of his principal collaborators in the designs of the interiors was Francesc Canyellas. In the final resolution the aesthetic ideal of “making what is useful beautiful” was obvious, as was that of responding to the new guidelines of modern educational theory (Montessori, Decroly, Dewey). Just a few small details: mural paintings, terracotta, sgraffiti, tiles, fountains and landscaped areas. The furniture was designed adapting it above all to the different places and the different functions.²⁸ To some extent the models revived rural models for chairs (wood and cane; twisted palm in the seats and backrests) and armchairs; in other objects (chairs, desks, benches) lathe turning was used, which in its formal resolution recalled Castilian furniture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In others, in the 1920s and the early 1930s, solutions close to rationalism were adopted. However, the Noucentista style that highlighted structural and constructive value, simple and useful decorative refinement, was the characteristic common to all this interior design. To produce it they had the services of two manufacturers: Construccions Pere Borrell and Mobiliario Sayos Hermanos.

In the construction of infrastructures promoted by Prat de la Riba’s government, we must not forget to mention the building of people’s libraries all over the country. In these buildings, although with regard to the building models one detects a very clear adherence to the classical spirit as though they were new “temples of art”, in the interior design (chairs, desks, shelves, ceramics) we once again see that connection between the rural world and rationalist simplicity.

The Higher School of Fine Crafts

Finally, Enric Prat de la Riba’s aspirations since 1910 of renewing the arts and crafts were effectively satisfied. On 23 April 1914, the Council of Educational Research, which had just been created, began to outline the programme for this future school. Once again, Joaquim Folch i Torres had a lot to do with it, because, as has been pointed out in several studies, the school project was closely related to the contacts established in London, near the Royal College, and to what he had seen in Central Europe during 1913 and 1914 on the six-month study trip that he had made, with the support of the JAE (Study Extension and Scientific Research Board, in Madrid).²⁹ The educationalist and artist Francesc d’Assís Galí was made the director of the school.

Fig. 2 Higher School of Fine Crafts, a fabrics class, 1916. Published on the Pàgina Artística of La Veu de Catalunya.

The different branches of the study plan corresponded to the following specializations:³⁰ “Earth Arts” (ceramic coverings, pottery, including faience, stoneware and porcelain), glassmaking, stained and enamelled glassware. The person in charge of this area was the French professor Alexandre Bigot, Doctor of Chemical Sciences from the University of Paris. One of his principal collaborators was the engineer Ramon Oliveres i Massó, professor of the Barcelona School of Industrial Engineers and a chemistry specialist. The other specializations were “Wood Arts” (cabinetmaking, carpentry in general, woodcarving); “Metal Arts” (locksmithing, forge work, iron constructions, bronze casting, silversmithing, casting, engraving and embossing; “Fabrics and leather Arts” (artistic tapestry, closely woven fabrics, stitching, embroidery, printing, leather embossing), and “Garden arts and architectural sculpture”. Women’s courses were also planned; the Fabrics Arts section was recommended mainly, and it was added that, “Ceramics and other arts are also highly suited to women’s usual skills”. Among the school’s teaching staff were Esteve Monegal, Joaquim Folch i Torres, Feliu Cardellach, Ramon Reventós, Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí, Tomàs Aymat, Ramon Sunyer, Rafael Solanic, Francesc Quer, Josep Ugarte, Feliu Elias, Antoni Serra and Ferran Tarragó. Its director was Francesc d’Assís Galí, as we have said, with Josep Llorens Artigas as secretary.

Fig. 3 Silk tapestry work. Original by F.G. Gurina, 1915. Published on the Pàgina Artística of La Veu de Catalunya.

The school’s courses lasted three years, with a final examination that students had to do before a board of examiners. Classes were given in classrooms and classroom-workshops. The “higher” category clearly corresponded to the change from an artisanal to a professional approach. In this respect, specific subjects led to specialization in each of the listed branches, but it had also been commonly established that it would be necessary to attend workshops and laboratories of the other crafts to which each student’s craft was most closely related, to get some idea of all of them. For example, in the case of ceramics students had to attend specific chemistry classes in the Faculty of Chemistry. Today, when transversality is spoken about so much, we can see that the Higher School of Fine Crafts already saw it as a product of interdisciplinarity and of interconnection with other centres (Industrial University, Higher School of Agriculture, Faculty of Chemistry, of Engineering).

In order to be admitted to the school candidates were required to have a level of knowledge provided by the batxillerat and to have studied certain subjects at the Industrial University; likewise, it was also necessary to know French. The school opened in 1915, and to begin with there were only 13 students; by the academic year 1918-1919 this number had risen to 31 and in the last year that it functioned, 1922-1923, there were 48.³¹ Once again, political circumstances, in the form of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, destroyed the entire project as the school was closed. The example of what it could provide had spread all over the country, so that similar bodies had been created and had adopted the new educational theories in vogue in Europe in those years. All in all it placed Catalonia, within the Spanish state, at the forefront of innovation in art teaching in the field of the industrial arts.

The Barcelona International Exhibition of Furniture (1923) and the Beauty of the Modest Home¹

Alícia Suárez

The subject of this article stems principally from the retrieval² of a series of articles that the painter and critic Rafael Benet (1888-1979) published in La Veu de Catalunya, commenting on the International Exhibition of Furniture and Interior Design.³ The newspaper La Veu de Catalunya was, from 1899 to 1936, the most important media platform of the period, controlled by the Catalanist bourgeoisie and its political party, the Lliga Regionalista.

This first point was reinforced by Enric Bricall’s observation relative to Catalan design’s lack of historical culture and the absence of reflection about its past, about its precedents.⁴ If we add the fact that furniture takes pride of place in the most important design museums⁵, it seems clear that the International Exhibition of Furniture and Interior Design organized in 1923 in Barcelona merits attention from the perspective of our research.

As Robert Bordaz points out, there is no exhibition that does not entail taking a stance and having the purpose of serving the national interest.⁶ With respect to this, the origins of the Furniture Exhibition date back to the plan to mount a second Universal Exhibition that gained widespread acceptance in Barcelona in the years leading up to outbreak of the First World War in the rest of Europe. After the success and the positive balance of the first exhibition, in 1888, after the turn of the century people began to discuss the idea of putting on a second exhibition. The decision was finally taken in 1914 to begin preparations and it was to be set up on Montjuïc.7

It should be noted that through the Pàgina Artística of La Veu de Catalunya⁸ we know about a previous initiative by the Cabinetmakers’ Association to organize an International Exhibition of Furniture in Barcelona in 1914, an initiative that, as you can see, would have coincided that year with the municipal one. Joaquim Folch i Torres used his articles about the cabinetmakers’ project⁹ in his campaign in support of national art through popular art:

Furniture makers,” he says, “are faced with two problems. The first is the foreign invasion, which they have caused and which, starting as an artistic invasion would have ended up being a commercial invasion (because it is already becoming one). The other one is the affirmation of their own personality and with it the awakening of their own artistic traditions, and behind it the creation of a formal type, [and he recommends] establishing a photographic study of furniture and the Catalan house in which, just as musicians do with popular songs, they include the basic ingredients, the degree of ‘Catalaness’ that will make our furniture modern, Catalan and artistically universal at the same time.

Work soon began to develop the mountain of Montjuïc and get it ready for what was initially planned as an Exhibition of Electrical Industries, designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, the third most renowned Modernista architect. The interruption of everything caused by the war in 1914 made them think of opening it in 1917. As is well known, it eventually became the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929.

By 1923 the two symmetrical pavilions were already built that we know today as Alfons XIII and Victòria Eugènia, but at that time they were the Palau de l’Art Modern and the Palau de l’Art Industrial. It was decided to put on some monographic exhibitions, “marking out the path towards the definite exhibition with flags and pavilions of every country. Let us prepare and hold these partial exhibitions, such as the furniture one, that unite beauty with usefulness”.¹⁰ Pere Bohigas i Tarragó, who was the secretary of the Furniture Exhibition, gives us many details of the entire process,¹¹ including for example that the organization of the first monographic furniture exhibition was approved in 1922. The city councillor Casimir Giralt, who was also an industrial furniture maker, played an outstanding role on the Culture Committee.

The aim of the exhibition was – as is clearly stated in the introduction to the catalogue – to publicize:

a) The historical precedents and the artistic heritage that exists in Spain with regard to furniture and interior design.

b) The current overall state of the furniture industry, the decorative arts of interior design and the production of art objects applied to furniture and interior decoration.

Fig. 1 Poster by Francesc Galí to publicize the exhibition abroad. Private collection.

The catalogue announces the holding of a décor and furniture competition “the elements of which may be obtained as inexpensively as possible within the bounds of good taste”. This competition, which was called “For the Beauty of the Modest Home”, is, in my opinion, the Furniture Exhibition’s most important contribution.

The International Exhibition of Furniture and Interior Design was opened on 13 September 1923 – shortly after the military coup led by General Primo de Rivera – ¹² and closed on 2 December of that year. According to Bohigas i Tarragó, it was visited on average by 8,050 people every day. Needless to say, great care was taken with the publicity materials, with posters by artists Francesc Galí, Ricart Canals, Feliu Elias and Oleguer Junyent, all of them well-known painters. It was also promoted abroad: C. Giralt, M. Rubió and Vidal i Guardiola travelled to Germany, Austria, France and England, and M. Rubió, to Paris. Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands were also visited.13

The exhibition curators were the politicians Francesc Cambó and Joan Pich i Pon; the site director was the architect Eduard Ferrés, aided by architects Raventós, Moragas and Térmens, and the artistic director was Oleguer Junyent.

In accordance with the stated objectives, the exhibition was divided into three sections:

1) Retrospective.

2) Furniture and modern interior designs

3) Specialist furniture, office equipment, artistic and decorative objects, machinery and industrial furniture-making techniques.

The Retrospective Section was a sort of history of furniture, with a series of rooms decorated with authentic pieces from the respective periods, from the Romanesque to Romanticism. Rafael Benet found the settings over-elaborate. For his part, about this same section, the commentator of the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà said:

[…] towards the end of the nineteenth century a general disorientation everywhere pretended to be the standard of a new style called Modernista, which died out a few years later, not without leaving, however, something useful. As a reaction against Modernisme, we turned once again to the antique, but with an antiquarian’s or a reproducer’s eye. Thus we are hoping that another reaction, which the present Furniture Exhibition successfully causes, will guide us definitely towards either a reaction with regard to the forms of popular furniture, elevating it – with richer materials and the intervention of the artisanal classes – to the category of civic or “gentleman’s” furniture, which might give it a style of our own, emancipating it from the never-ending historicist styles; or, at least, nationalizing them, as, with instinctive cunning, the cabinetmakers of Barcelona were able to do in the first third of the nineteenth century, creating the most beautiful “Barcelona Empire”. And if this does not happen, because it is not as easy as it seems, let our makers of humble craftsman’s furniture concern themselves with it. Where the rich man wants historical furniture, the craftsman desires comfortable, simple, pretty, unpretentious furniture. Though it might not seem so, he will find a practical and spacious kitchen cabinet and some comfortable, graciously shaped rush seat chairs far more pleasant and convenient than twee chairs with velvet or cheap upholstery or a sideboard with stained-glass doors – a thousand times or more than all the Modernista or Viennese imitations.14

I have reproduced a large part of the text from D’Ací i d’Allà because I feel that it sums up the Catalan cultural context very well with regard to what we would now call furniture design and which emerged at the Furniture Exhibition.

The author points out in his own way the overcoming of nineteenth-century historicism by the Modernista style understood as the Catalan version of Art Nouveau or Modern Style, and the subsequent historicist reaction against Modernisme, and he ends by highlighting the impasse in expectation of a further reaction that the exhibition might cause. He concludes by coming out in favour of simple, modest, popular furniture.

From this perspective, the articles by Rafael Benet supply us with other interesting facts. As the well-researched art critic that he was, he has a very balanced attitude towards tradition and the avant-garde. About the second section devoted to modern furniture, after rejecting the imitations of antique styles, he stresses the French contribution, and he particularly mentions Jacques Ruhlmann, Süe and Mare, Maurice Marinot and Maurice Dufrêne. As we see, they were the most outstanding names of Art Déco. This means that before the year the style was born, 1925, it was possible to appreciate Art Déco creations in Barcelona, something that perhaps explains why Santiago Marco,¹⁵ for example, adopted it very early on.

Another datum contributed by Rafael Benet is to be found under the heading “The New Spirit”, and he virtually transcribes the writings of Le Corbusier when he says:

Nothing is so beautiful as modern mechanical equipment, which corresponds to a first unique structural law in which rhetoric plays soberly without pleonasms. This brief rhetoric plays, in the law of bones and ornamentation, and it is basic (Doric, to use nomenclature thinking of the planner). Just as the automobile, the aeroplane and the express railway locomotive correspond in all their lines to the law of usefulness, so the hygienic facilities and the safes exhibited at the Exhibition in Barcelona are the most beautiful things in the Furniture Exhibition, because they have no pretensions to oratory.¹⁶

This functionalist proclamation shows that Rafael Benet was familiar with the journal L’Esprit Nouveau, which we know arrived in Barcelona via the French Bookshop, and which the avant-garde critic Sebastià Gasch also knew – like Dalí – “to the extent of being able to recite from memory the doctrines of the men of L’Esprit Nouveau”, in Gasch’s own words.17

The Modest Home Section

Santiago Marco, who at that time was the president of the FAD (Foment de les Arts Decoratives), played an outstanding role in the Furniture Exhibition, first and foremost because his stand (a tearoom), installed in the second section – the one devoted to modern furniture and interiors – won the Grand Prix. Rafael Benet mentions him along with his collaborators: Ricart (marbles), Casas (woodwork), Aymat (upholstery), Bracons (lacquerwork) and Biosca (bronzes); and, secondly, above all because he was the promoter along with members of the FAD of the competition prior to the exhibition to choose projects for the Modest Home Section. He was also behind a publication that is interesting because, in its desire to give guidance, it includes examples of what had been done abroad and what already existed in Catalonia.¹⁸ The photos of a modest Dutch house presented at the Garden City Exhibition in London in 1905, or those of the competition for decoration and furniture for the modest home organized in 1920, also in London, are significant examples of a theme that was already present internationally and which Barcelona included in its Furniture Exhibition.

Fig. 2 The FAD’s plan for a dining room. Published in “For the Beauty of the Modest Home”, Barcelona. Private collection.

Rafael Benet did not like the term “the Modest Home” because he associated it with a poor person’s house or cheaply built houses; he would have found it more appropriate to call it “the Popular Home”, which is the basic direction that the FAD publication eventually took. Here, after commenting on the foreign and Catalan creations, he ends by pointing out that the greatest beauty lies in the greatest simplicity and that, on this basis, it will be easy to solve the problem of the modest home inexpensively and aesthetically. There are clear references to popular inspiration. Of the various comments it is interesting to mention the following one:

[…] see, casting your eyes over these photographs, how in Holland, England and the United States of America they have a kind of rush seat chair very similar to ours, and it seems that a certain tide of sympathy towards this material makes it gladly accepted in all the interiors in which a distinguished hand has been able to place, with spontaneous wisdom, the things necessary in life to beautify the human home, raising it to the high spheres of art.19

After that he refers to the farmhouse as a standard to be considered.

The simple, popular rush seat chair thus became a sort of icon of the section in the Furniture Exhibition of 1923. This was spotted by the curators of the Exhibition “Decorative Arts in Barcelona: Collections for a Museum” that was held in 1993 in Barcelona.²⁰ They exhibited the popular rush seat chair in the section entitled “Towards Modernity” and pointed out its use in the schools of the Noucentista period.²¹ It must be said, though, that in the original schools it was the same popular model but with a woven cord seat.

The historiography of architecture and design usually concentrates its gaze on popular art as one of the ways to break with historicism (the imitation of historical styles in the academic tradition). It is for this reason that in the work of some of the most significant authors – including those that Nikolaus Pevsner called “pioneers of modern design” (1936) – one finds creations related to the popular rush seat chair. Thus, W. Morris and the Sussex chair (circa 1865); C.R. Mackintosh and the high-backed chair (circa 1897) designed for the Argyle Street Tea Room in Glasgow; Henry van de Velde and the chairs for his house in Ucle, now in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin.

In Catalonia, with the Noucentista cultural policy of seeking a national art style through popular tradition,²² the rush seat chair was revived, as we have seen, in the Modest Home Section of the International Furniture Exhibition. This item of furniture thus became an important milestone in the history of Catalan design. Apart from the anonymous design, we also find it associated with a notable creator, the architect Rafael Masó, in the cord seat chairs for Casa Bru Masó (1912, 1916, 1921). And most particularly, we shall rediscover the most popular simple rush seat chair among the architects of the GATCPAC. In 1935, in issue number 19 of the journal AC (Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea), dedicated to how interiors had evolved, Josep Lluís Sert and Josep Torres Clavé incorporated it into their creations of “weekend” houses in El Garraf. Moreover, they reproduced some photographs of popular interiors very similar to those in the Modest Home Exhibition and they added beneath:

[…] popular furniture, with no stylistic pretentions, is, like popular architecture, a good example of the spirit that ought to inform today’s furniture making. The emotion of popular furniture comes from its human proportion, its simplicity, not trying to be something important. This spirit, with another technique, is worthy of being imitated.23

This assessment of popular furniture is forcefully present in the armchairs in the Republic’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition.

In a project focusing on design culture in Barcelona it seems obvious that the International Furniture Exhibition of 1923 is a clear nod towards what was to become modern design (to use Pevsner’s expression again), which Noucentisme, with its defence of popular art, promotes.

Carles Barral i Nualart (1879-1936): Poster Artist, Printer and Editorial Designer

Pau Medrano-Bigas
Doctor of Design, University of Barcelona. Member of GRACMON

Carles Barral i Nualart¹ was born in Barcelona on 1 February 1879, in the family home in Passeig de Gràcia. He was the youngest of the four children – Adelina, Alfonso, Lluís and Carles – of the businessman Eduardo Barral and María Nualart. Sometime later the family moved to Valladolid, where Mr Barral set up a horse-drawn tramcar business and a blacksmith’s forge. The enterprise turned out to be quite unprofitable, and so they had to return to Barcelona in 1897. It was not a frustrating return, as in spite of everything they maintained their status as a well-to-do family. Adelina died before the move and Alfonso, the eldest son, a civil engineer and society painter, did not return to Barcelona with the others. He did come back some years later, however, and died there.

During this period in Castile, the young Carles – who was then about 17 years old – studied art at the School of Fine Arts in Valladolid from 1895 to 1897, excelling in drawing classes.² He also seems to have been enrolled in other drawing and painting academies. Moreover, certain information supplied by the family tells us that upon his return to Barcelona in 1897 he continued studying fine arts at other art schools in the city.

In early adulthood the artist was to transfer this quest for creativity and his curiosity to the media of expression typical of his time, as he was a great fan of photography – which he used for research purposes and to improve illustrations – and of the home movie camera, with which he filmed his family’s life. His films of their summer holidays in the seaside village of Calafell, in Tarragona, where the family had a house by the beach, are a testimony to a period and to how difficult it was for a bourgeois family from the big city to fit in in a fishing village. His life was always associated with that of his elder brother Lluís Barral i Nualart (1870-1935), with whom he got on well and worked together. Despite the nine-year age gap they were inseparable.

Fig. 1 Photographic portrait of Carles Barral i Nualart, 1909. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The brief adventure with Adrià Gual and the Barral Herms. printing house

In October 1899 the brothers Barral started out in the lithographic printing business when they went into partnership with the versatile artist Adrià Gual i Queralt (1872-1943). He wished to bring in new blood to the workshop inherited from his father, Josep Gual i Savall, a Catalan draughtsman and lithographer born in Reus (Tarragona), trained in France and established in Barcelona. Josep Gual had run the Litografía Gual lithographic workshop since 1860, initially at number 8, Carrer Quintana, and from 1884 in premises at 18-19, Carrer Jonqueres. After his father’s death in 1895 Adrià Gual took over the business in which he had been working for several years.3

The workshop remained in business as Litografía Hijo de J. Gual, but the 20-year-old Adrià Gual was totally absorbed in other more creative interests associated with playwriting and the theatre. This scant motivation meant that the business was neglected, and it eventually failed. Nor did Gual intend to devote any more time and effort to it, as the only thing on his mind was a longed-for journey to Paris. It was in this context that the Taller Litográfico Gual y Barral⁴ was established, which, continuing with a financial situation more attributable to Gual than to the impetus of the new partners, did not turn the corner.5

After overcoming numerous financial problems, in 1901 the partnership was dissolved and the Barral brothers took over the business – including the obsolete machinery in the workshop – and changed its name to Barral Herms. They moved into premises on the ground floor of the building where the family lived, at number 94, Passeig de Gracia. Under the direction of Lluís, who dealt with the management and administration, and Carles, responsible for the technical and creative side, the Barral i Nualart brothers’ printing house thrived.

Carles Barral was in charge of designing the headings that from then on were printed on the company’s letter paper, invoices and other administrative and commercial stationery.⁶ The workshop specialized in the lithographic printing of posters and all kinds of promotional material such as postcards, picture cards, leaflets, catalogues and programmes for a variety of events. Examples of this are some of the posters that during 1904 were folded and placed inside the prestigious Barcelona magazine Mercurio, featuring the work of local artists such as Francisco de Cidón, Opisso and Apel·les Mestres.7

Fig. 2 Letter heading of the Barral Herms. printing house. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

Carles Barral i Nualart as a poster artist

In this early period, Carles was the graphic artist with the job of making most of the posters that left the workshop. They had his signature printed on them, either in the form of a monogram – a letter “C” circumscribing the initial “B” of his first surname – or his initials, “C. B.”, followed by “Nualart”, his second surname in full. The confusing lettering of his signature – even more so in the cases where he only used the monogram – has generated errors when identifying and attributing his work correctly.

Of the posters, among the most outstanding were the one for Vinos Sard (Sard Wines, 1902) – a brand of a company in Barcelona for which that same year they also printed promotional postcards adapting the poster, and another one with the drawing of a manola signed by Ramon Casas; the poster for La Bitácora beers (c. 1904), for Francisco González Suárez’s Fábrica de Cerveza Inglesa (English Brewery) in Barcelona, and the poster displaying the printing house’s work (1905). There was also the self-promotional calendar-poster (1905) with beautiful drawings made for the printing house, or the series of four posters (c. 1905) used to advertise the pharmaceutical specialities – Estomagol, Paidotrofo, Neurogeno and Fimonal – of Doctor Josep Benet Soler from Reus, formulated in Laboratorios Benet at 148, Carrer del Bruc in Barcelona.

Fig. 3 Posters of Vinos Sard (1902), Cerveza La Bitácora (c. 1904) and Barral Herms. (1905). © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

Fig. 4 Posters of the pharmaceutical specialities of Dr Bonet, c. 1905. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

A little-known poster is the one he made to announce the second edition of the Festa del Peix (Fish Festival) in Banyoles, a series of sporting and festive activities – regattas and naval battles – held from 15 to 17 August 1911. The poster shows an imaginary and fantastic night-time scene, in which the oarsmen of a ship, guided by a torch, are getting ready to disembark on the shore of Lake Banyoles – Estany de Banyoles, the largest lake in Catalonia, in the province of Girona – as a mermaid looks at them.⁸ There must be many more posters yet to be discovered.

Carles Barral’s contact with some of the finest contemporary poster artists and illustrators of the day, who had their posters printed by the family business – including Apel·les Mestres, Adrià Gual, Ramon Casas, Francisco de Cidón, Joaquim Renart, John Hassall and Pere Montanya – was a crucial factor in the adaptability of his style. In my opinion, his academic mastery of drawing the human figure, especially the female one, so recurrent in the posters of that period, and the skilful decoration of the borders and the lettering of the texts of his early posters, like the one for Vinos Sard or the one advertising Barral Herms., powerfully recall, in the graphic solutions, the anatomical and humanist academicism of the artists of the Italian Liberty style, especially Metlicovitz, although the poses of his figures refer us more to intimate contention and a certain melancholy of symbolist influences typical of early Modernisme. His later output is more in the mould of the synthetic line marked by Francisco de Cidón or the Englishman John Hassall, characterized by figures with thick outlines and the contrast between the areas painted in detail and the large, uniform monochrome shaded-in spaces.

In certain examples, as in the case of the exquisite Barral Herms. self-promotional calendar (1905), I sense a knowledge of the ideas of Central European artists, draughtsmen and caricaturists, due to their expressiveness and compositional dynamism, the use of certain allegorical references taken from classical mythology, and the recurrent play between the line and the coloured areas, between the delicate and the forceful in the definition of the boundaries, between figures and backgrounds. The poster is cited briefly by the maestro Eliseu Trenc (1994) in one of the few studies to have been made of the figure of Carles Barral i Nualart: “In the group of the decorative poster mention must be made of Nualart, who made a calendar-poster for the Barral company that is an impeccable example of the use of the Arabesque and of its perfection and abstract beauty within Art Nouveau”.9

Fig. 5 Barral Herms. self-promotional calendar (1905). © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

Motoring as a connection

Through his elder brother Lluís, Carles Barral made contact with a singular group within the well-heeled Barcelona bourgeoisie: the pioneers of motoring. The fact that Ramon Casas was a near neighbour was probably a determining factor, as well as the contacts typical of the profession. The painter lived at number 96, Passeig de Gràcia, next to the building where the Barral family lived and had their lithographic workshop.10

The Barral brothers, along with men such as the above-mentioned painter, the publisher and founder of Hispano-Suiza, Francesc Seix i Faya, or the tyre industrialist Georges Klein, from Alsace but established in Barcelona, took part from the earliest days in promoting motoring and in 1906 they set up the Automóvil Club de Barcelona (ACB), the precursor of the present-day Reial Automòbil Club de Catalunya (RACC). Lluís sat on the ACB’s first board of directors as secretary, and Carles took an active part in charge of the library, an association that endured.11

Through these contacts, for years the Barral printing house was in charge of printing this association’s posters, leaflets and guidebooks and the events it organized, besides other jobs provided by their partners in the ACB-RACC. The posters by Ramon Casas printed by Barral Herms. included the one made to advertise the Garaje Bové (1906), at 88, Passeig de Gràcia, which showed a lady driver raising a glass proposing a toast; the poster for the 1908 Catalonia Cup motor race – the posters of the next two editions (1909 and 1910) were by Pere Montanya – and the poster for the Tibidabo Cup in 1914.

Carles Barral also made other advertising materials along these lines, like the poster for the Barcelona Cup motor races run on 4 June 1911; the synthetic poster for the Barcelona company Neumáticos Klein (1909),¹² and various illustrations to advertise Hispano-Suiza cars.

Fig. 6 Motor racing posters: Pneu-Klein (1909) and Copa Barcelona (1911). © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The expansion of the business: Industrias Gráficas Seix & Barral Herms.

In December 1911 the merger between the Barral and Seix family businesses was certified in order to establish the Sociedad Anónima Industrias Gráficas Seix & Barral Herms. This union probably saw the light thanks to the friendship between the Barral brothers and Francesc Seix i Faya, forged in their adventures together as founding partners of the ACB-RACC. This part of the Seix dynasty was formed by two branches of the family, both related to the publishing and graphic arts professions, headed by Jaume Seix i Salomó and his cousin Victorià Seix i Saura.

Jaume Seix i Salomó founded the Editorial Seix y Cía. publishing house, whose chromo-lithographical workshops were originally at 15-19, Carrer Dou, in Barcelona, from 1873 at least. By 1882 they had already been moved to Carrer Sant Agustí in the district of Gràcia, where he worked together with his sons Jaume and Francesc.¹³ Jaume Seix i Faya, who had taken over the company, died prematurely in June 1897, and the business passed to his brother Francesc Seix i Faya (1871-1937).14

Victorià Seix i Saura for his part created the Litografía Seix in 1905, opening first in Carrer Nou de la Rambla, before moving to Carrer de Sant Agustí, thus sharing the premises with Francesc Seix i Faya. The founding father died in 1911, and that same year his son Victorià Seix i Miralta (1885-1933) joined forces with his second cousin Francesc and with the brothers Barral to form I. G. Seix & Barral Herms.

The administrative offices, the production departments, the graphic studio and the typographical and lithographical workshops were housed in spacious new premises at 219, Carrer Provença. In this new setting, the duties of the Barral brothers had to be redefined: Lluís continued to be associated with executive and administrative management; Carles took charge of the artistic direction of the company’s publications from his office next to the graphic studio, abandoning for good his facet as a poster artist.

For the Seix family, Victorià Seix i Miralta took charge of editorial management, while his younger brother, the painter and poster artist Joan Seix i Miralta “Jan” (1896-1993), would enter the graphic studio later. After Victorià’s death, Joan replaced him as a company director, giving up his artistic activity.

A new post: editorial art director

During his time as art director of I. G. Seix & Barral Herms., Carles, directing the group of draughtsmen on the staff and commissioning external artists, was the head of graphics for numerous collections and works, both general interest and educational, and very successful storybooks and adventure novels. The latter included two illustrated volumes of Cuentos vivos by the great draughtsman Apel·les Mestres (1929) and the collection of 25 books of adventure stories begun in 1922, bound in a characteristic dark blue material with gilt lettering. The collection included titles such as Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines and The Conquest of Fire, with black-and-white illustrations inside and colour plates drawn by figures such as Joan Garcia-Junceda i Supervia (1881-1948), Josep Serra i Massana (1896-1980) or the young Josep Narro i Celorrio (1902-1994), who worked permanently for the publishing house as a draughtsman. Carles Barral’s contribution was felt in the respect for the design of the collections and the careful choice of artists who illustrated the books and of the graphic material that was printed there.15

Carles Barral also worked as a writer, either signing with his own name or using the pen name Capitán Argüello. His work included the 12 children’s and young people’s exercise books entitled Dibujo elemental (Elementary Drawing, 1913) “by C. B. Nualart”, which proposed a “teaching method based on modern educational principles”. Written under the pseudonym were three educational volumes of Lecciones de cosas (Lessons of Things, 1921, reprinted successively until the 1950s), instructive in nature, with detailed black-and-white drawings, some signed by Pere Montanya – who did a huge amount of work in the publishing house’s graphic studio – and others that were not signed. Some of these drawings may have been done by Carles Barral himself, while the interesting illustrated covers could have been the work of Narro or Montanya. The same is true for the three volumes about the sea (1923), El mar en la naturaleza (The Sea in Nature), Las conquistas del hombre (Man’s Conquests) and Vida Submarina (Undersea Life), signed once again by “Capitán Argüello”, with beautiful illustrated covers on the theme of the sea, a subject that fascinated him.

Fig. 7 Books written by Carles Barral i Nualart, in the series Lessons of Things and The Sea. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The alter ego of Carles Barral i Nualart

Among the best-known titles in the collection of adventure stories to which I referred above, there were six with such attractive titles as The Fire-Gods, The Eye of Gautama, The Glass Pagoda, The Leopard God, The Scarlet Water-lily and The Swallow: Around the World by Aeroplane, all of them signed by Captain Gilson. This was the pen name of the British writer Major Charles Gilson (1878-1943), born in Dedham, Essex (UK), and the author of adventure stories about explorers in exotic places – generally the faraway lands of the British Empire – and the heroic exploits on their travels. Seix Barral was the only Spanish publisher that between 1922 and 1936 bought the rights to translate and publish his novels, which were very successful in their numerous editions in other countries. Bearing in mind that Carles Barral began to use the pseudonym Capitán Argüello around that time, it was probably Captain Gilson’s military rank that gave him his inspiration.

In fact, on the title pages of these books, as a sort of stamp of the collection, the badge composed of an illustration with a legend underneath it with the publishing and printing house’s initials, IGSBH, was usually repeated. The drawing depicted the archetypal figure of a colonial explorer in his pith helmet, his safari suit with baggy trousers and high leather boots, a bandolier over his shoulder and a rifle grasped tightly with its butt resting on the ground. It was the portrait that described the seasoned Captain Rugby, the slight but determined explorer who was the main character in several of Charles Gilson’s novels.

This illustration – a portrait probably drawn by Narro – could be a caricature of Carles Barral himself: he used to dress in these clothes on his motoring and sailing adventures.¹⁶ On those occasions, Carles Barral would adopt the disguise of his alter ego, Capitán Argüello, the pseudonym with which he signed his books and collaborations written for the publishing house. It was also the name he gave to one of his lateen sail boats, with which he sailed near Calafell and practised, with his brother Lluís,¹⁷ their shared love of sailing and angling for such noble species of fish as corball (black drum), llobarro (sea bass), orada (gilt-head bream) and dèntol (snapper). This can be seen in the family’s home movies that have been conserved, and which were compiled in a report broadcast by TV3, Catalonia’s autonomous television station, in 2007.

Fig. 8 A photograph of Carles Barral and the cover of Los Deportes where he appears dressed as a colonial explorer, and the badge of the adventure storybook collection by Seix & Barral Herms. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The family, the sea and Calafell

On 14 April 1926, when Carles Barral was 47 years old, he got married by proxy – completing the formalities via the consulate – to Javiera Gregoria Agesta y Galarza in the city of Concordia, province of Entre Ríos, Argentina. Javiera Agesta (nee Elices), who everyone knew as Tota, was one of the daughters of the wealthy Argentinian Medina family who used to spend their summers in Europe, repeatedly visiting Italy, the Basque Country and Catalonia, before embarking in the port of Barcelona to return to their country.

Carles Barral met her in about 1921-1923 and courted her repeatedly on successive trips before proposing to her from a distance. She travelled to Barcelona a few months later, by now married, to start life in Barcelona. They had two children, Marilí and Carlos, surnamed Barral Agesta. The latter would continue his father’s creative talents as a writer and his publishing work in the family business.

As Carlos Barral Agesta writes in his memoirs, the family began spending the summer in Calafell in 1928, the year he was born.¹⁸ The love affair between the Barrals and the village on the coast of Tarragona began one day when Carles Barral had to sail close to the shore to take refuge from the heavy storm that had blown up … and he put in at Calafell. At first they rented a house for two summers before purchasing a small fisherman’s cottage right on the beach; in 1935 they bought the one next door. They are now the home of a museum dedicated to the writer.

Children’s theatres, cut-outs and building games

A lesser-known facet of Carles Barral i Nualart is his work as the designer of many children’s and young adult’s educational games, published and sold under the name I. G. Seix & Barral Herms. The ones he devised were legally patented under his name, and this was indicated on the boxes and the leaflets that came with them: “C. B. Nualart (patented)”.

Without doubt, the most successful game of all those invented by Carles was the Children’s Theatre, a collapsible folding cardboard theatre, accompanied by all kinds of accessories that made it possible to put on plays. Was it the early contact with the young Adrià Gual and his activities as a playwright and set designer that inspired him to design this game? I have found no evidence of this. The fact is that from 1915 onwards – the year it was launched – and for almost four decades, different versions of the children’s theatre were issued and reissued, as many as ten different model prosceniums and 23 plays that were adapted to them, presented in boxes that contained elements of set design, backgrounds, characters and different scripts with the plays and the instructions for staging them.

Fig. 9 The Children’s Theatre: lid of the box and one of the model prosceniums. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The structure of the children’s theatre was ingenious. It comprised a proscenium, a stage with its front curtain and a backstage area that, together with the sides, made it possible to swap the various offstage areas and backgrounds around. The characters were die-cut but they were joined at the bottom to a long strip that made it possible to animate them by moving it one way or the other. As Lucía Contreras Flores says (2008), a noted collector and an expert in cardboard theatres, “his system of boxes and hangings allowed you to add together various curtains in the same act, creating complex and very beautiful theatrical effects as good as the best set designs of any real theatre. They also devised a system of cut-outs in the curtains with translucent areas of coloured film that, properly lit, produced magical atmospheric and spatially deep effects never before seen”.19

In 1917 this theatre game won the honorific diploma “for the toy with the most artistic conditions”, awarded by the FAD (Foment de les Arts Decoratives) – at that time established as a professional association of artisans and decorative artists – in the context of the Spanish Association of Toymakers and Toys’ Third Toy Exhibition, held at the Barcelona School of Industry, in June and July of that year.²⁰ Proof also of its quality was the international acceptance it enjoyed, and English adaptations were made of it (The Children’s Theatre), highly appreciated at the time, especially in the demanding British market.

Besides its simple and ingenious solutions, the graphic wealth in the definition of the characters and the spectacular backgrounds – many of them drawn by Carles Barral himself in a fauvist style – have made them outstanding pieces in private collections and local and foreign museums.

Fig. 10 The Children’s Theatre. Model proscenium. © Pau Medrano-Bigas Collection.

The words “C. B. Nualart (patented)” were printed on another type of building game based on decorated die-cut pieces of cardboard, made by the company’s illustrators, such as the 1920s collection Architekton, with doll’s houses – Villa Teresita, Villa Lulú, Little Red Riding Hood – or buildings such as the Catalan Farmhouse, Mountain Chapel, Walled City Gate or Feudal Castle. An extensive collection of cut-outs in the Scenion series (1924) were also signed “Under the direction of C. B. Nualart”. They featured soldiers and characters drawn by Ricard Opisso i Sala(1880-1966) in historical settings – The Guard, The Feudal Lord, Bonaparte’s Troops, among others – in which the die-cut figures were joined to metal bases to make them stand up. The building game Mi pueblo (My Village, 1928) was more ambitious. It came in a large box that contained over 140 cut-out pieces of printed cardboard, necessary to build the 14 houses and buildings – a church, the town hall, the dwellings, the railway station – that, together, made up a small village.

We should also mention the collections of cut-out templates for easy drawing, that, going by the name of Lapisabio (c. 1930) “C. B. Nualart (patented)”, were advertised by the product mascot, an anthropomorphic sharpened pencil; or the Constructor series (c. 1930), cardboard cut-out building pieces ready to be assembled and form buildings and chalets, household furniture and kitchens, circuses and merry-go-rounds, gardens, automobiles, lorries, buses, zeppelins and aeroplanes, such as the model of the republican air force’s Farman F400.

The end of a creative period

Carles Barral i Nualart, who had a delicate heart, died in August 1936 of a heart attack as he was lighting a cigarette in front of the staircase leading to Industrias Gráficas Seix & Barral. His brother Lluís had died the previous year, in July 1935, after a long illness. Francesc Seix i Faya was to die a year later, in 1937, bringing to an end the founding generation of one of the most important publishing houses in the country.

I. G. Seix & Barral Herms. was collectivized during the Civil War. In 1942 the business was handed back to its owners, although the printing house was legally separated from the publishing house. The chairman of the board of directors of Imprenta Industrias Gráficas Seix & Barral (the printing side) was Joan Seix i Miralta, while Editorial Seix Barral (the publishing house) was under Víctor Seix i Perarnau (1923-1967), the son of Victorià. The publishing company would not be back in the hands of the founding families until the mid 1950s, when the well-known writer Carlos Barral Agesta, Carles Barral i Nualart’s son, joined: “I am a man of letters who has become a publisher due to family circumstances,” as he himself put it.²¹ Through Editorial Seix Barral, the new members of the respective founding families gave a new lease of life to what was to become a vitally important firm on the Spanish language literary scene.

The history of the lithographic workshop that Carles Barral i Nualart shared with his brother and which was to become Industrias Gráficas Seix & Barral Herms. is also testimony to the way people worked in a period when printing houses centralized the customers’ orders, being responsible for resolving them graphically and producing them. To do this, they hired external artists and illustrators or they added them to the staff, creating in-house graphic studios, as was the case here. In this system, the artists, graphic artists and commercial draughtsmen worked for the printing houses, not for the customers. Despite the fact that in the particular case of Seix Barral, and its in-house studio, popularly known as Can Seix, this system continued working well into the 1960s, in Spain it would be the generation of artists and graphic artists who started working in the 1950s that changed the relationship. Through the structuring of their professional activity in the form of studios and agencies – the new direct interlocutors with the customers in the supply of graphic services– they relegated the printing houses to the technical function typical of their productive tasks. That generation of pioneers would establish the use of the term “design” in Spain and would forge the profession of “graphic designer” as we know it today.22

The figure of Carles Barral i Nualart is the result of the conjunction and the gradual accumulation of his artistic concerns, his activity as an illustrator and poster artist of Modernisme, his dedication to the graphic arts, his change to art direction and to the design of collections of books in the in-house studio of a major publishing house and, finally, to his work as a disseminator of knowledge in educational books and an inventor of carefully designed and made cardboard toys. This article is an opportunity to get to know, establish and better appreciate his contribution to all the fields in which he invested his creativity and ingenuity.

Acknowledgements

To Marilí Barral, with fondness; to her children, Cristina and Ciro, and her cousin, Ivonette, for their help and kindness in sharing the archives and family memories.

To Lucía Contreras Flores, a passionate collector and an expert on cardboard theatres, for sharing her knowledge.

To Carles García, manager of the Foment del Treball library, for his readiness and help.

To Montserrat Marqués and to Postermil, for allowing me to use their images.

To Soler & Llach, for supplying me with images of posters and allowing me to reproduce them.

To Georgina Gratacós i Teixidor, curator of the Museu Darder in Banyoles.

Art Deco in Spain: Mass Culture and Style

Isabel Campi

In the majority of studies of Art Deco written by European and American scholars Spain does not appear. This might lead us to believe that Art Deco did not exist in the Iberian Peninsula. Furthermore, some antiques dealers have said that the 1960s boom in deco fashion in Europe and the USA meant that a large number of decorative objects were taken abroad. Notwithstanding the witness that have survived: buildings and commercial premises, and magazines, photographs, posters and packaging, disprove this non-existence.

Another problem related to the apparent absence of Art Deco in Spain has to do with the lack of research work, as the few scholars of the decorative arts in Spain did their degrees in the history of art, and so their study subject tends to be the relationships of dependence between the “major arts” and the “minor arts”.

On the contrary, in this article I propose to break away from the visual arts altogether and take a closer look at the history of design in the sense of investigating the channels through which Art Deco reached Spain and Catalonia and what were the industries that best represented it. In any case, although I shall mention the printing industries I shall not go into a detailed study of Art Deco graphic design, since the huge volume of literature produced about it in the period between the wars far exceeds the scope of this essay.

In general, studies of Art Deco in Spain are rather few in number and relatively recent. In 1976 historians Alícia Suárez and Mercè Vidal were invited to write the foreword for Paul Maentz’s book Art Deco: 1920-1940,¹ in which they outlined some early hypotheses about Art Deco in Catalonia. In 1980 Manuel Arenas and Pedro Azara identified the authors and key moments of Catalan Art Deco in an essay that appeared in a monographic issue of the magazine L’Avenç devoted to the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition.² The first study of Spanish Art Deco did not appear until 1990. It is an exhaustive piece of work by Javier Pérez Rojas that explores the painting, graphic illustration and architecture that was produced in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s and thoroughly examines the various aesthetic and cultural trends of the period. For Rojas Art Deco is a particular art form and he therefore disregards that which best defines Art Deco everywhere: the decorative arts and design.³ Art Deco in Spain describes the cultural scene of the time and its impact on art very well, but apart from Catalonia and the odd case in Valencia he is not all that interested in the furniture making, ceramics, jewellery and goldsmith’s shops that existed in Spain.

Mariàngels Fondevila’s doctoral thesis The Impact of Art Deco on Catalonia: the Decorative Arts does focus precisely on these productive sectors, and her approach is more in keeping with the current trends in history that advocate going beyond the more academic categories of art and getting closer to the decorative and “minor” arts, which deserve as much attention as the “major” arts.⁴ Although Fondevila’s account focuses preferably on artistic and crafts production, her analysis takes us much closer to the field of design as it does not neglect the aspects of production and consumption inherent in a style that, like fashions, was spread via openly commercial channels. Ten years after she read her thesis, Fondevila published an updated article in which she introduced new themes associated with illustration and the relationship between Catalan Art Deco and the avant-garde.⁵

Art Deco is underappreciated in Spanish academic circles, where is it rarely studied. It is not included in art history courses, which ignore the interest that this style has been arousing for decades in museums and in the world of antiques. In their studies, both Rojas and Fondevila exhaustively review the historiography of Art Deco, on a national and international level, and wonder why there is a complete lack of reference to Spanish Art Deco in foreign publications and exhibitions. To solve this situation a little, in 2009 the Design History Foundation in Barcelona organized a course of 12 sessions on Art Deco that was very well received among a group of antiques dealers and scholars of art.

Despite being a modern, powerful style, Art Deco was not avant-garde in the sense that it was not part of any political ideology. Indeed, it was used by very different types of regimes. It was not based on manifestoes or programmatic documents nor did it have visionary leaders, although it did have many designers who “set a trend”, as they say these days. It was an extremely popular style that spread all over the world among the social classes who wanted to be modern and up to date. And although in the mid 1920s it emerged chiefly in the upper class, who were able to purchase luxury goods and services thanks to the fortunes they had gathered during the First World War (jewellery, decorative objects, haute couture, gastronomy, cruises, and so on), it soon became so popular that it ended up being a style widely adopted by the middle class, who were able to consume it through the cinema, imitation jewellery, haberdashery, magazines and cosmetics packaging. In Barcelona, for example, just before the Civil War, one could just as easily consume Art Deco by wearing geometric jewellery of incrusted gemstones purchased at the prestigious jeweller’s shop J. Roca, as by shopping in the Jorba department stores, with their lavishly deco interiors.⁶ In Madrid, one could have a wholly deco experience by going to the Concert Hall of the Capitol Cinema, located in the very modern Carrión building (1933), designed by architects Luis Martínez Feduchi and Vicente Eced.

Despite this lack of ideology, this style can immediately be recognized: it corresponds to a series of design characteristics clearly defined by the authors of the voluminous catalogue of the exhibition Art Deco 1910-1939, held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2003, and which, by the way, totally ignored Spain.⁷ According to the authors of this publication, there are four characteristics that define the deco style:

• Schematic simplification and geometrization applied to both volumes and structural features and to decorative and ornamental features. These bold shapes were inspired by avant-garde art (Cubism, Neo-Plasticism, Futurism, Constructivism and rationalist architecture), setting out to emulate their formal repertoires rather than their social objectives.

• The evocation of the exotic, which, in an age of progress in communications, tourism and scientific missions, gave the design a cosmopolitan international look. The exotic decorative motifs could be from remote cultures, such as Africa or China, or those far-off in time, like Tutankhamun’s Egypt or Meso-American cultures, or native traditions that had been preserved, for example Maori culture in New Zealand or Flamenco folklore in Spain.

• The co-existence in the same object or interior space of rare and luxurious materials, generally polished and shiny (lacquers, varnishes, crocodile or snake skin, precious and semi-precious stones), with modern industrial materials (plastic, rubber, glass, aluminium and chrome-plated metals).

• In the West, the eclectic appropriation of historical styles, with a certain preference for classicism in the 1930s, during which time Art Deco took on a more severe and refined look.⁸

In the 1920s Art Deco was chiefly present in the luxury decorative arts and crafts, but in the 1930s it was also used to give the artefacts produced as a result of technological progress – telephones, radio receivers and electrical appliances – a bold modern image; before the First World War their designs had been primitive and frightening.⁹ In graphic art, advertising and illustration, Art Deco was equally apparent in the predominance of simplification, geometrization, flat figures, and the use of exaggeratedly bold lettering reduced to simple circles, triangles and squares.

Mass culture, fashion and consumption in the origins of Art Deco

The majority of art historians consider Art Deco to be a continuation of Modernisme (Art Nouveau) adapted to the new times and contaminated by the new forms of the avant-garde. This is partly true, since the circumstances that had played a role in the formation of the Modern Style, Art Nouveau or Jugendstil changed radically after the First World War. These turn-of-the-century styles were essentially romantic and bourgeois, and although they reached the public through the large department stores, hotels, cafés and restaurants, and were produced with semi-industrial methods, they were not placed at the service of mass culture for the simple reason that this was still at a very early stage.

The modern mass-communication society corresponds to the second industrial revolution, that of electricity and oil, which took place during the first 30 years of the twentieth century, a period when the telephone, the cinema, the phonograph, the radio, the automobile and aviation appeared, and when the use of electricity spread. It was a true revolution in the sense that people born in the late nineteenth century went in no time at all from candles to light bulbs and from carriages to aeroplanes. According to Tresserras and Espinet, the phenomena of “mass” communication were characterized by an exponential increase in the information available about many different aspects of reality and in the face of the regular and periodic presentation of events as shows. Despite vain attempts to turn the clock back, mass-communication society is characterised by the gradual give up of the ideology of tradition in favour of that of the new and the modern, and for its faith in modern technology.¹⁰ The disproportionate insistence on the virtues of the modern and on the importance of behaving in a modern way that appears all over the media in the 1920s and 1930s needed a style to call its own, and, in large part, this was Art Deco.

Besides the revolutionary appliances that changed people’s lives in no time, the major mass phenomena that came up in society in the first third of the twentieth century were the radio, sport and the cinema.

The radio, which was the great new development of the twentieth century, evolved very quickly. The start of radio broadcasting in the 1920s was an unprecedented novelty, but it has to be admitted that it was a limited medium. Radio stations were very short range and could only be heard in cities; the broadcasts lasted just a few hours and featured very few programmes, and, as if that were not enough, receivers were big and bulky and complicated to work. Radio broadcasting was financed with subscribers’ fees and an unpopular “tax” on receivers. This state of affairs changed radically in the 1930s when the stations’ power and range increased, the technology and the design of radios improved significantly and stations began to be financed through advertising. The radio then became a free form of entertainment that spread fashionable music and songs, especially jazz, dealt with current affairs and politics or gave housewives tips about how to keep a modern home. Although the emission of waves cannot be seen or felt, everything to do with radio – the programming magazines, their adverts, the design of radio receivers – was starting to look very modern. Spain never managed to have a radio manufacturing industry on a level with other European countries or the USA, but the deco models of Philips, Eco or Philco were advertised in magazines and newspapers and could be found in retail shops at reasonably affordable prices.¹¹ The bold designs of these brands with their geometric shapes were much appreciated and in time they became icons of a period, now highly prized by collectors and museums.12

Sport was the second new pillar of mass culture. Motor racing and horse racing became shows that mobilized thousands of people, who took advantage of the occasion to wear their new clothes and show that they were up with the latest fashion. They were elitist events, however. Football was something else; in the 1920s it acquired a new social dimension. In Spain the game turned professional in 1926, and the first professional football league season was played in 1929. But besides being a masses show sport involved a new concept of the body, which was intensely advertised through the cinema and the press and which generated an authentic revolution in the way people dressed and behaved. Playing golf, swimming, tennis, cycling, bathing in the sea, rambling, skiing – basically, life in the great outdoors – was the premise for enjoying an agile, young, healthy body that was unreservedly exposed to the sunlight. This ideal could not be put into practice wearing corsets, petticoats and buttons and bows, in the case of women, or thick tailored suits and ties in the case of men. Coco Chanel and Jean Patou, in the 1920s, and René Lacoste, in the 1930s, very successfully designed loose-fitting, light, practical and sexy clothes that allowed for great freedom of movement and which in Spain were persistently publicized at the cinema and in magazines. Although it was fashion designed in the world of haute couture, what was being pushed was sophisticated but unostentatious clothing that eschewed gaudy luxury and was relatively easy to imitate, on both an industrial level and by domestic dress designers and clothes makers, whereby its international success was immediate.

According to Lipovetsky, in the 1920s the first democratization of fashion took place in the sense that it no longer corresponded to the principle of majestic exhibition or subordination to a superior hierarchy, but to the principle of equality.¹³ This does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that during Art Deco the luxury industries declined or that class differences were abolished. What this French philosopher observes is that social distinction and excellence were no longer expressed through the asphyxiating accumulation of trimmings, but through more subtle aspects such as quality, the rarity of the materials, the prestige of the brands and the elegance of the cuts.¹⁴ The signs of social rank were toned down by other more personal attributes such as slimness, youth or sex appeal, which, among other ways, could be acquired by doing sport and using cosmetics, a sector in which deco design was present on a large scale.

Lipovetsky has a positive view of fashion as a phenomenon for changing models, in the sense that he does not subscribe to Marxism’s moralistic critique according to which consumption is an instrument of alienation of the individuals that helplessly succumb to the power of capitalism. The author agrees with the well-known theories of Thorstein Veblen and Jean Baudrillard, according to which consumer society is not characterized by the disproportionate acquisition of goods, but by their transformation in a system of signification that is constructed quite independently of their economic value. It is not products that are consumed but symbols. According to Veblen, this system has an aspirational side to it, as it serves the purpose of ascending the class ladder. Without disregarding these hypotheses, Lipovetsky adds that in the twentieth century mass consumption is no longer driven by a system of class distinction, but that it is increasingly also a system of private satisfaction regardless to status and to other people’s opinions. Modern individuals consume for their own wellbeing, for their autonomy and their individual satisfaction. According to him, one does not so much consume to dazzle the “Other” and to earn social admiration as for oneself. Rather than social status, by consuming one acquires elegance, femininity, virility, youth, refinement, security, naturalness and so on. The lack of subordination to the laws of status, morality and good manners, as far as consumption is concerned, is a conquest of democratic societies. It is no coincidence that the more totalitarian regimes and fundamentalist religions see fashion as a danger of deviation that must be forbidden.

This overview enables us to find an explanation for the messages that appear in advertising and magazines in the Art Deco period. It is a fact that objects did not lose their symbolic value and that consumption was not freed from class competition. Indeed, haute couture and the luxury industries joined in the aesthetic innovation of Art Deco enthusiastically. But Lipovetsky distinguishes prestige consumption from mass consumption in the sense that the latter does not place the emphasis on status, but on one’s own autonomy and pleasure. This trend appeared in Spain at virtually the same time as in other countries. According to a detailed study of Catalan women’s magazines in the first third of the century made by Míriam Soriano, the messages that advertisements aimed at housewives were not proposing social ascent but “real affordability”, “speed and comfort”, “eternal youth”, “beauty”, “a healthy mouth”, “smooth white skin”, “20 years old forever”, “a pleasant feeling”, “a slender curvy figure”, “a relaxing life”, “enjoy the pleasure of sport”, “modern comfort”, and so on.¹⁵ This new perception of the home and the body as a source of health, a place of pleasure and individual self-realization was something very modern and absolutely unthinkable with the moral codes and narrow-mindedness of the previous century. Advertising quite boldly took aim and assaulted the ideal of the Spanish woman, selfless and wholly devoted to her role as a wife and mother, something that not even the publishers of these magazines dared to question openly.

The cinema

Along with the radio, sport and the press, the cinema was another of the great pillars of mass culture and one of Art Deco’s most important channels of mediation. The movies went from being a curious fairground attraction to an incredibly popular show fuelled by the growth of the fabulous industry of the Hollywood studios. Whether silent, in the 1920s, or talking, in the 1930s, the cinema became a fantastic dream factory that had to be designed. Although there was no shortage of mammoth historical productions, as Donald Albrecht has pertinently observed, very soon there were film production companies making a clear commitment to modern sets and props.¹⁶ The studios reworked a series of styles that came from the European avant-garde and returned them to the screen stripped of their reforming and militant spirit, to show social groups made up of ladies of leisure, social-climbing smartly dressed gentlemen and likeable petty thieves living in luxurious penthouses, going to society parties, playing sport and travelling. Mass entertainment par excellence, the cinema was a powerful channel of mediation of Art Deco, and its presence in the Hollywood studios has been broadly documented by Howard Mandelbau and Erik Myers in their excellent monographic study Screen Deco: a Celebration of High Style in Architecture and Film.¹⁷ Based on this study it would be necessary to discover which films screened in Spain during the 1920s and 1930s proposed models of behaviour and style for extremely large sections of the population.18

The influence of Hollywood films is obvious in Spanish magazines, where above all the actresses appeared on the fashion pages as female archetypes and symbols of modernity and elegance that were to be imitated, relegating the role of models that high-society ladies had previously played to the background.

Furthermore, the huge cinemas of the time, new temples of the modern era, were the place where people from all walks of life went to be entertained and also to be shown how they should dress and behave in an unequivocally modern way. As you would expect, many Spanish cinemas incorporated the most striking design ideas into the architecture and the interiors, in an attempt to make the modernity of the medium and of its container correspond visually. According to Javier Pérez Rojas, the cinemas of Madrid, Gijón, Valencia, La Coruña and Melilla form such an important group that just by visiting them one could get a fairly complete idea of Spanish Art Deco.19

Magazines

Magazines were of course one of the principal means of spreading Art Deco in Spain, and it must be acknowledged that magnificent examples appeared with regard to layout, illustration and photography. They were periodicals with larger circulations than literary ones, and their aim was to inform the enlightened middle class, using a moderate tone, not avant-garde, of new developments in art, literature, decoration, fashion, entertainment and shopping. The huge number of articles and advertisements that in these magazines tell us about the “modern woman”, the “modern man”, the “modern home”, “modern décor”, “modern cookery”, “modern fashion”, “modern hygiene” and “modern education” is indicative of the swift change in customs and lifestyle that had taken place in Spain in a very short while and which could not be ignored.

Magazines are a mine of information about Art Deco as, besides the artistic quality of their illustrations and photographs and the interest of their graphic layout, their advertisements tell us which products were on the market, what advantages they offered and what scale of values they proposed. They are even useful for knowing about a host of Art Deco-style shops, cafés and businesses that have disappeared.

The study of Spanish deco magazines deserves a monographic article all to itself, as they constitute a golden age of graphic illustration. For reasons of space, here I shall just mention the most significant magazines in Madrid and Barcelona. In the former there were Blanco y Negro, La Esfera and Elegancias.

Blanco y Negro was an illustrated magazine founded in 1891 by Torcuato Luca de Tena and Álvarez Osorio, and published by Prensa Española in Madrid. The magazine was profusely illustrated, and excellent draughtsmen such as Joaquim Xauradó, Rafael de Penagos, José Igual Ruiz, Ramón Manchón, Cobos and Baldrich contributed to it. It was the first Spanish magazine to publish a colour photograph (1912) and also to use colour and glossy coated paper. In the 1920s and 1930s its elegant covers always featured ladies dressed in the latest fashions. The most sophisticated period was that of the Blanco y Negro supplement in 1935 and 1936, whose monographic issues about fashion, women and the home informed, using striking photographs and sophisticated fashion sketches, about the latest fashions in decoration and clothes.

La Esfera was a weekly magazine published in Madrid from 1914 to 1931 whose illustrations are worth mentioning. This generally accompanied literary texts and occasionally appeared on the cover. The subjects covered were usually scenes of balls, exotic ballets and modern life in general focused on hotels and restaurants enlivened with very elegant figures. The list of contributors was extremely long, and although they were conditioned by the texts, all of them shared the same spirit that was expressed in drawings in which the details in the clothes, accessories and trimmings predominated as defining features of an elegant, frivolous and cosmopolitan world.²⁰ One outstanding contributor was the great poster artist Rafael de Penagos, who to begin with did drawings inspired by the orientalist dances of Tórtola Valencia, and then perfume advertisements for Floralia, most of them set on beaches and in places of recreation as seen in the films of the time. On the whole La Esfera maintained a line of sobriety, clarity and elegance that distanced it from Art Nouveau and moved it closer to similar publications with a modern look that were being published in other countries. This weekly ceased publication in 1931, possibly because it was unable to compete with the popularity of photographic magazines.

The quintessential Madrid fashion magazine was Elegancias, published, like Blanco y Negro, by Prensa Española S.A. and which came out between January 1923 and June 1925. Elegancias did not really publish articles, but illustrated fashion reports – some from Paris or New York –with photographs and magnificent fashion sketches drawn by Bartolozzi, Penagos, Baldrich and Sergé, among others. They showed slim ladies in society poses, dressed in completely straight dresses and wearing small cloche hats. The fashion reports showed women as being elegant and modern on any occasion, whether it be a dinner, a cocktail, a “grill-room” or playing “sport”.²¹ The advertisements were very daring for the time and those for cosmetics and health products sometimes showed women completely naked. Despite being a women’s magazine, car advertisements were very common. Although the price of a car was exorbitant for Spanish women, it is clear that manufacturers saw them as a potential new market.

The Catalan women’s magazines Feminal, El Hogar y la Moda and La Dona Catalana were studied in depth by Míriam Soriano in 2014. She made an exhaustive analysis of content such as fashion, hygiene, sport, the home, illustrations and advertising, and the irruption of technological devices in the home – electrical appliances of all kinds, typewriters, radio receivers, phonographs and others. Soriano observed that the messages published in these magazines – and which I listed in the previous section – were not very different from those today. The difference lay in the fact that many of the products that were presented and purchased in that period were completely new.

This brief description of magazines must include D’Ací i d’Allà, founded in 1918, published initially by Editorial Catalana and edited by Josep Carner and Ignasi Folch i Torres. In 1924 this magazine was taken over by the publisher López Llausà, and the new editor was the cultural promoter Carles Soldevila. In its early days D’Ací i d’Allà adopted a Noucentista design and in a moderate way informed readers of new developments in modern life. In about 1929, both the articles and the advertisements adopted a very deco tone,²² whose apotheosis was the special issue devoted to the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929. In this issue the design of the advertising – with its geometric and exaggeratedly bold lettering, its dynamic diagonal compositions and its virtually abstract illustrations – was so homogeneously deco that it gave the impression of having been designed by a very small group of designers. [Fig. 1] Indeed, ten of these advertisements carry the signature of Josep Sala, who furthermore advertised himself on page 30 as a draughtsman, photographer and publicist.23

Fig. 1 Advertisement for Fotogravats J. M. Llovet, D’Ací i d’Allà, Vol. 18, special issue International Exhibition, Barcelona, December 1929, p. 19.

From issue number 169 onwards, in March 1932, this magazine underwent a radical graphic change. As it says in its credits, Josep Sala became its artistic director and one of its main photographers. D’Ací i d’Allà adopted a graphic composition far closer to Central European graphic rationalism, which resulted in rectangular blocks of text set in the middle of large blank spaces, headlines with sans-serif lettering, the absence of illustrations and the predominance of photographs (in keeping with the trends of New Objectivity), a hardcover and spiral binding. Several of its covers were designed by the German Will Faber. The illustrations were always signed, which shows an important degree of respect for the photographers’ authorship. D’Ací i d’Allà thus became a predominantly visual medium, almost cinematic, an unusually modern and cosmopolitan publishing product that set out to educate a Catalan bourgeoisie that wished to be kept up to date in matters of art, entertainment, decoration and fashion.²⁴

Exhibitions

As was the case in other countries, international exhibitions were another important channel of mediation of Art Deco and they are very useful for seeing how it progressed as a modern style in the world.

In 1923 the International Exhibition of Furniture took place in Barcelona, in the first pavilions of the Montjuïc Fair that were already built. At this exhibition, which has been studied very well by Alícia Suárez, suites of furniture were presented in every historical style from every country.²⁵ There was however a modern furniture section in which the French furniture makers Jacques Ruhlmann, Süe et Mare, Maurice Marinot and Maurice Dufrêne, who were already creating the emblematic Art Deco style, were invited to take part. The work of these furniture makers caught the eye of the artists and designers of the FAD (Fostering Arts and Design) and of its president, Santiago Marco, and it provided the contacts necessary for going to the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, which would be held in Paris in 1925.

The official Spanish delegation at the Paris show, with its corresponding pavilion designed by Pascual Bravo, went quite unnoticed among the French critics. On the other hand, the Catalan delegation was more attractive. The slowness with which the Spanish government had replied to the invitation to take part in the exhibition exasperated the FAD so much that the president, Santiago Marco, acted efficiently and quickly, and he managed to arrange for 40 members of this association to be able to exhibit in the rotunda of the Grand Palais and in the Saint-Dominique Galleries. Of course, this was not part of the official Spanish delegation and very little funding was allocated to it.²⁶ The jewellery designer Lluís Masriera was in charge of designing the Grand Palais area where a display of the decorative arts, miniatures on enamel and ivory, theatrical designs and book arts was presented, as well as the cosmetics company Myrurgia, which won a gold medal.

The conditions for admission that the FAD proposed to its members were the same as the ones that the Société d’Artistes Decorateurs had imposed on the exhibitors at the event: newness, boldness and originality. Looking back to the past and imitations were not allowed, nor were any old styles. For Santiago Marco the FAD’s mission was to show the world that modern decorative arts did exist in Spain despite the “invasive” fashion of the neo-Renaissance and the neo-Plateresque that had colonized interiors. The artists and designers of the FAD on the whole exhibited a very decorative style, typical of the recent Art Nouveau past, at the height of the transition towards the Cubist style of Art Deco. On a curious note, Antoni Gaudí, at the time totally absorbed in the work on the Temple of the Sagrada Família, refused to go to the Paris Exhibition, giving as a reason that his art was misunderstood.²⁷

Despite the fact that a large neo-Baroque building with very little of the modern about it stood above the fair, surrounded by a series of historicist palaces, the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929, postponed for 15 years due to the First World War, has been considered a typical expression of the deco spirit. [Fig. 2] Dedicated to electricity, the exhibition was organized around a long avenue, flanked by illuminated obelisks and crowned by the grand Magic Fountain designed by the engineer Carlos Buhigas. At the far end, beams of light fanning out embraced and gave coherence to a site that by night was spectacular. However, in spite of the fair’s cosmopolitan and modernizing intentions, in the architecture a paradox arose: the “palaces” or large buildings that housed the exhibitions of chemistry, agriculture, communications and transport, the industrial arts and clothing, were designed according to the academic tradition of the Beaux-Arts system, opting for a totally outdated mixture of historical styles, quite unsuitable for a display of twentieth-century mass culture. On the other hand, as Ignasi de Solà Morales perceptively observed, in this exhibition the expressions of modern architecture appeared in a series of small “pavilions” of a few Spanish companies – the Jorba department stores,²⁸ [Fig. 3] Hispano-Suiza, the Hydrographic Confederation of the Ebro and Sociedad Anónima Cros – or in the national “pavilions” of Yugoslavia, Sweden and Germany, which presented the famous pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe, now considered to have been the most mature and refined expression of Modernism.²⁹ Organized well into the twentieth century, the Barcelona International Exhibition was an example of the doubts and difficulties that design and modern architecture had in order to become established in Spain.

Fig. 2 The National Palace and Magic Fountain during the Barcelona International Exhibition, 1929. Photo: Barcelona Photographic Archive.

Fig. 3 Arnald Calvet: Jorba department stores building, Manresa, 1933. Photo by Montse Vendrell.

The best expression of Art Deco at the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition was almost certainly the modest Artists’ Gathering pavilion, organized by the energetic president of the FAD, Santiago Marco, who gave it a more programmatic and less hurried character than that of the Paris mission in 1925.³⁰ Artists’ Gathering was an association created specifically to organize a modern decorative arts show, cosmopolitan, select and independent of the official one, in the context of the exhibition. The enterprise brought together 58 participants, mostly, although not exclusively, members of the FAD who exhibited in a pavilion designed by the architect Jaume Mestres Fossas. The building, austere, symmetrical and a touch classical on the outside but very elaborate inside – it had a Greek cross floor plan that made it look more like a mansion than a private residence – was actually conceived as a container of decorative events. Inside it the aim was to show all the arts that converged in the modern home – furniture, art objects and accessories – on an equal footing with painting and sculpture. The interior décor sought simplicity, sobriety and comfort and also to demonstrate the advantages of new materials and modern technology such as the full bathroom, central heating and the gas cooker.³¹

In keeping with the lifestyle of the new times, the most representative domestic areas were the entrance hall, the bedroom, the dressing room, the office-library, the bathroom (with mural paintings by Josep Obiols depicting newts and with panes of glass that had been silver-plated and etched by Lluís Rigalt), the kitchen, freed of soot and coal, and the scullery with all the necessary utensils supplied by the company Catalana de Gas y Electricidad. The lighting was electric and traditional items such as anachronistic oil lamps, chandeliers and hanging candelabra were dispensed with.32

In the Artists’ Gathering pavilion we can see all the characteristics of Art Deco: schematic and geometric decoration, the passion for luxury and the exotic, and the coexistence of all that with industrial materials and the progress made by the most advanced domestic technology. [Fig. 4]

Fig. 4 Jaume Mestres Fossas: entrance hall of the Artists’ Gathering pavilion. Photo: Mas Archive.

Although the architecture and the pavilions of the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929 have been studied in depth (see notes 29 and 30), I believe it is necessary to take a closer look at some of the stands that I have come across in the course of this research, like for example that of the Textile Manufacturers’ Guild of Sabadell,³³ that of Molfort’s socks, that of jewellers Masriera i Carreras and the pavilion of the Blast Furnaces of Biscay. As they were commercially designed and very short-lived, these stands have not merited any special attention by historians of the Barcelona exhibition, since they can only be seen in old photographs or by visiting the companies’ archives.

From Art Nouveau to Art Deco

The evolution of shapes of Modernisme towards Art Deco has been well studied and in the applied arts it apparently took place rapidly but not traumatically.

Indeed, in Spain too the workshops and industries that had been revitalized at the turn of the century with Modernisme soon adapted to schematic simplicity, abstraction and Cubist shapes. In the case of Barcelona, Fondevila follows very well the change from one style to the other in the workshops of the furniture makers Gaspar Homar and Joan Busquets, in Escofet, the floor tile maker, in the Serra ceramics workshop, and in the work of the jeweller Lluís Masriera. In 1925 the latter went to the Paris exhibition with a collection of pieces in which he abandoned the naturalist repertoire that had made him so famous and adopted a typically Deco idiom, flat and schematic. In the mid 1920s, Masriera evolved swiftly towards geometric shapes, floral stylizations and oriental-style repertoires. With the aid of his partner and precious stone expert, Joaquim Carreras, Masriera abandoned the colour range of Art Nouveau and chose the flat white gem incrusted with diamonds that Maison Cartier of Paris had made fashionable. [Fig. 5]

Fig. 5 Lluís Masriera: snake bracelet. Gold, diamonds, opals, onyx, emeralds and plique-à-jour enamel. A copy of the piece presented at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris in 1925. Bagués-Masriera Collection, Barcelona. Photo by Miquel Casanelles.

In the field of architecture and furniture making there is also widespread agreement according to which the change from Art Nouveau to Art Deco took place with the adoption of the rectilinear shapes of the Viennese Secession and the Glasgow School. According to Rojas and Fondevila, the work of Otto Wagner, Josef Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann was well known in Spain. Whether via the 1908 International Congress of Architects in Vienna, which had publicized them, or through journals, illustrated books or travelling, the fact is that designers found in the countries of Central Europe an escape route from the decorative excesses of Art Nouveau. One of the architects who best exemplified the amalgam of local traditions with elements of the Viennese Secession was the Girona-born architect Rafael Masó. A great lover of the decorative arts and ceramics, Masó has been considered the bridge between Modernisme and Noucentisme and in certain aspects he was a forerunner of Art Deco. [Fig. 6] His knowledge of Austrian and German architecture came from reading the journals The Studio, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and Stikerein & Spitzen (Embroidery and Lace Edging), from which he began to develop geometric and schematic decoration. The furniture he designed between 1910 and 1916 could now be considered Art Deco before it actually existed as such, since there was still a decade to go before the 1925 Paris exhibition.34

Fig. 6 Rafael Masó: Adroher Hermanos shop in Girona, 1917. Historical Archive of the Architects’ Association of Catalonia, Girona.

The Secessionist repertoire was introduced to Spain very especially through the industrial arts that make up the decorative details of buildings: in the railings, the glasswork, the woodwork and, above all, the ceramic linings. The taulells, or wainscoting, of tiles from Onda and Manises, popularized the Secessionist repertoire in the small villages on the Mediterranean coast, in what would be a colouristic local interpretation of a European tradition. Despite working far from the large cities where the modern styles were created, Spanish designers were less isolated than it seems. We know, for example, that the ceramicist from Valencia Gaspar Polo had in his workshop French, German, Austrian and Danish decoration magazines that provided him with up-to-date repertoires.35

Another way in to Spain for the Secessionist repertoire was steam-bent wooden furniture, known popularly as “Viennese furniture”. As Julio Vives has shown, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century the furniture made by the companies Thonet Brothers and Jacob & Josef Kohn was marketed very successfully in Spain. Its price-to-quality ratio and original design were unbeatable. In about the 1910s a change of taste with regard to this kind of furniture began to take place, almost certainly caused by the tiredness and the mannerism of the typical Art Nouveau coup de fouet. In this respect Kohn was a pioneer.³⁶ Besides the imaginative curvilinear types invented in the nineteenth century by Thonet, Kohn began marketing a series of far less decorative and more functional models in Europe and Spain, created by the designers of the Viennese Secession Otto Wagner, Gustav Siegel, Kolo Moser and Josef Hoffmann, and which proved to be very useful for furnishing bank branches, professional offices, cafés, restaurants and hotels. Some of the innovations they came up with were the use of the square-profile structural strip, round arches and the brass details that gave the furniture a far more severe look and also made it more hard wearing.

The importation of Viennese Secessionist furniture was however interrupted due to the outbreak of the First World War, when the routes connecting Spain with the Austro-Hungarian Empire were blocked. This gave encouragement to the bentwood furniture makers in Valencia, who since the turn of the century had been competing aggressively for control of the Spanish market. Indeed, much of the Viennese-style furniture that was purchased in Spain – in Galicia, the Basque Country, Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, and even in Buenos Aires – was manufactured by the firms Salvador Albacar y Gil, Luis Suay Bonora, Joaquín Lleó y Bolás and Ventura Feliu Rocafort in Valencia and by Alejandro Delgado in Murcia. These companies did not restrict themselves to slavishly copying Viennese models, but they also innovated technically and introduced a large number of patents.37

A close look at these companies’ output gives us an idea of how far they were in tune with fashions and changes in taste. In Salvador Albacar’s 1911 catalogue, along with the typical Modernista models still in vogue and the odd outmoded historicist one, there appear two complete bedrooms composed of a bed, wardrobe, bedside table, dressing table and shelves (pages 46-49) manufactured with square-profile strips, round and ogee arches and smooth veneered panelling. I will not venture to say that they were Art Deco if one bears in mind that this style “officially” appeared in the 1920s, but it is certainly surprising that alternatives to industrial Art Nouveau were already being proposed at such an early date.³⁸ On the other hand, the 1924 catalogue of the Valencian company Hijo de Ventura Feliu leaves us in no doubt about the modernization of the bentwood furniture that was being made and sold in Spain. Although the Modernista models that made this company so famous survive, almost half the furniture that appears in this document has a structure of square-profile strips, bent in rounded or ogee arches, and the wardrobes have completely smooth panelled or mirrored doors. [Fig. 7] In these models the imaginative curved decoration typical of Art Nouveau is abandoned and there is even the odd reference to abstract art.³⁹ The furniture of Ventura Feliu picked up the baton from the Viennese Secession and projected it towards the twentieth century in what was to be an interesting attempt to popularize the modern repertoires, which was precisely the function of Art Deco.

Fig. 7 Screen. Catalogue: Fábrica de muebles encorvados Hijo de Ventura Feliu, Valencia, June 1924, p. 79.

This practical, simple and inexpensive furniture from Valencia was the perfect accompaniment for the earliest modern architecture and it faithfully served its ideals of functionality, standardization and mass consumption, and so it deserves its place in the history of design along with the highly praised radical furniture of the GATEPAC, whose output was very modest.⁴⁰ The suitability of Valencian furniture can be seen in the fact that it remained in use for many decades.⁴¹ Those of us of a certain age can still remember it in provincial middle-class homes, hotels and restaurants in post-war Spain, before it was pushed aside by the retrogressive furniture sold by Muebles la Fábrica and El Corte Inglés.

In any case, Secessionist design was not the only escape route from Modernisme in Spain. Historians have identified others such as Classicism, Regionalism, Baroque and Plateresque and, of course, Modernism (called in Spain Movimiento Moderno). Art Deco rubbed shoulders with all of them.

Modern coexistences: Noucentisme and the Avant-garde

Classicism was the modern reinterpretation of Latin and Mediterranean traditions and, in Catalonia, this gave rise to a very well orchestrated cultural movement called Noucentisme that was promoted by the Lliga Regionalista, a conservative nationalist party that had a highly elaborate plan to modernize the country. The first phase of Noucentisme (1914-1923) coincided with the establishment of the Mancomunitat and the introduction of a certain degree of autonomy with respect to Spanish state institutions. According to Mercè Vidal, who has studied this movement in depth, rather than a repertoire of academic forms, Noucentisme sought a mythical origin in Mediterranean classical tradition to legitimate its ideals.⁴² Its nationalist aspect also led it to value the world of popular tradition, from architecture to the arts and crafts, which could be clearly seen in the design of objects and in graphic productions.43

Classicism was expressed for example in the work of the sculptor Esteve Monegal, who used Greco-Roman female figures in the designs of his packaging for Myrurgia perfumes, or in the work of Josep Obiols, who incorporated classical scenes in the inlays that he applied to furniture designed by Antoni Badrinas. Although in theory Noucentisme may be considered a programmatic movement that had nothing to do with Art Deco, in practice contamination was inevitable. In their wish to be modern, Noucentista designers did not slavishly repeat Mediterranean classical traditions, but they interpreted them schematically, which was a very Art Deco attitude.

In Spain Art Deco coexisted with Modernism, as it did in the rest of Europe. This coexistence gave rise to heated controversies. There were many architects and designers who, upon noting the decline of Art Nouveau, promptly adopted Deco as a modern decorative style after the First World War. However, unlike the avant-garde, Art Deco was not trying to change the world. This aim belonged to Modernism, far more radical and politically committed in nature. Modernism set out to transform society and bring it into the twentieth century, by collectivizing private life, freeing women from their domestic chores and improving the health and hygiene of the body. This ambitious programme would be achieved through the use of modern technologies, mass production, and the introduction of a mechanical and rational aesthetic, all in the context of the proletarian revolution. Although not all the architects of Modernism were openly left wing, it has to be acknowledged that Modernism’s programme was rooted in the ideas of equality and social justice as proposed by Socialism.⁴⁴

Thus, as you would expect, the craftsmen of Art Deco, especially the furniture makers of the FAD in Barcelona, had heated arguments with their Modernist colleagues. In issue 15 (third quarter of 1934) the journal AC, the mouthpiece of the GATCPAC (Grup d’Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l’Arquitectura Contemporània), published a long article entitled “A false concept of modern furniture” in which it accused Art Deco of being completely different to what they were advocating. It was a false modernity that “did not correspond spiritually to any interior revolution of the home or its organization”.45

However, the controversy had in fact already begun, a year earlier, in the pages of the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà, the exponent of the most exquisite Art Deco and modern good taste.⁴⁶ In March 1933, Santiago Marco, the president of the FAD and almost certainly the most prestigious interior designer in Barcelona, published an article about modern décor in which he proposed to use new materials such as nitro-cellulose, stainless metals, steel and nickel-chrome plating, despite the fact that the public was still slow to accept them. Marco advocate their use and put his well-heeled clientele at ease, who were afraid that their use would imply a reduction in quality or a lapse into vulgarity:

These experiences, in accordance with the principles that affect interior décor, entail or demand simplicity and deliberation everywhere, but they never countenance the reduction or the absence of quality […] What frightens many people is believing that the new trends may go too far and that upon achieving this modern state, in which so many walls and clean furniture with a simplistic structure are planned, the enjoyment and the comfort that distinguished, well-to-do people are able to afford in order to distance themselves from vulgarity will be no more.47

Marco illustrated his article with photographs of interiors in which the evolution of their style could be seen: first, the house of Sr Jaume Martí, decorated in a luxurious, typically Paris 1925 style; second, the office of Dr Monroset, equipped with wooden furniture with an angular and austere design, and finally, the interiors of the recently opened fashion shop El Dique Flotante, which he had designed in a wholly modernist style and equipped with tubular furniture. From an ideological point of view, Marco did not belong to the avant-garde but nor did he scorn its emblematic styles.

Three months after Marco’s article, in the same magazine the GATCPAC published its statement about what the modern home should be. Evoking the theories of Le Corbusier, it upheld that the furniture should have the precision typical of the industrial expression of our age and that this can only be achieved by seeking light detachable standard types, designed for wholly utilitarian purposes and mass produced. The GATCPAC ended its article with the following hygienist and aesthetic arguments:

The GATCPAC is of the opinion: That the furniture derived from the 1925 Paris exhibition is not modern, due to the large amount of heavy varnished wood · That dust traps have no place in modern furniture and it must be possible to clean it easily from all angles. English-type upholstered chairs, within their simplicity, are storehouses of dirt; just try to see one being dismantled that has been in use for a while · That decorative fabrics with supposedly modern patterns are as old as the ones with patterns from the past · That within the large varieties of qualities of fabrics that are currently being manufactured those with plain colours must be used · That a pleasant setting in a modern interior can be obtained with very few elements. The “nouveau riche” spirit, the shopkeeper par excellence, tends to accumulate the maximum number of elements in the minimum amount of space, losing all notion of order · That few elements and few colours wisely and harmoniously combined will give us a tasteful modern interior that will not go out of fashion · GATCPAC.48

The GATCPAC illustrated its article with photographs of the ultra-modern, minimalist and luxurious Tugendhat house by Mies van der Rohe, built in Brno in 1930, almost certainly in an attempt to teach the prudent readers of the magazine a lesson in radical Modernism.

Despite these diatribes, crossovers between the avant-garde and Art Deco were frequent. Without wishing to play down their desire for social reform, the architects of the GATCPAC only ever managed to complete two public buildings for the Republican Generalitat – the Anti-Tuberculosis Dispensary and the Casa Bloc group of workers’ apartments in Sant Andreu. The rest were commissions for blocks of rented flats and private dwellings. One of the main leaders of the GATCPAC, Josep Lluís Sert, even designed the façade, the interiors and the furniture of the luxurious Roca Jeweller’s shop, in Passeig de Gràcia in the centre of Barcelona.

Regionalism, purism and “Spanish remorse”

In Spain, regionalism and purism were stimulated by the idea of the “regeneration” that Spanish intellectuals invoked after the crisis of 1898, through which it ought to be possible to harmonize technological progress with knowledge of the most profound Spanish identity. These rather nationalistic movements signalled the boom in rambling, the creation and the support of bodies set up to explore the remotest places in the peninsula, where it was thought the authentic Hispanic soul remained, uncontaminated. The romantic stereotype of Spain as a country capable of conserving its customs and traditions to a greater extent than neighbouring countries, devoured by industrialization, provided creators with a dose of typically Art Deco exoticism. In the regionalist painting of Ignacio Zuloaga, Eduardo Chicarro and Julio Romero de Torres themes appear of popular and purist Spain, such as bullfighters, majas (young women) and flamenco dancers, which were a never-ending seam mined by design, graphic illustration and advertising in the time. [Fig. 8] In line with these tendencies, in Barcelona in the 1920s the perfume manufacturer Myrurgia launched a series of new fragrances with images and names inspired by flamenco folklore and by the choreographic creations of the dancer Tórtola Valencia, an authentic muse of painters and writers of the period.⁴⁹ In Valencia, the ceramicist Antonio Peyró included, in his colouristic production of trinkets, flamenco dancers, women dressed for the fallas (spring festival) in Valencia, farm labourers and typical Spanish characters that he combined with women dancing the Charleston and personalities from the 1920s. The search for the exotic found in purist Spain a repertoire waiting to be reinterpreted in a modern way, just as Mexican designers were doing with their Meso-American traditions, or New Zealand designers with their Maori traditions.

Fig. 8 Esteve Monegal: Maja perfume bottle with box, by Myrurgia, c. 1922. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya Collection. Photo by Jordi Calveras.

Besides the regionalist and purist tendencies, according to Pérez Rojas, during the 1920s in Spain there was an authentic rediscovery of the Baroque and the Renaissance that was expressed in architecture that he also considers Deco. This is a problematic issue, not at all progressive in my opinion, as the neo-Baroque buildings of the 1920s seem rather to be examples of terminal historicism than the beginnings of a modern idiom. Moreover, I have not found any schematic and stylized interpretations of the Baroque in Spanish furniture similar to the ones made by the great French ensembliers Jacques Émile Ruhlmann and Süe et Mare in France. It is also hard to use the adjective “deco” to describe revivals of the Plateresque style,⁵⁰ basically because it was old-fashioned, anachronistic and dull, and because transferring it to furniture resulted in the “Spanish remorse” style, which decorated aristocratic or allegedly noble mansions. Although I admit that in the art, decoration and fashion magazines of the 1920s, illustrated reports on interiors decorated in historic Spanish styles and with paintings from the Golden Age appear alongside very modern interiors and geometric-style illustrations, this does not lead me to think that all Spanish decorative output of the 1920s was Art Deco. In my opinion, the idea that the Baroque and Renaissance revivals were national styles reinterpreted in a modern way is questionable, because they look to me more like nostalgic evocations of a glorious past that gave interiors a gloomy old-fashioned look.

Furniture makers

Although they are less well known than their Modernista predecessors and they did not reach the extremes of luxury and sophistication of their French contemporaries, there is a small group of excellent Catalan ensembliers to whom history ought to do justice.⁵¹ In the first place there was the president of the FAD, Santiago Marco, who besides being a man of action was the favourite furniture maker of the Barcelona middle class.⁵² As a young man he trained in the projects section of the workshops of Francesc Vidal i Javellí, where he rose to be manager of the company. When Vidal died, Marco left the company and began designing furniture in historical styles for customers of his former boss. However, from the 1920s onwards Marco started to become interested in the fashions from Paris that he was familiar with through publications, trips and personal contacts. In the French capital Santiago Marco visited the workshops of Émile Ruhlmann, whose furniture he admired and did not hesitate to take as a source of inspiration. His participation as director and interior designer of the Artists’ Gathering pavilion in 1929 was quite outstanding. Besides proposing a very modern concept of domestic architecture, in this pavilion Marco incorporated rich materials like woods and silk brocades into the furniture, culminating in the most precious and refined version of Art Deco, very much in line with Parisian trends. Nevertheless, at the end of the 1920s he began to get interested in modern industrial materials: nitro-cellulose enamels, stainless metals, rubber flooring and grainless wood. During the first half of the 1930s, the style of this designer became refined, moving towards far more rationalist interior designs, which he furnished with tubular furniture, although he did not persist too much in this line, which he found cold and mechanistic, for domestic settings at least. Here I would like to make it clear that Marco was not an industrial businessman, he was actually a designer who did not have his own workshops and outsourced the manufacturing all his designs.⁵³

The case of Antoni Badrinas is especially interesting for his training and for the contacts he maintained with Germany. From 1908 to 1914 he lived in Dresden, where he first studied painting at the Königliche Akademie der Bildende Künste and then ornamental composition at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts). Badrinas gained first-hand knowledge of the Deutscher Werkbund’s theories of industrial innovation and the revival of the proposed popular traditions, both of them as an alternative to the Jugendstil. Upon his return, he left his hometown Terrassa and opened his workshops in Barcelona in 1920. In 1927 he was to open a furniture and decorative accessories shop in Avinguda Diagonal that would become the place where artists and designers of the period met. Badrinas imported French industrial textiles with designs by Raoul Dufy,⁵⁴ silver objects by Jensen, and he was the exclusive representative in Spain of the German DeTeKu fabrics and wallpapers. Badrinas’s furniture had simple lines and was impeccably made, and it often incorporated the inlays of Josep Obiols in what we might consider to be the continuation of the great Modernista marquetry tradition that Gaspar Homar and Josep Pey had initiated. The novelty lay in the fact that Badrinas abandoned the Japanese-style and Pre-Raphaelite repertoires of his predecessors, devoting himself to developing the popular classicist repertoire typical of Noucentisme. Whereas Santiago Marco’s customers were the Generalitat and the Barcelona haute bourgeoisie, Badrinas’s clientele was composed of professional people – doctors and lawyers, traders, intellectuals and artists – and the city council, which commissioned him with the decoration of several offices. Badrinas did not however devote himself exclusively to refined luxury furniture. To the extent that he had his own workshops, he had studied in Germany and he wished to reduce the prices of his furniture, he concerned himself with its mass production. During the 1930s he produced a series of very simple models, free of trimmings, aimed at furnishing homes with limited purchasing power.⁵⁵ He occasionally incorporated pieces of metal or tubing in the style of Marcel Breuer’s furniture, which was already becoming known in Spain at that time thanks to the Rolaco company from Madrid.

Jaume Llongueras did not take part in the exhibitions in Paris and Barcelona and he developed Art Deco occasionally. He was a versatile man and a refined furniture maker who did important commissions. As a young man, he had been closely linked to Catalan Modernisme and had worked in Gaudí’s workshop. His first assignments as an independent interior designer – two bars and a milk bar – clearly showed the influence of the latest German Jugendstil, whose evolution he was familiar with thanks to the journey he had made in 1911 to Hellerau to study rhythmic gymnastics. This city, where the first garden city and an important modern furniture factory were built, could be considered a showcase of the innovation promoted by the Deutscher Werkbund. During the 1920s, Llongueras was given important official commissions that he always resolved in classical styles – either eighteenth-century French or sixteenth-century Italian. He only developed the “1925 style” in the design for the house of Sr Xavier Tort (1932) and in the Modes Badia shop, in 1934, which at the time was highly praised by critics.56

Talleres Vídua de Josep Ribas was one of the companies that most contributed to the rising of Art Deco, insofar as it built the furniture of the designers – Ramón Rigol, Santiago Marco and Valeri Corberó – who did not have their own workshop. It was moreover a pioneering company in the construction of tubular steel furniture, a material that it imported from Sweden. The Ribas workshops had been founded in 1897 and were known for manufacturing and selling excellent furniture in both classical and modern styles. Josep Ribas, the owner of the workshop, died in 1909, and his widow Pilar Seva ran the company very efficiently until the outbreak of the Civil War, due to which the workshop was dismantled. Although the company’s prestige was based on traditional furniture, the Ribas workshops did many commissions in Art Deco and rationalist styles. [Fig. 9] The heir to the workshop, Josep Ribas Seva, was well trained, travelled a lot and showed that he had an extraordinary talent for furniture design, whose development he entrusted completely to the company’s draughtsmen and workers. During the 1920s and 1930s, Talleres Vídua de Josep Ribas did important public and private commissions, as well as making all the furniture in the Artists’ Gathering pavilion in 1929. During the first half of the 1930s, the Ribas workshops acquired the technology necessary to manufacture the tubular furniture that they were asked to make by the designers of the time, very especially the GATCPAC. From 1930 to 1935 the company was an industrial partner of this group of avant-garde architects, something that allowed it to display its furniture in the gallery that the latter had opened in Passeig de Gràcia.57

Fig. 9 Valeri Corberó: upholstered tubular armchair, manufactured by Talleres Vídua de Josep Ribas, 1932. Museu del Disseny de Barcelona Collection. Photo: Barcelona Photographic Archive.

The companies Rolaco [Fig. 10] and MAC manufactured and sold tubular furniture in Madrid. The former, producing metal furniture, was founded in 1930 by Romeo Landini and Eduardo Solís, and its artistic manager was the German Otto Winkler. Also in 1930, José María Fernández de Castro discovered bent tubular furniture at an exhibition that he saw in the German city of Leipzig and, together with Eduardo Show Loring, he created the company Muebles de Acero Curvado (MAC) with the aim of making modern tubular furniture. After a period of trial and error, in 1931 MAC won a contract to reproduce under license the chairs of Mies van der Rohe. To begin with the steel was bent by hand, but the company later purchased a bending machine, achieving with it the mass production of a variety of designs that became enormously popular. So popular in fact, that Thonet actually accused them of plagiarising the furniture of Marcel Breuer. The two companies merged in 1932, becoming Rolaco-MAC. During the years of cultural splendour of the Second Republic, Rolaco-MAC’s tubular furniture was the favourite of avant-garde architects and fashionable interior designers.⁵⁸

Fig. 10 Luis Martínez Feduchi: bookcase, manufactured by Rolaco, Madrid, 1933. Museu del Disseny de Barcelona Collection. Photo by Rafael Vargas Studio.

Perfumery

Perfumery had an important place in Art Deco magazines. It was a sector associated with fashion, determined to invest in advertising and design, whose companies in many cases survived the disaster of the Civil War. Although the fragrances were invisible, the advertisements for the brands of Floralia, Gal, Myrurgia and Dana evoked exoticism, modernity and glamour.

Myrurgia was created in 1916 when the sculptor Esteve Monegal took over the family business, undertaking the company’s artistic and commercial management remarkably successfully. Monegal was responsible for defining the lines in accordance with the fragrances and designing the bottles, labels and packaging that, to start with, were commissioned to French companies. He furthermore entrusted the advertising to the excellent draughtsman Eduard Jener, who worked in a very Art Deco graphic line,⁵⁹ and the photography to Pere Català Pic, Josep Sala and Ramón Batlles. In the 1930s the latter illustrated photographically better than anybody the concepts of luxury and glamour that the company wished to communicate. Myrurgia perfumes, some of which remained on the market throughout the twentieth century, constituted the quintessential Art Deco product in Spain.⁶⁰ Monegal was a good classical-style sculptor, and in about 1918 he and Jener launched the first lines of fragrances – Colonia Natural, Sales de Tracia, Sales de Tesalia, Orgía Ariadna, Mi Reina – in a classical style that depicted vestal virgins and dancers dressed in Greco-Roman style tunics illuminated with a very soft range of colours. However, the influences of the Ballets Russes, Poiret’s oriental feasts and the exotic dances of Tórtola Valencia soon became popular, and so Myrurgia launched a line in an oriental style almost at the same time. Polvos Morisca, Tentación, Hindustan, Bésame, Maderas de Oriente [Fig. 11], Fantasio, Formosa and Liria resorted to bottles packaged in exotic woods and drawings based on dancers and Persian-style Arabesques. Myrurgia’s third line was the one based on Spanish stereotypes. In a time when cosmetics were dominated by French brands, Monegal’s choice was a complete success, as he presented to the world an image of perfumery different to the habitual one. The lines Maja, Suspiros de Granada, Sol de Triana, Goyesca, Flor de Blasón, Tu reja, Joya, Príncipe de Asturias and Embrujo de Sevilla were based on very sophisticated stylizations of the Spanish stereotypes the maja, the woman from Seville, the carnation and the aggressive combination of the colours red and black.61

Fig. 11 Eduard Jener and Esteve Monegal: Maderas de Oriente perfume bottle by Myrurgia. Museu del Disseny de Barcelona Collection. Photo by Rafael Vargas Studio.

Conclusion

Paradoxically Art Deco did not disappear from the everyday scene after the Civil War. As it was a modern style with no defined ideology, its designers were not persecuted by the Franco regime nor did they have to go into exile. Despite the reactionary trends, the censorship and the huge cultural regression that took place in the 1940s and 1950s, it could occasionally still be seen in the work of different illustrators⁶² or in catalogues of companies that were behind the times.63

In an article of 1980, Manuel Arenas and Pedro Azara called local Art Deco a “photocopied” style.⁶⁴ It is true that Spanish cities were a long way from the great cultural capitals – Paris, London or New York – where Art Deco was created. Nevertheless, the most recent research has clearly shown that this style was spread all over the world through the channels of mediation typical of mass culture as no other had been. Art Deco went round the world and reached countries as far away from the metropolis as India, China, Japan, South Africa, New Zealand and Latin America. In all these places Art Deco appropriated indigenous decorative cultures, which it schematized, modernized and turned into a contemporary style ready to be consumed by the middle and upper class.

Spain was no exception, and we have seen how quickly and eagerly it absorbed Art Deco through the cinema, magazines and exhibitions. In my opinion, the studies of Art Deco in Spain ought not to be based on the idea that it was a provincial style, outmoded and peripheral, but they should explore how the strategies of schematic simplification, geometrization, modernization, luxury, mass consumption and commercialization that define it were used to reinterpret local traditions. Moreover, the more commercial and short-lived products have yet to be researched, those farthest removed from art and the decorative arts. These include the packaging of food and cleaning products, the displays of brands of dyes, of cosmetics and food products that were placed on the counter in grocery stores, as well as simple haberdashery products: fabrics, ribbons, buckles and buttons, indispensable for modern clothing. As regards interiors, besides private dwellings countless offices, shops, restaurants, cafeterias, cinemas and nightclubs, which disappeared due to the changes in economic activity and variations in taste, have still to be investigated. Likewise, and as I mentioned above, it would be stimulating to research more exhaustively the influence of Hollywood movies on Spaniards’ changing tastes and customs.

The consideration of Art Deco as a commercial style, frivolous and minor, lacking the “artistic” quality and the virtuosity of its predecessor, Modernisme, has seriously influenced the destruction of its heritage – in Spain at least. This makes it difficult to study, value and catalogue. Although many buildings are still standing, countless interiors have been destroyed, not to mention objects.⁶⁵ Art museums are reluctant to collect what in their day were indisputably commercial products. Nevertheless, we should be pleased that the historians I cited at the beginning – Suárez and Vidal, Arenas and Azara, Pérez Rojas and Fondevila – have made a case for research into this style in Spain and Catalonia and that in Segovia there is a museum dedicated to both Art Nouveau and Art Deco.66

Acknowledgements

This study has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of Julio Vives, who gave me access to his catalogues on bentwood furniture from Valencia. My thanks also to Silvia Santaeugenia, who showed me her research into the Artists’ Gathering pavilion, and to Pilar Vélez, who gave me access to the data about Lluís Masriera’s Serpiente (snake) bracelet. Finally, my thanks to Anna Calvera, who made interesting suggestions about the approach of the research.

Mediterraneanism in 1930s Design and its Survival in the Post-war Period¹

Mercè Vidal i Jansà

Things are merely thought detectors.

Le Corbusier, Défense de l’architecture (1929-1930)

As is well known, in the mid 1920s the modern interior, and with it furniture making, underwent a substantial change that might even be referred to as a “revolution in interiors”. The change went hand in hand with the new architectural ideas that were appearing in that period. Aspects such as the rationality of functions, the economization of space and the introduction of the standard and mass production marked the new criteria for projects. If on top of that we add the new slogans – the cult of sport, healthy living, hygiene, comfort – these new values spread when furniture was conceptualized and interior space characterized, and they became novelties, different and decisive.

In 1926, referring to furniture, Le Corbusier coined the phrase “domestic equipment”. In Précisions he categorically stated that, “the innovation of the plan for the modern house will be effectively tackled, which after stripping down the question of furniture [...] a machinist period has succeeded the pre-machinist period; a new spirit has replaced the ancient spirit”.² Precisely to hammer home these arguments he made use of what he had already proposed in the Esprit Nouveau (New Spirit) pavilion, in 1925, that he had just presented at that year’s Salon d’Automne in Paris. The new stand was dominated by metallic furniture. Between both pavilions, the equipment had made the space bigger. Now it was all chromed steel tube furniture and pigeonhole-containers with which, through the rationality of the functions, the interior of the dwelling had been turned upside down. But it also meant that, in the context of France, the new stand by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand was placed parallel to the dominant one of German metallic furniture, which had emerged with the Bauhaus and was associated with Neue Sachlichkeit. It was part of that Bauen, as the Germans were calling the new architecture, closer to science and technology than to Baukunst, architecture and art: “Today, in the avant-garde of the “neue Sachlichkeid” [sic], two words have been killed off: Baukunst (Architecture) and Kunst (Art). They have been replaced with Bauen (to build) and Leben (life) [...] With this done, one can only speak objectively of the question by using the comprehensible terms ‘architecture’ and ‘art’”,³ as Le Corbusier put it. This issue generated a series of standpoints and became one of the most interesting polemics of the period. As we shall see, Catalonia did not remain oblivious to it.

In these circumstances the new steel-tubed furniture was an innovation and, consequently, as such the right tools were required to produce it. One of the principal industrial manufacturers was M. Thonet, born in Germany but living in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century. His factory had established itself with curved wooden furniture; it was now doing it with this new equipment, with its simple structure, material and shape, light, hygienic and mass-produced. Thonet was one of its main distributors and, as happened in other countries, it arrived in Catalonia via him. In those years this new equipment, associated with the functionalist avant-garde trend, was publicized in another important medium: the specialist magazines that became a sign of identity of this modernity. Journals such as L’Architecture d’Aujourdhui, Cahiers d’Art, Bauwelt (close to the CIAM), Moderne Bauformen (published by Julius Hoffmann of Darmstadt), Das Neue Frankfurt, Das Werk, Domus and Casabella – to mention the most important ones – gave it an international reach.

In the late 1920s, the new ideas for modern equipment achieved a status that they had never previously had. The new architectural projects were experimental in nature, and this aspect was extended to furniture too. It is important to bear in mind exhibitions like the one held on the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart in 1927, under the direction of Mies van der Rohe. Called Die Wohnung (The room), a group of houses furnished for the occasion was presented to the public for the first time. Or the one held in Frankfurt, two years later, dedicated to Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum (The Dwelling for Minimal Existence), which was also the theme of CIAM II held in the same city. In these early years, most of the consumers were the architects who were introducing the new furniture in their projects; it also interested intellectuals and those who could afford it, since in the 1920s and 1930s its small-scale manufacture made it an expensive item. Although behind the new architectural ideas the social aspect was given priority, the general public showed little interest in it, preferring “stylish” furniture. While metallic furniture was an innovative creation in all senses, especially with the introduction of the cantilever chair – in French porte-à-faux – which had a lot of research behind it, the manufacturing of wooden furniture continued and, in fact, experienced even greater formal simplicity in keeping with this new style.

Although a few years later, the echoes of this functionalist avant-garde were heard in Catalonia through the group of young architects that, between the mid twenties and the early thirties, were finishing their architecture degrees. In 1930 Josep Lluís Sert, Sixte Illescas, Josep Torres Clavé, Pere Armengou, Ricard de Churruca, Francesc Perales, Germà Rodríguez Arias, Cristòfol Alzamora and Manuel Subiño established themselves as the GATCPAC (Grup d’Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l’Arquitectura Contemporània/Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Advancement of Contemporary Architecture),⁴ and others gradually joined them. The GATCPAC promoted this new modern equipment linked to the new architectural ideas.

The influence of Le Corbusier’s that has so often been pointed out on the Catalan group placed it in the quandary that I have mentioned above and, as we shall see throughout the study of furniture and interiors, it gradually led to a Mediterranean sphere of influence flourishing that, to use the same terms as they did, confronted “functionalism of the material” with “functionalism of the spirit”.5

The Creation of “Contemporary House Building and Furnishing”

The GATCPAC set up its headquarters on the ground floor of a building in L’Eixample, at Passeig de Gràcia, 99, on the corner of Carrer de Rosselló, very close to Gaudí’s building La Pedrera. It was – and still is – one of the most distinguished streets in the city. The premises opened on 13 April 1931, and right from the start not only was it used as a meeting place, it was also chiefly the shop in which both the modern equipment and the technical solutions linked to the building industry were presented. The remodelling of this space that the GATCPAC took over was unequivocally surprising for the modern look of the lines that shaped the large glass surface of the shop windows, more than 12 metres long. This transparent remodelled front, achieved with these large windows, provided a direct link between the exterior and the interior.

Fig. 1 The GATCPAC premises with the stands on the ground floor, where “ambiences” were created with the new furniture. The structure of beams, iron pillars and tubular railings made it possible to create the mezzanine, converted into an exhibition place and library, the members’ meeting room. Interior design along the lines of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Reproduced in AC, 2nd quarter 1931, No. 2.

A large sign composed in Futura lettering announced “Construcció i Moblament de la Casa Contemporània” (Contemporary House Building and Furnishing), and above the entrance door, all the way down the glass, the initials GATCPAC appeared. Due to the limitations of the 113m2 of space, the interior solution incorporated a double mezzanine along one of the sides of the perimeter wall held up by iron girders and pillars that added an extra 32m². The purpose of this space was to display different “ambiences”. It was an easy and intriguing way of presenting the aesthetic effect of the set of equipment to the prospective customer.

Contemporary House Building and Furnishing was a reference point in the city’s cultural life, and the press lost no time in commenting on its impact. In Mirador, Josep Mainar, who was a member of the FAD (Foment de les Arts Decoratives), predicted that, “These young architects in new disciplines have to bring their restlessness to more rational realizations that do away with the largest possible number of prejudices from the imponderables”.⁶ The article was illustrated with a picture of the studio of architects Germà Rodríguez Arias and Ricard de Churruca, at Via Laietana, 18, showing an interior with hardly any decorative elements on the walls and with the Mies van der Rohe chairs created in 1927 for the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, with their characteristic cantilevered structure.

AC and the GATCPAC Bulletin

The GATCPAC, then, created its headquarters with Contemporary House Building and Furnishing, and it also promoted various publications to spread the new ideas. The agreement to publish a journal came from the meeting held in Zaragoza in October 1930, when they were established as the GATEPAC (Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea), which unified two further centres corresponding to Central and Northern Spain respectively, members of the CIRPAC (Comité International pour la Réalisation de l’Architecture Contemporaine). The journal was AC (Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea) Publicación del GATEPAC, published in Barcelona. It was more or less produced by the Catalan architects, who were far more numerous and showed great dynamism, and were more united and full of enthusiasm. Josep Torres Clavé took on the job of editor-in-chief and, from August 1932, he asked for a second editor, Josep Lluís Sert, to be appointed.⁷ A total of 25 issues of the journal were published from 1931 to 1937. The first one appeared in about May 1931. Throughout its life it was always published in Spanish,⁸ except for the last issue, which was produced in Catalan by Torres Clavé in the middle of the war. This publication enabled them to spread the word inside Spain and to publicize the existence of an avant-garde linked to the functionalist current internationally. Moreover, AC made exchanges with other journals easier for them.

In 1932, for example, from the headquarters of the GATCPAC, apart from the publications that were being added to the small library that was being built up, a large number of journals from a wide geographical area were available to the member architects, associated architecture students and collaborating industrialists. They were the following: from Germany, BauenSiedelnWohnen, Die Bau und Werkkunst, Deutsche Bau Zeitung (D.B.Z.), Bauwelt, Moderne Bauformen, Der P. –träger, Die Neue Stadt, Die Wohnung, Deutsches Bauwesen, Baugilde B.D.A., Wohnungs Wirtschaft, Electroschweissung; from the Netherlands, Kunst and Opbow; from Sweden, Bygmästeren; from Czechoslovakia, Stavitel and Stavba; from France, L’Architecture d’Aujord’hui and L’architecte; from Belgium, Cité & Techne and Emulation; from Italy La Casa bella (the name of the journal edited by Giuseppe Pagano and Edoardo Persico before it was changed to Casabella); from Argentina, Revista de Arquitectura; from Poland, Dom, Osiedle, Mieszkanie and Pressens; from Mexico, Tolteca; from the USA, Architectural Record and Shelter, and from Spain Arquitectura, Dyna, Cemento, El Contratista de Obras and Viviendas – a long list that showed this international scope to which AC was added.

So zealous were the young architects that very soon the idea of publishing a GATCPAC bulletin was suggested at one of the meetings by the architect Joan Baptista Subirana.⁹ It was first published in mid 1932 with the initials GATCPAC as its masthead. It did not adopt the format of AC, based on Das Neue Frankfurt, but the DIN-A4 page size. There were four pages of text distributed in two columns virtually without illustrations. It was an information bulletin written entirely in Catalan in which the projects that had been done and others that were being drafted were concisely presented. There was a section of information about materials and industrial novelties, and information about the journals received and the books loaned by the Martínez Pérez bookshop – for a while a collaborating partner – that could be consulted at the group’s headquarters. In each bulletin a series of small schematic line drawings appears below the contents – which can easily be associated with those that Le Corbusier was introducing to L’Esprit Nouveau next to the characteristic Roneo filing cabinets – depicting items of furniture, from Thonet’s classic Vienna curved wooden chair that Le Corbusier had placed in his pavilion in 1925 and in the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, to the metallic cantilever chairs by Breuer and Mies. Drawings of lifts, all kinds of cars, and bicycles completed this list … all of them, old and modern, having become “standard objects”. They had taken the drawings from the compilation done by Koen Limperg in collaboration with S. M. Krijgsman.10

Industrialists and companies

Right from the start a number of industrialists were associated with the GATCPAC because they understood that:

It is essential for the architect who is responsible for everything going on in the building to have the help of these industrial technicians, and a complete mutual understanding with them […]. With this collaboration the job as a whole that has to be done is made easier and we hope to gradually be able to resolve the series of problems at present that will increase constantly in the future, with a spirit of our own, for while human needs are increasingly more common and uniform, racial and climatological differences [my italics] will always exist. We shall optimistically try at least to keep up with the times.¹¹

And they ended by saying that they had already begun to study the standard features: doors, windows, metal shutters and some basic items of furniture of the new architectural ideas. Collaboration with these industrialists also represented an important source of income. An initial membership fee had been established, and another after a year, or monthly. The industrialists were grouped together in three categories, A, B and C, according to the different branches of the building industry. Only one firm corresponding to each branch could join as an industrialist partner, except for construction companies, of which there could be two. Notwithstanding that, from the Board’s minutes we know that certain agreements could be reached and there could be more than one from the same speciality. All members were entitled to exhibit their products on the stands and in the display cabinets at the headquarters.12

From 1930 to 1937, among those joining and leaving, we find the following companies and industrialists in the interiors sector: Hermann Heydt and Thonet, metallic furniture; Vda. J. Ribas, wooden furniture; Josep Vallès, wooden constructions in general; Planells, Queraltó i Cia, cabinetmakers; Dámaso Azcue, rush furniture; Biosca i Botey, metalwork; E. F. Escofet i Cia, cement (hydraulic) floor tiles; Fernando Blasi, magnesium-based cement, and Butsems for artificial stone. Later, Bargalló and Artur Rigol joined for gardening, although as a result of the latter’s death in 1934 Aldrufeu joined as a gardening industrialist along with Joan Mirambell. Siemens supplied electrical appliances; carpets were by Sert, SA; upholstery, by A. Tronch; metallic fabrics, by Rivière; paint, by Vilaró i Valls, SA; metallic windows, by Cristall (H. Heydt), and glass, by E. Cardona (from 1935 onwards it would be Cardona & Munné).13

There can be no doubt that photography and the use of new typographies were very important in the 1930s, above all with regard to the pictures illustrating magazines or the exhibitions in which the work done and the projects were displayed; photo-montage, very common in those years, was also used. Through photographs creative research was applied that particularly characterized the Neue Sachlichkeit trend with the peculiar “objectivity” and sharpness of the shots of buildings, interiors, objects and furniture. The introduction of overhead and low-level shots, the detailed focus and the well-composed frame became factors of modernity. The GATCPAC made use of this medium and availed itself of the services of the photographer Josep Sala as a collaborating partner – he was the artistic director of the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà,¹⁴ perhaps the best collated and the most advanced with regard to graphic layout of the time – and the photographer Margaret Michaelis, who, upon leaving Berlin in 1933 and going into exile, came to live in Barcelona for a few years and worked with the group.¹⁵

Fig. 2 The vestibule of the GATCPAC premises with the Breuer chairs and the large shop windows with cacti arranged. The interior and exterior visuality generates a very open space. Reproduced in AC, 2nd quarter 1931, No. 2.

Their first designs inside the machine à habiter (machine for living [in])

The photographs taken by Josep Sala offer us, in issue 2 of AC (1931), a good illustrated report on the furniture and the ambiences that had been created at Contemporary House Building and Furnishing.

Among the most noteworthy designs is the armchair with a wooden structure, the first model designed by the group.¹⁶ What makes it a standard item of furniture is the elimination of the elastic part of the upholstery, replaced by a metal frame with springs at the sides, in line with the conception of metallic furniture. The armchair has curved wooden armrests – in beech varnished with nitrocellulose – and we may suppose that it was not made in a single piece. It is similar to the armchair designed by Josep Lluís Sert for the Roca jeweller’s shop (1933-1934)¹⁷ in which the curved wood is obtained by joining two pieces together. The cushions, joined together, fit over the frame, one for the backrest and the other for the seat, which is filled with kapok fibre or down, and we are told that they could be lined with leather, canvas or cloth. The one presented on the stand was upholstered in black patent leather. It was produced by the furniture maker Vda. de J. Ribas, which despite being an important company, did not have the tools, at least at that time, to get round the problem of curved wooden furniture, but it was thought that the matter could be resolved with good craftsmanship. The simplicity of the GATCPAC model went well with the small side table that was placed in front of it, with a chromed steel structure and a round clear glass top, on a carpet of light-coloured geometric bands laid on a smooth magnesite floor.

As I said, the avant-garde integrated furniture by placing it on a par with social and aesthetic concerns, and this gave it a new status. Moved by this interest, whenever it could the GATCPAC endeavoured to include its designs in different shows, whether an exhibition or a stage play, as was the case with the play put on at the initiative of the magazine Estels at the Casino de Masnou social club. It was they, for example, who insisted on this the group’s first creation being present in the architecture exhibition that was held at the Sala Parés in June 1931, organized by the Architects’ Association of Catalonia. We also find it in the building at Carrer de Muntaner, 342-348, designed by Josep Lluís Sert (1930-1931), reproduced in AC;¹⁸ and at the beginning of 1932 it appeared at the Lyon Fair, where the GATCPAC took part. The model in this case was displayed with the leather cushions dyed blue. It was part of the assembly for the GATCPAC exhibition on the subject of “Rational parcelling out”,¹⁹ held that spring in the basement of Plaça de Catalunya. This coincided with the visit to Barcelona of members of the CIRPAC including Victor Bourgeois, Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion, Van Eesteren and Walter Gropius. Each of them gave a talk and the meeting was useful for preparing what was to be the next CIAM congress, in Moscow, but which was eventually held the following summer (1933) in Athens on board the Patris II. The arrival in the city of these foreign friends was highly significant in the group because it made it possible to demonstrate that the new premises were completely in tune with international avant-garde groups.

Among the designs displayed in the shop in 1931 there were some foreign, completely metallic items of furniture produced by Thonet: Breuer’s Espoleto and Wassily chairs, or Mies’s MRs. There were also black swing arm table lamps, similar to the ones made in those years by Belmag in Switzerland. Another display included the tables with an enamel-painted metallic stand and a linoleum-covered veneered wooden surface, around which had been arranged Emile Guillot’s folding chairs – which Thonet produced – in varnished or enamel-painted wood. Other items of furniture on show were wardrobes, sets of shelves and low sideboards highlighting the oblong shape, with sliding doors. The colour of the top – pale pink, blue or green – contrasted with the dark-coloured sides and the back (in brown, grey or black). The frame of these pieces of furniture was tubular and it thus showed, once again, their modern tendencies. The beds were the model sold by Thonet,²⁰ in steel tubing along the sides and across the ends.

All in all, the shop was arranged in an austere, rigorous, simple, clear way. The presence of tubular railings to separate the two levels heightened the modern look, imbued with the German Neue Sachlichkeit, so typical of interiors in the early 1930s. As AC pointed out, it also had “several details that show how pleasant simplicity is and how charming the most modern interiors are”, details that ranged from placing some of the journals already mentioned that had emerged with the new avant-garde on some of the vitrines or the furniture, to the presence of an abstract work of art, such as Object, Gypsy Woman by the sculptor Àngel Ferrant (loaned to the shop), a sign of the GATCPAC’s links with abstraction. On another level we ought to add that a porró (Catalan spouted drinking vessel) was even displayed on one of the laid tables – a “standard object”, perhaps? – that Josep Sala’s camera deliberately captured, just as the designer Charlotte Perriand had introduced it on the extendable table in her apartment in Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris, and which had been pictured in magazines.²¹ Finally, there was the presence of plants, especially the cacti that became so popular in the modern interiors of those years after being discovered by Pierre Jeanneret in Athens – even though their sale was prohibited in April 1932. All these elements added to the atmospheric warmth to which AC had been referring.

The Barcelona middle class, those most up to date and the more snobbish ones, found a new way of living and an understanding of the modern interior expressed in the new Contemporary House Building and Furnishing shop. By way of example we have a few testimonies of this. When furnishing their apartment after getting married in 1936 the parents of the former president of the Generalitat Pasqual Maragall went to the GATCPAC shop to buy the dining room furniture. When I asked them what had interested them,²² they simply said “because they were ‘modern’!” When he got married in 1934, the architect Joan Baptista Subirana, a member of the GATCPAC, also purchased metallic furniture by Breuer for his flat in Sant Gervasi, which shaped – and still does – the apartment’s entrance hall, despite the “conventional nature” of the spaces. Other items of furniture were designed by the same architect, who turned to some of the manufacturers in the group.²³ No less symptomatic of this idea of being modern is the photograph of Salvador Dalí taken inside the house at Portlligat decorated with Breuer-style furniture (c. 1931) – purchased in the GATCPAC shop, perhaps? – and the one taken by Brassaï of Dalí and Gala in their apartment at number 7, Rue Gauguet in Paris (c. 1932), in which the subjects are leaning against functionalist furniture.²⁴

In the GATCPAC shop this modernity could be felt everywhere. A small bar was even set up at one end as yet another “note” of the free and easy atmosphere they wished to transmit. Record listening sessions were also held there and a few talks were given.²⁵ On 20 August 1932, in a private session, there was a performance there by the tiny members of the sculptor Alexander Calder’s “Smallest Circus in the World”.

Moreover, Sert’s proposal to allow ADLAN (Amics de l’Art Nou/Friends of the New Art), the new group dedicated to spreading avant-garde modern art, to join the GATCPAC as an advisory partner was agreed to;²⁶ they were also allowed to meet in the architects’ shop when they asked to in October 1932.²⁷ Through ADLAN, directed by Joan Prats, Josep Lluís Sert and Joaquim Gomis, the affirmation of Surrealist poetics became part of the Catalan cultural scene.28

From metallic to rush furniture

One of the most outstanding members of the GATCPAC was Josep Lluís Sert, one of the first to promote the group, and also its first president. He had a dynamic personality, and contacts abroad. In a letter, as Ásdis Ólafsdóttir mentions, Giedion said that, “In Spain, the organizational talent of J.-L. Sert gives Barcelona a cutting-edge role”.29

It was Josep Lluís Sert who, seconded by Josep Torres Clavé and Germà Rodríguez Arias at the group’s meetings, insisted repeatedly that it was necessary to create GATCPAC furniture and that it should be as affordable as possible.³⁰ Most of that imported furniture was far too expensive for the general public and so it was not part of the social thinking advocated by the GATCPAC. In 1932 it was suggested, for example, that instead of importing furniture through Thonet, they ought to do so through Wohnbedarf of Zurich, created by Giedion, Werner M. Moser and Rudolf Graber the previous year, because the same items of furniture were not as expensive. Before Artek was founded, furniture by Alvar Aalto was imported through Marcel Michaud of Lyon, the founder in 1933 of Stylclair. However, once Artek had been established, due to the great popularity of the Finnish architect’s furniture in Barcelona the GATCPAC no longer dealt with Switzerland or France, but directly with Finland. In 1936 the GATCPAC was the fifth largest importer of furniture from Artek, behind Finmar, Artek-Suède, Stylclair and SIDAM.31

All this furniture was given quite a satisfactory reception and, partly via the GATCPAC, architects from Madrid and the Basque Country were placing orders for some items. If metallic furniture had been very successful, this was no less true of Emile Guillot’s folding wooden chair, imported from Thonet-Mundus as model B 751. It gained wide acceptance in Barcelona before it did in other European countries. Not only do we find it in the premises of the GATCPAC or in Josep Lluís Sert’s studio-office in Carrer de Muntaner,³² it was also part of the furniture in the “Beach house that you can dismantle”, which had been built by Josep Vallès. The prototype of this minimal dwelling was presented and exhibited in October 1932 in the Gran Via between to Passeig de Gràcia and Rambla Catalunya in Barcelona, and, as had been agreed, it was a group creation.³³ It also appeared, and with it Guillot’s chair, in the exhibition that in the spring of 1933 was held in the basement of Plaça de Catalunya. The “Beach house that you can dismantle” accompanied the architectural and urban planning project for the Ciutat del Repòs i de Vacances (Holiday and Relaxation City) that, from the beginning, the young architects had planned in order to meet the needs for leisure, recreation, life in the open air and contact with nature, to be enjoyed by the majority of the population. The GATCPAC saw in this minimal dwelling one of the ideas for their future project. They even installed it directly on the beach. In July it was assembled at Castelldefels and used as a direct experiment by some of the group members – Alzamora, Sert, Torres Clavé and Ribas Seva – who footed the bill.34

Notwithstanding that, within the dizzy atmosphere of new ideas and experiments that metallic furniture offered, the fact of actually being able to produce them was unquestionably important for the GATCPAC members. They themselves praised the great success obtained in Barcelona with this furniture, but actually producing it was a real bone of contention. They managed to bend the iron by filling it with sand, just as ROLACO, founded in 1930, had begun to do in Madrid. However, whereas ROLACO began to design tubular furniture one or two years later because it had imported a tool that enabled it to manufacture it,³⁵ in Barcelona there were no factories ready for this.³⁶ Therefore, some of the metallic furniture designs produced as GATCPAC models – tables, beds, wardrobes, sideboards, lights, stools – are the result of the work of good technicians who invented new processes, and of medium-sized companies, like that of Joaquim Blanch i Cairó (Badalona),³⁷ Buades of Palma de Mallorca, or other more important ones such as Vda. J. Ribas (Barcelona), which made wooden as well as metallic furniture. Despite lacking techniques that far more advanced countries possessed, for the GATCPAC it was obvious that without research there is no invention, and that if they invented they broke with routine and could thus innovate. The GATCPAC’s concern over resolving this issue led them to visit manufacturers’ workshops continually, either to solve problems or to provide them with drawings of what they wanted to design despite the lack of technology.

Among the GATCPAC’s creations in metalwork, at the beginning of 1932 they designed an aluminium floor lamp standing two metres high, measuring 41.5 cm in diameter. The functionalist nature of this light lies in the shape, simple and stylized. The structure is a long tubular body resting on a round stand; at the other end, there is a small joint next to the bell-shaped shade that allows it to be adjusted. Its shape, however, diffuses the light upwards via the light bulb inside the bell-shaped shade. Some of the original ones are kept in private collections, others are reissues – like the one that appears in the Museu de les Arts Decoratives de Barcelona – by Santa & Cole from 1995 onwards. The Madrid architect Fernando García Mercadal, a member of the GATEPAC, was very interested in it: with a simple outline drawing to indicate which particular model it was, he told them in a letter that he had decided to purchase some. This has enabled me to date it.³⁸

Although interest in metallic furniture came above all from German interiors, wooden furniture was never sidelined and from the start of 1930 we find rush furniture along with it. In the exhibition held in Berlin in 1932 entitled “Sunshine, fresh air and houses for all”, where prototypes of minimal weekend houses were displayed, they were accompanied by rush furniture, which was very popular in Central Europe. Many of these designs were reinterpretations of anonymous ones that, reconverted by Erich Dieckmann (a Bauhaus alumnus), were advertised through Möbelbau³⁹ by Julius Hoffmann of Stuttgart in the early 1930s. They were the expression of that same idea of simplicity and hygiene, nature, fresh air, light and sunshine that was being advocated by contemporary architecture. They were signs of the “racial and climatological differences”, no less, that the members of the GATCPAC had mentioned at the start, and which I highlighted above. Furniture makers such as Vda. J. Ribas had these catalogues published by Hoffmann for manufacturing in wood and rush. They were assembly kits, and if someone had the basic tools – and Ribas had them – he could assemble them by himself. In 1932, the GATCPAC incorporated this kind of furniture, bringing it from Azpeitia, a town in northern Spain. It was made by Dámaso Azcue, who, from the following year onwards, became a collaborating partner.

This rush furniture took centre stage in some of the interiors in GATCPAC projects and it seems to mark the beginning of a gradual distancing from the machine à habiter, which Le Corbusier himself had begun to shun around 1930, leaning towards the vernacular. Think of Villa Mandrot in Le Pradet, described as “this beautiful stone of Provence” or Villa Errazuris in Chile.

When the GATCPAC took part in the 4th Barcelona International Trade Fair, held on Montjuïc (June 1933), it had set up three different sections in an area measuring 168m². Its “star” project, the “Relaxation and Holiday City” (CRV), was displayed in one of these areas – using models, plans, photographs and photomontage – with the desire for it to be taken up by the republican government of the Generalitat. A second zone, with a very austere concept, was devoted to metallic furniture. It displayed the collection of their most important collaborating partner, the furniture maker Ribas. The setting featured paintings by Joan Miró (from Joan Prats’ collection) and the presence of a floor lamp by Biosca & Botey. The last area, which the photographs⁴⁰ highlighted the most, presented a terrace, a typological characteristic of the semi-enclosed gardens typical of countries with good weather. The setting displayed a small area for plants – created by Artur Rigol, a gardener – and on the three smooth side walls, made of corrugated iron to evoke the “bareness of the wall”, there were some of sculptor Àngel Ferrant’s compositions. One of them can be identified as Object. Gypsy Woman, which we found in the GATCPAC shop. A set of rush furniture had been arranged on a floor covered with glass tiles on a sandy base. The inclination of the backrests of this group of armchairs, chairs and benches denoted relaxation and ease. AC noted that, “the rush furniture [was] manufactured expressly for the GATEPAC, by Dámaso Azcue”.

Fig. 3 The Mediterraneanist influence and the more humanistic nature that the GATCPAC advocated is obvious in this interior of the weekend houses, built in El Garraf in 1934 by Sert and Torres Clavé. On one side we see the rush furniture produced by Dámaso Azcue, according to the model by Aizpúrua and Labayen. Photograph by Margaret Michaelis, reproduced in AC, 3rd quarter 1935, issue No. 19, devoted to “The evolution of the interior”.

This rush furniture was marketed and distributed by Dámaso Azcue and, as far as we know, the armchair was designed by architects José Manuel Aizpúrua and Joaquín Labayen,⁴¹ members of the GATEPAC, and sent to the Catalan architects via the manufacturer. The design was presented as anonymous because it was a group effort. Dámaso Azcue marketed it very successfully. It was even sold in Budapest. The GATCPAC integrated its simplicity, rationality and comfort as an easy chair in the architectural ideas that were also linked directly to rural buildings and the long tradition of Catalan building. We see it as part of the unitary space of the weekend houses in El Garraf designed in 1934 by Josep Lluís Sert and Josep Torres Clavé. They are constructions that contrasted with the machine à habiter because, as Josep Lluís Sert stated in the lecture he gave to the Barcelona School of Architecture Students’ Association in 1934, “the misunderstood functional architecture that created a machinist décor in the years 1925-1930 is dead”.42

Notwithstanding that, it is important to note that with regard to furniture and the modern interior, the GATCPAC’s interest in reaching out to large areas of society and trying to lower the costs of producing furniture was difficult to achieve. Changing people’s ideas about interiors was even harder. The proof is that when, as a result of the inauguration in 1934 of the series of minimal dwellings built for the Comissariat de la Casa Obrera at Avinguda Torres i Bages, 107-123, by the GATCPAC (Sert, Subirana, Torres Clavé), the pictures of the interiors show us simple furniture, but in a style somewhere between Cubist and Art Déco.⁴³ This furniture did not go at all with what appeared in the axonometric projections drawn by the architects in harmony with the interior spaces. This aspect of “social regenerationism” – from the house to the interior – was, as Ignasi de Solà-Morales aptly put it,⁴⁴ the most naively reformist aspect of what the avant-garde was proud of.

The affirmation of the Mediterranean personality

The question of the presence of the Mediterranean personality, or the Latin personality, became especially important in the 1930s through the GATCPAC. Nevertheless, in the Catalan context we are compelled to refer to the trend that shaped cultural, political and, to a large extent, social development in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Noucentisme – shortly before the retour à l’ordre crystallized in Europe. Noucentisme, understood as a particular project of modernity, aspired to turn Catalonia into a twentieth-century country.45

As the foundations of its project, Noucentisme identified classical Mediterranean tradition, seeking in it a mythical origin to give its ideals legitimacy and distance itself from academicism. From this perspective, it found guidelines ideal for creation, both formal and thematic, that can be seen in the artistic output. Its nationalistic component also led it to appreciate the world of rural tradition, from architecture to craftsmanship, so it became a veritable mentor in the discovery of essential values. In this respect, Noucentisme valued rural architecture – basically the farmhouses, the modest washbasins, the trellises covered in vines, the small porches – as the material culture that came from the ancestral home. It historically and symbolically rebuilt the links with Catalonia’s own tradition, from the revival, in pottery, of the blues characteristic of eighteenth-century Barcelona, or popular Baroque sgraffiti, to the reinterpretation of the lathe-turned furniture in the old stately homes. With regard to the subject we are looking at, an obvious example was the competition that the FAD held on the theme of “The beauty of the modest home” in the International Exhibition of Furniture and Interior Décor in 1923, to give but one example.46

However, despite this appreciation of simplicity, as also expressed by members of the GATCPAC, or those of the ADLAN,⁴⁷ in Noucentisme modernity has its limits; it is a “moderate modernity” that goes no further than the concept of the representation of figurative art. It is thus contrary to what the avant-garde expresses, as the latter cast its gaze over the vernacular, seeking in it not national undertones but parameters that stem from modernity itself. It approaches it from an idea of design and the standard and, in keeping with the formal experiments of modern art, from the most normative to the most lyrical and organic abstraction – remember that GATCPAC interiors had works by Léger, Àngel Ferrant, Eudald Serra and Joan Miró – to the freedom to attach, recycle or invent new forms nourished by the poetics of Surrealism.

Since the first contacts that the young architects had with Le Corbusier in 1928, before they set up as a group, he had told them: “The architecture I recommend is essentially Latin because it is mathematical ratio and it has clarity of concept. Do you understand why I think it is suitable in your country where there are a few clear and well-reasoned structural solutions?”.48

This Latin personality was heightened when Le Corbusier said that, “the Latins’ time has come”, “Italy that makes a great change of direction towards the architecture of modern times. He re is revolutionary Catalonia that, with its head, chooses the spirit of the times”.⁴⁹ Or in the letter he wrote to the engineer Guido Fiorini, in August 1932: “I feel that the time of the Latin countries has come and that the second cycle of the machinist age will be dominated by Latin grace”.

And it would be even more decisive at the CIAM IV Congress held on board the Patris II and in Athens in the summer of 1933. The visit to the Aegean islands was for many delegates the affirmation of a certain continuity between that modern spirit and the pre-classical world. It also signified that the line taken by Le Corbusier was strengthened in the face of the more orthodox one of Germanic functionalism. If Cahiers de l’Art left room for articles like the one by Panos Djelepy, “The houses of the Greek islands observed from the point of view of modern architecture”,⁵⁰ Christian Zervos published L’Art en Grèce dedicated to this CIAM, the Italian journal Quadrante devoted its entire September issue to Greece, and AC followed suit in this exaltation and affirmation:⁵¹

The elements of the Latin groups have in this congress greater importance than in previous ones; we are almost the majority and we are sailing around the Mediterranean […]. The Greek coast and the islands of the archipelago have architecture similar to that of Ibiza and Menorca, villages painted in whitewash or in pale shades, flat or vaulted roofs. It is architecture that we may very well consider as having a modern spirit, the continuation of the same forms that have been repeated for centuries on many coastlines and all the islands in the Latin sea.

And so this Mediterraneanism was reaffirmed through the congress. Le Corbusier himself, remembering his first stay in 1910 and that of the congress, painted a mythical picture of it, almost like a sort of regeneration, when he said: “In between times – from that first to that second voyage in Greece – I had understood that the Mediterranean is the inexhaustible reservoir of lessons useful for our wisdom [...]. From that usefulness perhaps the people of the present [...]. Can affirm the human scale!”52

The comments that AC dedicated to the 5th Milan Triennale (1933) are along the same lines of the consolidation of these points of reference with regard to contemporary architecture and identification through autochthonous types, such as the patio, a certain treatment of the light, materials, the exaltation of the bareness of the wall; in short, the aspects that essentially distinguish them from Northern European architecture: “For the new architectural tendency has profoundly Mediterranean roots. It is openly proclaimed by the buildings of popular tradition that have been erected to this day on the coasts and the islands of the Latin sea”.53

From this perspective that the avant-garde applied to the vernacular world, in the summer of 1935 the architect Josep Lluís Sert, the artist Joan Miró and the photographer Margaret Michaelis set out on the journey to Andalusia and Castelló de la Plana, visiting several cities, towns and villages on the Mediterranean coast. Michaelis’ camera captured the built simplicity of architecture “without a style” and the elements of “popular industry”: jugs, amphorae, unpretentious objects for household use, endlessly repeating centuries-old forms, standards. If architecture expressed through its type, which was identical in these places close to the Mediterranean, some life-giving “constants”, “modern architecture,” said AC, “is a return to the pure forms of the Mediterranean. It is yet another victory for the Latin sea!” (p. 33). The small object contained lyrical value, humanism.

The creation of MIDVA

In 1935 there were important changes. The slogan “Contemporary House Building and Furnishing”, with which four years earlier the shop in Passeig de Gràcia had been opened – the place where discussions had taken place about furniture design, the importation of certain models, the choice of industrial producers, and so on – was replaced by MIDVA, Mobiliari i Decoració de la Vivenda Actual (Modern House Furniture and Decoration).

MIDVA was a company formed by Josep Lluís Sert, Josep Torres Clavé, Antoni Bonet Castellana (the young architecture student), Germà Rodríguez Arias, and some collaborating industrialists.⁵⁴ It corresponded to the decision to break the inertia of not producing their own furniture, one of the issues that had been insisted on more than once during board meetings. The new company was considered to be a collaborating industrialist. Its establishment was crucial for promoting new models, despite its short lifespan, interrupted by the Civil War (1936-1939). The gestation of MIDVA seems to have influenced the direction of AC, which was the mouthpiece of the GATCPAC, as in issue No. 15 (3rd quarter 1934) it devoted a long article to furniture under the heading “A false concept of modern furniture”; issue 18 (2nd quarter 1935) was devoted to architecture and the standard elements of popular industry, and issue 19 (3rd quarter 1935) focused on the evolution of the interior. They are all evidence of this desire for affirmation and to fight the false modern: Art Déco, the imitations of machinist décor, regionalisms (Spanish revival) and academicism.

Some models emerged from MIDVA: a dining room table, a side table, two easy chairs with an inclined backrest,⁵⁵ one of them extendable to different positions, and the armchair, the best known one because it appeared in the Republic’s pavilion planned in Paris – by Sert and the architect Luis Lacasa – at the International Exhibition of 1937. In this pavilion, aside from the plastic arts section, there was also a very large section devoted to popular production from all over Spain.56

All the models were made of wood and maintained a very clear link with Mediterranean vernacular roots, as they were reinterpretations of the anonymous piece of furniture typical of the Balearic Islands, and Ibiza especially, the cadiral (armchair).

The momentum that MIDVA gained served not only to establish closer links with foreign firms, such as Artek; the shop – as I have said – changed its name to MIDVA. And, as MIDVA, it took part in May 1936 in the 1st Artistic Decorators’ Show organized in Barcelona by the FAD. It brought together a large number of craftsmen, ensembliers, technicians and designers.⁵⁷ For Catalonia the event was a great step forward towards the renewal and consolidation of the decorative arts and design, in a line of reinforcement of the modernity of its own output. The outbreak of the Civil War two months later brought that hopeful future to a sudden end.

MIDVA, however, was also the direct expression of the Mediterraneanist tendency, of the Latinism that had been taking hold in modern architecture. I think it would be a good idea to describe its stand,⁵⁸ if only briefly, because the fundamental role that furniture had taken, and with it, interiors, in the sense of accentuating, changing, provoking, causing them to evolve – as I said at the beginning – was an issue that both architects and designers were well aware of. Indeed, the setting for the stand was a terrace with a Catalan vaulted roof where different areas were recreated for the functions of eating, reading, relaxing, playing sport … It was the items of furniture or the integration of the furniture in the walls that separated the different functions in a single space.

The materials are a highly significant chapter: rush, braided cord from Palma (used on the popular chairs called bulrush chairs), glazed tiles and ceramics (present in country cottages and the subject of research during the period of Catalan Modernisme), Figueres stone (its use was very popular), Scots pine (in Catalonia it is found in beams, doors and auxiliary furniture from the fourteenth century onwards) and corrugated iron. As we can see, a material culture stemming from local tradition to which were added the atmospheric colours of the space created: whitewash, blue⁵⁹ and yellow. A veritable Mediterranean symphony. This stand was completed with just the cut-out painting by Joan Miró done on a cement medium, an earthenware jug, white china plates and a pumpkin, whose silhouette might remind us of the organic works of Jean Arp. The stand was created by three members of the GATCPAC and MIDVA, Josep Lluís Sert, Josep Torres Clavé and Antoni Bonet Castellana. The work was done by Josep Vallès (woodwork); Planells, Queraltó i Cia (cabinetmakers); Vda. J. Ribas (furniture), and Joan Mirambell (gardener).

Although the participation of the rationalist architects with the FAD in this show seemed to presage new collaborations between both entities, political circumstances and the outbreak of the Civil War prevented it. Between them they planned to publicize Catalan design internationally at the forthcoming exhibition to be held in Paris in 1937, but it was not to be. Preliminary work had also begun (between Sert, Torres and Subirana, representatives of the GATCPAC, and Josep Mainar and Santiago Marco as representatives of the FAD) with the intention of mounting a major building and furniture exhibition in Barcelona to be installed in one of the pavilions on Montjuïc. As it began to take shape, and since the idea was also to build a restaurant and a cabaret nightclub in different bodies, they thought of purchasing land in the Diagonal, but that was thwarted too. In the end, only the FAD went to the 6th Milan Triennale (1936) representing Catalonia.60

It should be pointed out that this Mediterraneanist or Latinist line, which in furniture and interior décor took hold in the GATCPAC, does not appear unconnected to other foreign manifestations that, in the functionalist and/or rationalist trend, reinforce what Le Corbusier called the “Latin front”. For the GATCPAC, in the mid 1930s this direction meant contributing to the international debate at the same time as what was taking place in other centres. And this confirms me in my opinion that what began as the “periphery” became a line common to other centres.

Epilogue. The survival of Mediterraneanism in the post-war period

The outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936 and the subsequent persecution by General Franco’s national army of those on the side of the republic meant, for many intellectuals, going into exile. The triumph of Francoism meant the end for this modernity, which was considered – as it was by the Nazis – “degenerate” art. In 1939, after the war Spain entered a long period of autarky. Any and all signs of progress were obliterated and old academic and purist attitudes returned. Some of the leading names in the previous period, such as Aizpúrua and Torres Clavé, died at the front; others, including Sert, Rodríguez Arias and Bonet Castellana, went into exile in the United States and/or South America.

The Mediterraneanist line survived in the post-war years through two exemplary figures: in Chile, Germà Rodríguez Arias,⁶¹ and in Barcelona, José Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat. They confirm me in my hypothesis that their work was not the reflection of the new post-Second World War context, but that it came from the contribution that Catalan rationalism had made to the Modern Movement. Let us look at them in greater detail.

In the new international scene after the Second World War, the dominant characteristic internationalist pathway of the pre-war Modern Movement gave way to the emergence of more receptive and retrospective attitudes that made references to “place” and local tradition flourish. It is what Giedion has called “a new regionalism”,⁶² a very good example of which is the geographical characterization of the Scandinavian countries, where the reassessment of the figure of Alvar Aalto stood out after World War II. In large part, this attention was encouraged by the influence of the United States. In the field of design, precisely, these coordinates are very obvious. One only has to allude to the work of Charles Eames and to the introduction of the organic in the concept of the interiors that were promoted by the Design Section of the Museum of Modern Art in New York under the direction of E. Kaufmann.63

After going into exile via Paris and Mexico, Germà Rodríguez Arias, a former member of the GATCPAC, arrived in Santiago de Chile in 1941. He established ties with the company Muebles SUR created the following year by fellow Catalan exiles – Tarragó, Labayen and, shortly later, Aguadé – ⁶⁴ and this meant bringing about a renewal of the general ideas about furniture and interior décor. From what may be called “modern”, attempts were made to go beyond the adoption of a “style” and, on the other hand, within ethical considerations, seek out that which maintained a link with Latin America.

The text of one of Muebles SUR’s advertisements reads as follows:

[…] Muebles “SUR” do not try to imitate any style at the expense of comfort and probably good taste; they aspire only to fulfilling their specific function in the simplest and most perfect way. This is where their rational shapes and lines, in which whim or fashion play no part at all, their guaranteed solidity and the high quality of their materials, come from. This is also the reason for the pleasant and cheerful appearance given to them by the light, clean shades of their natural varnished woods.

Indeed, Muebles SUR set out to introduce the line advocated by the pre-war avant-garde, but using materials from Chile: Oregon pine, araucaria (Araucaria araucana, now a protected species) and coihue (Nothofagus dombeyi), a native species. The name SUR (south) marked a specific geographical place.

In some of the furniture designed by Rodríguez Arias in Santiago de Chile, whether for the Barrachina Restaurant or the Miraflores Café,⁶⁵ we find a certain similarity to those produced before the war. But what was to make his own output, and Muebles SUR, boom were the orders placed by the poet Pablo Neruda for his residence in Isla Negra, the small coastal village near Santiago de Chile. The poet had his house there, to which Rodríguez Arias added some extensions. Now a house-museum, it is where Neruda and his wife Matilde were buried.

Among the furniture ordered by Neruda, a fan, like Rodríguez Arias, of the wood of the Oregon pine, with its many streaks,⁶⁶ is the wing chair that was later called Isla Negra but which, right from the start, the architect himself called Cadira Catalana (Catalan chair). The armchair’s origins clearly lay in the reinterpretation of that cadiral from the Balearic Islands that he placed in the living room of the house that he had built in Sant Antoni on Ibiza⁶⁷ and which later turned out to be the one that appeared in the 1st Artistic Decorators’ Show in 1936 as a MIDVA production.

The armchair was designed for the living room. With a structure of solid varnished Oregon pine, the back legs ran the length of the backrest and thus a wing chair was obtained. According to the plan, the seat rested on a bed-base type iron structure, but certain difficulties in the manufacturing led them to choose to make it with an extendable rack system. This enabled it to tilt back and forth, making it more comfortable to relax in. The materials of the seat and the backrest – as the original plans show us – were padded cushions filled with horsehair and leather trimmed car upholstery. The one for Neruda was done in brown and white unborn calfskin, just as the poet wanted it. The version in black and white cowhide is the one in the Museu de les Arts Decoratives in Barcelona.⁶⁸

As the poet himself said in a telegram he sent to Rodríguez Arias,⁶⁹ the idea of making a six-legged chair, which is how the cadira catalana was designed (1942), definitely interested Neruda. In this case, the architect went back to his roots and, making a reinterpretation of the pinewood chair, with a rush seat and six legs, as made by chair makers in Catalonia – made principally in Valencia, it supplied the entire Catalan market – ⁷⁰ he designed the one for Neruda’s home. It was later produced by Muebles SUR and widely distributed. The model made for the poet’s house was in araucaria (Araucaria araucana) but as this is now a protected species, since production was resumed in the 1990s Muebles SUR has produced it in coihue (Nothofagus dombeyi). Rodríguez Arias maintained close ties with the popular model through the use of turned wood and the rush seat; but he established the alternative of turning it into an armchair. Based on these two examples, the ones that were most successful thanks to the publicity achieved via the poet, other designs by the architect kept to the line of rational simplicity so indebted to the Mediterraneanist current interpreted from the theories of the 1930s rationalist avant-garde.

The resumption of activity by the new generations of architects in the post-war period and in the context of Spain cannot fail to include the figure of José Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat. In this case, and unlike Rodríguez Arias, it was not direct experience that influenced Coderch; it was the example of the pre-war avant-garde that enabled him to approach architecture and the rural world without falling victim to purist or regionalist attitudes. He himself said: “I believe that popular architecture in every country is based on very specific and realistic premises, and it always has a dignity that many works considered modern lack”.71

For this architect and designer, Mediterraneanism became essential due to his particular sensibility for both architecture and interior design. A clear example of this is the Spanish pavilion for the 9th Milan Triennale in 1951, with which he won the Gold Medal.⁷² It is a mixture of warm materials such as wood – for example the Persian blinds with adjustable slats produced by Llambí, similar to those called mallorquines, to filter the light with the Mediterranean sun clearly beating down – and the use of organic forms. We should also mention the presence in the pavilion of a selection of popular objects – like those that AC considered to be “standard objects” – next to works representative of contemporary artists such as Joan Miró, ceramists Josep Llorens Artigas and Antoni Cumella, sculptors Oteiza, Eudald Serra and Àngel Ferrant, and photographer Joaquim Gomis, who showed photographs of Gaudí and Ibiza. Gio Ponti, in Domus, celebrated this success by pointing out that:

Spain has its won way of being present in modern art and culture: there are no schools, theories, polemics, movements, but Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Juan Gris, García Lorca are Spanish. In modern architecture, there are no programmes, no theoretical avant-garde, but the most modern essential architectural purity is already in the age-old anonymous popular buildings of Ibiza; and Gaudí, the most extraordinary architect of the last century [...]. This is the Spain that the architect Coderch has intended to present at the Triennale.73

With this pavilion Coderch had also shown human value, which became one of the determining aspects. What Coderch had managed to express was a point of reference for Spanish manufacturing and a first recognition from abroad, something that seemed to indicate that the country was beginning to emerge from the immense shipwreck of the post-war period.

On this path between research, recovery and syncretism, Coderch tackled new design ideas, which are now classics. The architect Antoni de Moragas considers that Coderch “based his work on popular architecture and added contemporary idiom with exactly the right conception and form”.⁷⁴ He also designed products such as the Polo fireplace (1954-1955) and the Coderch lamp (1957).⁷⁵ The fireplace was created from the combination of different concavities that can be suspended in the middle of the room or hung on the wall. The simplicity of this fireplace’s design is undoubtedly adaptable to any construction, and it makes it possible to free up the whole space. In fact, being suspended means that it can be seen as a veritable sculpture. Each combination becomes an interesting and alternative design. The Coderch fireplace is inspired on the traditional Catalan forge. According to designer Miquel Milà, Coderch himself had at some time or another used this term.⁷⁶ The truncated pyramidal shape is a reminder of what I mentioned above.⁷⁷ The vertical structure, with a more compact appearance, is compensated by the fire box, which is suspended, not in direct contact with the floor.

The Coderch lamp won the National Design Award of the Argentine Republic in 1964, and the architect and sculptor Max Bill presented it for the first time at an exhibition in Zurich in March 1958. Coderch wrote: “Our main problem was to design an atmospheric lamp. Upon completing the project, we realized that the light prompted familiarity and was like the fireplace”.⁷⁸ The prototype was made of wood from Guinea and once the industry existed in Spain that could cut each slat with a laser, Coderch chose to manufacture it in plastic. The peculiar thing about this lamp is that you can never see the light bulb, which is hidden behind the slats, and it thus generates a very warm atmospheric light. The simplicity of the design makes it possible to place this lamp in both a rustic interior or in a very modern one. We could find similarities with the designs of Paul Henningsen (like the PH-5, so well known, of 1957) and with Alvar Aalto’s, designed in 1951. Both are now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection. Coderch’s research also reveals to us a very new design concept: when you buy this lamp, it comes in a box in the form of a kit to be assembled. In 1962, Picasso – who had bought a Coderch lamp for his studio – wrote a postcard to the author on which he drew its outline and stamped his signature on it. Picasso thought – as the architect’s sister told me – that it was one of the most beautiful lamps in the world.79

The brief period studied confirms for us the need to rewrite the history of Catalan design and to determine whether this relationship established between industrial design and traditional culture, based on the myth of the Mediterranean, survived beyond the first two decades after the Civil War.

The Graphic Avant-garde and the Radius of Influence of Barcelona: Enric Crous-Vidal (Lleida, 1908-Noyon, 1987)1

Esther Solé i Martí

Writing this article has reminded me of the thoughts of Daniel Giralt-Miracle, and at the same time it has brought to mind Miquel Pueyo² and Josep Vallverdú: “The distance from Barcelona to Lleida is the same as it is in the opposite direction, but the people of Barcelona always find it harder to tear ourselves away from it and look towards Lleida than vice versa”.

People have always looked towards the capital of Catalonia. However Barcelona – any centre – needs the other side of the coin: the periphery. Mine will be a contribution from the periphery about the periphery that brings new shades of meaning to the Barcelona Design System. I shall therefore outline the centre-versus-periphery phenomenon, I shall determine Lleida’s peripheral condition, and I shall shine the spotlight on an example of fertility in this supposed desert, Enric Crous-Vidal, the principal exponent of avant-garde graphic arts in Lleida. It will be a good opportunity to observe how the Catalan periphery behaved in the world of design and its links with Barcelona before the Civil War, and vice versa. Moreover, based on Crous’s work on Latin script I shall focus on the centre-periphery duality from an international point of view, making an ideological interpretation of the European typographic debate after the Second World War as it played out in Paris.

Centre-periphery: an erroneous dichotomy for an undeniable reality

The use of a dichotomy as erroneous as that between the centre and the periphery, in order to understand the reality in which we live, is still habitual, but there have also been numerous attempts to resolve this awkward situation. The pairing was first defined in the colonial period: expansion and the control of the known world by Eurocentric powers established ties of dependence that formalized a pre-existing situation: inequality had been imposed. The hierarchic nature of the ties can be seen everywhere, and Walter Christaller came up with the principal theory about it in 1933: it is the theory of central places, also applicable to the world of design based on the interpretations of Fernand Braudel revived by Guy Julier in the late 1990s.3

In the history of design, notable studies of this subject have been made from the point of view of the race towards development according to the Western model, above all in the 1970s and 1980s, with the appearance of the studies by Gui Bonsiepe and Tony Fry, respectively.⁴ Both look towards the developing countries, the periphery of the developed world in a pointless race, since – already in the 1980s – doubt was being cast on the role of the developed world as a model, in design too. These approaches may seem quite far-off with respect to the subject being dealt with here, but they are the point of departure for an eventually transverse debate.

Bonsiepe looked at industrial design in Chile, Argentina and Brazil on the eve of the coups d’état and the respective dictatorships, and understood the relationship between the centre and the periphery as a pairing that indicates a bond between territories defined after the Cold War, based on the exportation of technology. The author considered that the centre had established a paternalistic protectorate over the periphery, affecting its ability to develop a design system of its own and to train competitive designers, a situation that was perpetuated over and above the argument that it corresponded to a delay in the application of a reproductive model. Moreover, Bonsiepe observed that this tactic did not have ideal repercussions on the territory because of the structural shortcomings in the periphery at that time, short of confidence with regard to design, lacking a state to provide the required know-how and without a competitive educational structure to train designers to work from and for the periphery, to seek out innovation rather than copying, working for social transformation. Bonsiepe opted for a rethink in the actions of the centre: it is necessary to understand the periphery, and to realize that what works in one context will not be infallible in another. The links between the centre and the periphery have to be qualified and a decolonizing design alternative has to be found in order to achieve – in the very long term – the autonomous development of the periphery.

For his part, Fry proposed a term that other authors were to revive later: marginality.⁵ He linked the existence of a binary concept of social ties to the legacy of colonialism and the subsequent industrial relocation, which had suppressed the growth and individuality of the periphery due to the absorption of the centre’s ideas. Fry claimed that it was no use ignoring marginal situations by negating them; it was necessary to reinforce the teaching of design so that marginal powers could grow at their own rate and experience their own history of design.

After Bonsiepe and Fry, other positions can be glimpsed, in which the meetings between design historians and scholars held in Barcelona (1999), Havana (2000), Istanbul (2002), Guadalajara (2004), Helsinki (2006) and Osaka (2008) stand out. Stemming from the concern over establishing common ground between design scholars, the meetings have shown the diversity and the general ignorance of what goes on outside the major (and their own) centres of the discipline. These meetings produced interesting ideas about the condition of the peripheries, including, on the one hand, the appearance of a poisonous term, exclusion, to refer to the peripheral.⁶ On the other hand a highly pragmatic approach stands out: “peripheral countries are those whose chief contributions […] are rarely heard of except in those few culminating moments that have become part of universal history”.⁷ The periphery is everything unknown to the centre, which survives in its environment but which often only partially transcends its boundaries. This notion of periphery is usually defined by the proliferation of (Eurocentric) design, a condition linked to the supposed delay in its development outside the central territories. Therefore, a commitment to plurality should be made in order to give a voice to alternative histories and rewrite the general history of design, making room for everyone.8

The increasing ordinariness of the periphery is unquestionable, especially as a result of globalization and its effects on the influence of different centres in multiple peripheries. It would therefore be a good idea to opt for polycentrism,⁹ to encourage the small histories of design and incorporate them into the more important discourses so that they may cease to be wedges in the general history, in which not only the lilies among thistles¹⁰ might enjoy a brief instant of recognition seasoned by the exotic gaze so typical of centres, but this integration could be real. However, it must not be forgotten that unless the methodology undergoes a substantial change, knowledge that could eclipse the influence of the big names in design cannot be attained.11

Lleida, “Ilerda és una merda!” (Lleida is rubbish!)

Let us now turn to Lleida. You will immediately be thinking that Lleida cannot be compared to the developing world and that the dynamics described above can hardly be applied to it. However, Lleida’s lower growth rate with respect to its neighbours, due to geographical, economic and cultural determinants – there is the famous saying, “that’s good enough for Lleida”, the symbol of dangerous conformity – added to Catalonia’s advantageous situation, makes it possible to claim that Lleida is an example of the periphery within the group of territories that set the pace in the life and development of industrial design.

This situation was accentuated at the turn of the twentieth century. Then Lleida was the fourth largest city in Catalonia, with a population of just over 20,000 inhabitants. Devoted chiefly to agriculture, it was just beginning the transition towards urban life in which the transformation and service economy predominated. Improvements in town planning and in its citizens’ quality of life were slow and peppered by both caciquisme (control by political bosses) and by a stultifying cultural life with illiteracy rates close to 70%. Historically afflicted by territorial imbalances, Lleida was entering the twentieth century opening its eyes to growth boosted by the improvement in infrastructures – the building of irrigation channels and the arrival of the railway were crucial – and also by the establishment of industry, in the form of La Canadenca¹² and food processing companies.¹³ However, its status as an inland provincial capital and a feeling of stagnation encouraged the formation of attitudes – encapsulated in tendentious concepts common in the literature produced in Lleida – crucial for understanding life in the city, especially after the Civil War. Provincialisme, provincianisme, lleidatanisme and leridanismo (all referring to the parochial, provincial outlook of the people of Lleida) are the terms in question, famously dealt with by Josep Vallverdú and Miquel Pueyo: along with the artificial division of Spain into provinces envisaged by the 1812 Constitution, they could easily be complemented by Joan Fuster’s thoughts on the Valencian Country.¹⁴ Provincialisme, a term used almost exclusively by Josep Vallverdú,¹⁵ is the name for this situation, an excellent mechanism of social control.

Here you have the birth of the provincial mindset: “It lacks broad horizons and reduces the world to a small strip of land and to the game of vice-regencies […] Provincianisme […] creates conformity […], it is a way of playing the victim”.¹⁶ The provincial outlook falls into a spiral of parochial passion, fuelled by futile self-flagellation, in an atmosphere in which the bitterness of feeling oneself to be the loser is habitual and is linked to a regional dependence, which in Lleida is unequivocally directed towards Barcelona. The solitude of Lleida, the absence of a powerful nearby town with which to compare itself and establish rivalries, meant that Barcelona was seen as the capital, the enemy and the cause of all its problems. Barcelona is the centre. Lleida is the periphery: a mass of passive second-class citizens unhappy with their situation but apparently incapable of changing it.

Lleidatanisme and leridanismo are distillates of Lleida’s provincialism. Lleidatanisme is a long-standing attitude that survived Francoism and which was still alive and kicking – in absolutely retrograde fashion – well into the twenty-first century. Lleidatanisme tries to be an optimistic form of provincialism, which seeks self-assertion and sees the positive aspects of Lleida’s condition: “It is expressed as a self-assertion that is satisfied […] by its own contemplation […], it upholds […] the goodness of being from Lleida, a noble attitude were it not so tiresome. […] Lleidatanisme occurs […] because Barcelona exists, and for that reason only”.17

This attitude is not programmatic. Comparison with Barcelona seeks only to heighten the marginal nature of Lleida. This parochialism is not usually explicit – unlike in leridanismo – but examples of it can be found that aim to shun self-indulgence, such as the magazines Lleida or Vida Lleidatana, which skilfully combine a restrained vulgarity with displays of an inclination towards a new – cultural – dawn in the city.18

Leridanismo is more complex, aligned with the ideas of Francoism. A product of the post-war period, it stood for distancing itself from a united Catalonia, fostering territorial antipathies and demonizing the centre. Leridanismo made use of the press and the feeble cultural industry, manipulated in favour of a policy that alluded to “obscure intentions against Lleida […] [and] atavistic animosities”¹⁹ to fuel the conflict. Divide and rule: harangues were habitual – authentic series of stupid ideas – about the lack of things in common between Lleida and Barcelona, or about the city’s alleged lleidatanisme.²⁰ Fortunately, the transition helped to dissolve it, and the fact that its ideologues camouflaged themselves in all kinds of positions explains the static and antiquated nature of many local institutions during that period.

However, what about design? At the beginning of the twentieth century there was no record in Lleida of any specialized job in design understood as a response to a social and cultural restlessness, associated with modernity and the wish to aesthetically improve the goods produced by local industry with the aim of fostering more highbrow consumption. The professionals closest to this standpoint might possibly have been found in printing houses, which had enjoyed a boom in the days of the Republic.²¹ Unfortunately, this was a sector with little desire for innovation and experimentation, whose output was dull. The outlook was bleak, and no improvement could be glimpsed until the Transition. Entrenched leridanismo put a stop to the importation of models from outside, and although there was a market for products and ideas from Barcelona, this was not the case with design culture. Likewise there was no trace of any formal teaching of the subject;²² everything was controlled by industrial professionals (not yet called designers), but as regards innovation and the assimilation of modernity this kind of restlessness and work was practically non-existent. Therefore, all innovation inevitably arrived late and there was a considerable delay in its introduction. Anyone who stood out in this desert was barely given a hearing, unless they were truly valuable and were given the necessary push … usually a long way from home.

A Lily Among Thistles: Enric Crous-Vidal

Although he was very important in the history of art in Lleida in the first third of the twentieth century, Enric Crous-Vidal (Lleida, 1908 – Noyon, 1987) seems to have been consigned to painful oblivion. This is not the proper place to talk in depth about his life story, extensively studied in recent publications.²³ My intention is to outline his facet as a graphic artist both before and after the Civil War and to observe the repercussions he had beyond his immediate surroundings. It will illustrate the impact of Barcelona as the centre and the peripheral state of Lleida.

Enric Crous’s life as an artist can be split into two periods separated by the Civil War. He lived the first third of his life in Lleida, and it was marked by the phenomenon of the magazine Art. Crous taught himself the skills of the graphic arts, and his name was mentioned outside Lleida for the first time in 1931, when he exhibited Pantomima Bohèmia (Bohemian Pantomime), a series of five panels of graphic work, at the Galeries Laietanes in Barcelona. That year he founded the Studi Llamp advertising agency, and came up with refreshing productions in a territory where graphic advertising was insubstantial and restrained. His best-known advertisements came from Studi Llamp: the one for Infernal anisette is paradigmatic, characterized by its monochrome look, the use of the airbrush and the minimal presence of text, which gives prominence to a design based on Art Déco typography that seeks a heightened visual impact.

However, the cornerstone of this period was the magazine Art. Crous had a passionate mind and he was eager to share with his fellow citizens both the new artistic and cultural attitudes coming from neighbouring territories and the restlessness that was stirring him. So it was that in 1932 an initial attempt at the magazine saw the light, a one-off to begin with, but which the following year received a crucial although short-lived boost. Roughly speaking, Art was a magazine written mostly in Catalan and devoted to the analysis and dissemination of the most cutting-edge art and literature from a perspective close to Surrealism and Futurism that made it similar to the magazine Hèlix, one of the few Catalan magazines totally about avant-garde ideas.²⁴ It had a lot of artistic reviews, especially about architecture, the cinema and the plastic arts, combined with thoughts on topics of the day and literary texts by renowned authors: there were poems by Federico García Lorca, Jean Cocteau, J. V. Foix, Paul Éluard and others in every issue. What’s more, mention must be made of the many illustrations, veritable windows into the world of international architecture, Cubist and Surrealist art, avant-garde cinema and the photographs of Man Ray and Fritz Horn, among others.

The first issue is notable for its masthead, airbrushed, and for the presence of caricatures by local artists (Niko, Perelló, Bon). Although it deals with current topics, Art does not differ formally from any other magazines in Lleida at the time. Despite everything, the aim was to be a shot in the arm: “We appear propelled by a dynamism packed with ideas, the children born of a new artistic womb […] we are not prostituted by those fossilized modesties, […] that douse the revolutionary flames […]. We aim our first cries […] at the monopolizers of culture, who […] in Lleida have become market gardeners […]”.²⁵ Publication of Art resumed in March of the following year, with Josep Viola, Antoni Bonet Isard and Enric Crous – the literary and artistic editor, and the principal funder of the editions – in charge, and with the support of a tight-knit circle of contributors.

Art was an unusual phenomenon in Lleida in the 1930s. Its content and attitude were highly combative and coloured, opposed especially to the vulgarity of Lleida, and it was aligned with the avant-garde ideas forged in both Barcelona and abroad in a clearly internationalist outlook.²⁶ Moreover, it was a platform of activities that set out to enliven the scene in Lleida before the war.²⁷ This is how they introduced themselves: “An international magazine. Against geographical enclosure. […] a vital necessity. Not Lleida-Barcelona but cosmos, and yet within the cosmos: Lleida-Barcelona. Embracing with vital strength […] the international milestone, and even going beyond it […] we start from the “now” and reach for the future […]. The standard […] against decorativism, this refuge of all those incapable of creativity […]. We do not pretend to have said anything new. We have positioned ourselves […]”.28

This desire to place it on the avant-garde map was framed by an innovative design, with a profusion of illustrations and with the text organized, highlighted with frames, ornamental bars and striking titles. Unfortunately and in keeping with the habitual incomprehension of avant-garde initiatives, Art made a minimal impact at the time. Lleida did not even respond to this stimulus. There was neither enthusiasm nor passion to make the magazine a point of reference. Indifference and incomprehension swallowed up the enterprise, which only received positive reviews from Barcelona,²⁹ where Art’s impact was so discreet that in those same years a magazine began to be published in Barcelona with the same title but with a completely opposite editorial line.³⁰ Just one year after it first appeared, Art was forced to close. The tenth and last issue was the swansong of this initiative, bid farewell with great pomp:

[…] besieged by manifest incomprehension […]. My conviction […] has presided over it […] the instinctive carburation, typical of a mad bolt for freedom with its artistic tendency […], which was the result of innovative concerns in a provincial temperament begun in an isolated province, Lleida, full of beatific vulgarity […]. So often, […] the experiments conducted here in Lleida, were presented […] in Madrid and Barcelona […] and the result was never sterile! […]. Despite everything, this pedant […] has managed to initiate and propel, in this city, the current movements in painting, advertising, typography […] and managed to put together a magazine worthy of the contemporary trends that were ignored here […]. The Magazine Art, created over a layer of apathy that is already chronic in the City on the Segre, became a reality […]. One must confess […], that a period of virulence typical of youth has been overcome. […] sincerity and good faith have always gone hand in hand with the new cultural trends […]. And to end with: it is annoying, and it is painful to have to say it, but, […] Lleida (a) [sic] Ilerda, is rubbish!!!31

After Art, Crous’s activism continued along paths away from the official culture circuits, circumscribed to Lleida and with few or no repercussions beyond it, despite the growing circulation of information. Then the war broke out and forced him to go into exile in France, thus beginning the second part of his life.

Crous began his comeback in 1947, when he was hired as a typesetter at the Draeger printing house. For three years, until he founded his own business, he learnt all the aspects of typography and design that he either did not know or which he had taught himself, with the limitations this implies. Draeger was famous for the excellence of its productions and the perfectionism and thoroughness demanded of employees. So it was that Crous honed his skills, became a professional in the discipline, and received the first acknowledgement for the work he had done.

However, the sweetest period of his life came after 1950: by then middle-aged, he was determined to enter the world of typography and graphic design alone. The adventure, whose results were uneven, meant for him a decade in the forefront of the European printing scene from the stage of the Fonderie Typographique Française (FTF), which had strayed slightly from the main pathways of the typography of the moment, focused on the adaptation of fonts to the needs of the Modern Movement. His wish was to commit himself to a highly patriotic exercise: to stand up for and renew a type of lettering, Latin script.³² Crous became its main representative thanks to the support of Maximilien Vox and to the echo of typographers and designers of the stature of Joan Trochut, René Ponot, Louis Ferrand and Ricard Giralt-Miracle. Thanks to the FTF, Crous was given the job of creating a significant part of the theoretical corpus of the new Latin script,³³ accompanied by different types of lettering designed by him.34

This was an essentially French period. Crous felt appreciated and, looking at Spain out of the corner of his eye, he was admired internationally in specialist circles: the FTF was the promoter and distributor in France of his types and he competed with the products of other companies – chiefly Debergny & Peignot – and with the types’ distribution licenses: foreign ones in France and his own abroad. In order to ensure the spread of the new Latin script in the Mediterranean basin, Carles Villarnau – director of the Fundición Tipográfica Nacional (FTN) – opted to distribute Enric Crous’s fonts in Spain in 1954.³⁵ Barcelona-born Ricard Giralt-Miracle, a fellow designer and typographer, was one of those chiefly responsible for the penetration of Crous-Vidal’s fonts in the Spanish market, since he produced the FTN’s advertising materials, especially at that time.36

Crous remained on the crest of a wave for much of the 1950s, until he yielded to the criticisms aimed at the Achilles heel of his corpus: the lack of mastery – or scant orthodoxy – in the basic lettering and the manifest subordination of legibility to the theoretical and aesthetic content of the creation.³⁷ Crous took these opinions very badly; he saw them as an uncalled-for, disproportionate attack, to which he responded with a couple of more solid and combative jobs, gradually distancing himself from the forefront of the renewal of Latin script. After that he continued working in the privacy of his studio. He retired after presenting the Structura font that ended the controversy and left the path to success clear for one of the families that embody a turning point in the European printing scene in the middle of the twentieth century: Adrian Frutiger’s Univers, cast by Debergny & Peignot in 1957 and the symbol of the beginning of the undisputable predominance of sans-serif over the Romans that Crous had wanted to revive.

Epilogue

Let us end our story here, at the symbolic moment of the fall of the new Latin script – sublimated in Enric Crous – at the hands of Neue Graphik and the Swiss School, and let us connect it to the words about the centre and the periphery with which I began this article. The duality – crude maybe, but revealing – between Central European script (centre) and Latin script (periphery) can quickly be established. The new Latin script is the vindication of the value of the graphic tradition in the Mediterranean basin – the geographical periphery of Europe – passed through the sieve of the desire for reinvention that Crous headed. This movement was also the sublimation of a form of patriotism that set out to meet the needs of the French printing industry, supposedly dissatisfied with the expressive resources coming from the foundries of Northern and Central Europe: the idea that a lyrical, dynamic Mediterranean culture could not express itself wholly effectively using scripts emerging – and successfully used – from other cultures took root strongly and was one of the generators of this controversy, which was eventually resolved in favour of the ideas of the Swiss School and Neue Graphik, pointing to the beginning of a new chapter in the history of typography.

Enric Crous, triumphant, the standard-bearer of the rebirth of Latin script, was revered by designers and typographers and was acclaimed by the French and Spanish industries. We may consider him to have been a link between Paris and Barcelona – and Madrid. But this enthusiasm and the entire debate it gave rise to barely reached Lleida: there, Crous was a complete unknown, from the post-war years virtually to the present day, a victim of provincialism and the circumstances of his life.38

However, anonymity in the city of his birth is no excuse: his designs and work on the new Latin script must not be underrated, nor should the importance of the magazine Art as an avant-garde experiment be scorned in a place as dull as Lleida. As a young man Crous was a militant supporter of lleidatanisme, writing the editorials in Art, where allusions to Barcelona are frequent and range from the desire for coexistence – to begin with – to the bitter realization that Lleida was off the map, in issue 0. Art did not seek self-flagellation, but the headlong rush of art and culture in Lleida based on implacable criticism and the optimism of the pre-war avant-garde, importing information from the cultural and artistic centres of the time in order to generate a restlessness that never appeared, and this initiative came to nothing.

Like other singular examples, Crous did make this longed-for headlong rush, spurred on by both his instinct for survival and the faith in his ideas. His militant Latinism, standing up for the value of the typographical tradition of the Mediterranean basin as a basis for the rebirth of the script of this region – in many ways peripheral in the years following the Second World War – must be interpreted as a real tonic in the French industry’s struggle to make room for itself in the international typography debate. Moreover, this combative attitude was also – within the existing multiplicity – a nexus between the state of French printing just after the Second World War and the debate in design circles in post-Civil War Barcelona. Besides being the enfant terrible of Latin script,³⁹ Enric Crous was also a bridge between two territories and two ways of understanding reality.

The Radio and Household Electrical Appliance Manufacturing Industries Before the Civil War (1929-1936)¹

Isabel Campi

The objective of this article is to investigate the uses to which electricity was put between 1929 and 1936, from the end of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship to the end of the Second Republic. The aim is to see if the amazing increase in the production and consumption of radio sets, television sets and household electrical appliances that took place in Spain between 1955 and 1975 had its origins in the years before the Civil War, or whether, on the contrary, it was an industry that appeared out of nowhere.

According to historian David Landes, only three industries managed to grow after the 1929 Wall Street Crash: automobiles, radios and household electrical appliances.² The history of design teaches us, moreover, that it was these industries that required the services of product designers for the first time. The meteoric rises of Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague and Richard B. Fuller began in the USA in the 1930s, at the height of the crisis, via the supply of design services to the transport and electrical appliance sectors. Despite the fact that Streamlining was heavily criticized with moralistic arguments by sectors close to Gute Form, in recent years the movement has been studied seriously and defended by Donald Bush and by the Museum Für Gestaltung in Zurich, and finally exhibited in the context of the Liliane & David M. Stewart collection’s Program for Modern Design in Montreal.3

All these studies concur that the figure of the product designer developed and was consolidated as a professional capable of meeting highly sophisticated industrial needs during the 1930s. The incorporation of Ford’s theories in the manufacturing of electrical appliances – radios and household appliances – led to a situation of overproduction. Surpluses got even bigger during the 1930s with the fall in consumption due to the 1929 crash. Products such as cars, radios and refrigerators no longer sold purely because they were cheap and technologically new. It was now necessary to go from promoting the price to promoting the product; in other words, “dramatizing” it and making it more attractive. Therefore, designers were no longer required to solve only functional problems – making cheaper, safer models, clean and easy to use – but to solve symbolic problems as well. After the 1929 crash, companies understood that it was necessary to manufacture desires at the same rate as products were being made, and they thus made a determined commitment to original design, advertising and marketing.

In the context of Catalonia and Spain, it is necessary to investigate whether, allowing for all the obvious differences, there had been any initiatives aimed at designing and manufacturing radio sets or electrical appliances minimally inspired on American or European models. The mission is not wholly impossible, as neither the whole of industry was undercapitalized – textiles made a profit during the 1930s – nor did all of it create poor-quality design. In the case of automobiles we have Hispano Suiza, making cars almost by hand for exclusive buyers. Although it did not use Ford’s mass-production methods, it did on the other hand achieve legendary levels of design and quality. Myrurgia would be another case of a company that while it did not reach particularly high levels of production did achieve notable levels of quality in perfume bottle design and in its advertising campaigns.4

The two years of interim governments after the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and those of the Second Republic (1931-1936) are an interesting period because in Spain there was a failed attempt at capitalist renewal promoted by liberal sectors of society, whose values and ethics were more modern than, and different to, those of more traditional Spain. In this context, radios and household appliances spearheaded the modernization that I have mentioned. In turn, they depended totally on electrification.

The electrification of Catalonia

The process of electrification seems to have been quicker and more efficient in Catalonia than in the rest of Spain. The constantly increasing demand of a local industry that was seeking an alternative to coal, and the existence of trained technical teams open to technological innovations, constituted a welcoming environment for electricity. According to Horacio Capel, “The rapid progress made by electricity in Catalonia was possible thanks to the existence of a favourable social, economic and technological environment and a capacity to mobilize capital, technical know-how, work and business management hitherto unprecedented in Spain”.5

During the 1870s it was normal for companies to produce their own electricity, but in 1880 the Sociedad Española de Electricidad opened a small power station in Carrer de Mata in Barcelona, initially generating 220 kW, which sold electricity to companies in Ciutat Vella. The great productive leap forward took place in 1906 when the Compañía Barcelonesa de Electricidad installed its large AC power station in Carrer de Mata in Barcelona, and in 1912, when Riegos y Fuerzas del Ebro and Energía Eléctrica de Cataluña began building the big hydroelectric power stations in the Pyrenees.

The complete opposite of steam, which led to the concentration of machinery and to industrial gigantism by having all kinds of machines working on site, electricity encouraged productive diversification, namely, craft and domestic workshops and the development of small transformative industries, so characteristic of Catalan industry: carpenter’s shops, tailor’s shops, mechanical and forging workshops, shipyards and car factories, as well as the electric furnaces that were required to produce the special steels that were needed for mechanical industries, sewing machines and typewriters, and household appliances.

According to Manuel Lecuona and Manuel Martínez,⁶ for many years Spanish electricity producers were unable to make interesting offers to users, so household electrification did not become a reality all over urban and rural Spain until the 1960s. And without plentiful, cheap electricity radios and household appliances would not work.

Notwithstanding that, it has been historically demonstrated that Catalonia was electrified before the Civil War in very acceptable conditions. The sharp increase in the production of electricity was the result of ever-increasing demand. Given that electricity cannot be stored, Catalan producers tried to even out the flow of demand in the following way: by supplying electricity to factories, tramways and the underground railway by day and to commercial establishments, entertainment centres and homes by night. The conquest of the domestic market, which always lagged behind the industrial market, was fundamental for evening out the demand for electricity.

Fig. 1 Diagram of electricity consumption in Catalonia 1901-1935. Gross total consumption and gross per capita consumption and graph of electricity consumption in Catalonia, Spain and abroad in 1934. Gross total consumption and gross per capita consumption. Source: courtesy of Jordi Nadal Oller.

Domestic use was growing proportionally but it was always lower than industrial use, because to begin with users considered electricity to be an expensive and dangerous form of energy. However, since domestic gas lighting did not enjoy the popularity in Spain that it achieved in other countries such as the United Kingdom, in Catalonia people went literally from candles to light bulbs.

Despite the delay in the domestic demand for electricity, the figures show that the number of users was increasing rapidly: in 1905 the Compañía Barcelonesa de Electricidad had 5,700 customers, and in 1934-1935, Energía Eléctrica de Cataluña – after its takeover of the former – had 435,000.7

Therefore, in 1934 per capita rates of electrification in Catalonia were comparable to those in France or Northern Italy, and slightly lower than those in Great Britain and Germany. But this was irrelevant for the birth of a local electrical appliance manufacturing industry. As we shall see later on, when it came to buying good radios and good household appliances, consumers preferred foreign brands.

The financing of electrification

One aspect that catches the eye when studying local production of radios and household appliances during the years leading up to the Civil War is its paltry nature. When monitoring the development of Catalan industry during the years of the Second Republic and before, the steady growth of the production and use of electricity appears in stark contrast to the scant development of the consumer goods industries that derived from it. Catalan homes were consuming more and more of the new energy, but the appliances were foreign. As we shall see later on, the country welcomed innovation and consumed it, but it did not generate it. The problem seems to have been structural and had to do with the particular way in which these industries came into being.

During the 1930s, in the USA and Europe, radio and household electrical appliance manufacturers were financed with the surplus capital from two already existing industries: automobiles and electricity. Penny Sparke has clearly shown that the origins of the household appliance industry lay not so much in the “needs” of housewives as in the needs of powerful industries that had to invest their surplus capital somewhere.⁸ And this somewhere was research and the development of household appliances destined for millions of families who, from the 1930s onwards, were no longer perceived as units of production, but as units of consumption.9

The major electricity producers, General Electric in the USA and AEG in Germany, invested part of the profits that they made in the research and development of household appliances that in turn stimulated the consumption of electricity.¹⁰ AEG had already tried out this strategy in industry by selling turbines to companies using the electricity it made. In its big power station in Carrer de Mata, the Compañía Barcelonesa de Electricidad installed turbines made by AEG, the company that at the same time held most of its shares. One question that Horacio Capel considers intriguing is why Catalan capitalists were not interested in the electricity business. Not even in the 1920s, when success was assured and the works begun by foreign capitalists were at an advanced stage: “The answer is perhaps simple. Catalan industry and the country’s economic activity, highly fragmented, generated profits in small companies, but not the volumes of capital needed to make the huge investments required by the modern production and distribution of electricity”.¹¹

The three great crises of the Barcelona stock exchange in the second half of the nineteenth century, along with the phylloxera crisis and the definitive loss of American markets, must have left Catalan banks bereft of resources, and if there were any they were immobilized in the building of the Eixample district.

The fact is that virtually all the capital required to electrify Catalonia was foreign. Local banks seem to have had neither the volume nor the financial capacity to invest in centres of production and in the introduction of networks that would take many years to turn a profit. However, Catalonia was a by no means inconsiderable market, and for this reason Walter Rathenau, the chairman of AEG, and Frank Pearson, the founder of several American hydroelectric power stations and the Barcelona Traction company, known as La Canadenca, convinced shareholders elsewhere to invest in it, whereby the country received capital, technical know-how and management models that it would not otherwise have generated by itself.

Given that the great electrification of Catalonia was carried out with foreign capital, it is no surprise that neither the surplus capital nor the profits remained in Catalonia or were used to inject capital into local industry. Nor was there a car industry powerful enough to invest its surpluses in manufacturing refrigerators. Hispano Suiza and Elizalde drifted towards manufacturing aeroplane engines when they saw that making cars was no longer profitable. Between 1929 and 1936 the only powerful traditional Catalan industry, textiles, concentrated on the domestic market and manufacturers moved their surplus capital into mechanics and manufacturing machinery, but not into electrical appliances. Catalonia had a technological and professional fabric that rapidly incorporated electrical innovations produced in other countries, but it did not generate them. This technological dependence, added to the small scale of local electromechanical companies, explains in part why, before the war, no competitive local companies risked going into the household electrical appliance or radio business on an industrial scale.

The benefits for Catalonia of electrification were unquestionable, in both the short and the long term. But they were produced in the context of economic conditions that highlighted the fact that it was a peripheral dependent country. The household electrical appliance industry was incapable of growing in a country that, curiously, did not experience the effects of the Great Depression as dramatically as the USA and Europe did.

Electricity and the pending modernization of Catalan homes

Domestic conversion to electricity was slow, so much so that some companies did the installation for free in order to gain new customers. In the 1920s plans for buildings with electrical installations are already on record, but building houses with the whole electrical installation included did not become widespread until the 1930s.

Fig. 2 Discussions on the subject of electricity broadcast during Spanish household electricity week. Madrid, 1936.

The adoption of or conversion to electricity was accompanied by any number of promotional endeavours in the form of advertisements in the press, in theatres and cinemas, radio chat shows and all kinds of exhibitions. The 1929 Barcelona Universal Exhibition was actually based on a project dating from 1913 whose principal leitmotiv was the extolling of electricity. However we have no record of there being – at the Barcelona Exhibition – anything remotely similar to the famous Arts Menagères show that was held in Paris for the first time in 1923, in the Champ-de-Mars, with the aim of showing off all the advances in the field of household electrical appliances and the mechanization of the home and catering. In no time, this show was moved to the spectacular Grand Palais and became a magnificent annual event looked forward to by families of all social classes in Paris, interrupted only from 1939 to 1948 because of the Second World War and the German occupation.12

Despite all the promotional efforts made by the authorities, and by architects and engineers, a completely electrified house seems to have been a luxury in the 1930s. What’s more, the idea that electricity was a very expensive form of energy, the use of which had to be kept an eye on and controlled permanently, appears with exaggerated persistence in all the Spanish home economics handbooks of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s … and even the 1960s! While the message that engineers and electricity companies were sending housewives was “spend”, the message from women’s circles was “save”.¹³ The American or European myth of the modern efficient woman who saved time with the aid of machines and Taylorist methods seems to have been a utopia in Catalonia.

The consumption of household electrical appliances

Unlike radios, household electrical appliances are not terminals of a powerful media organization, whose story is researched at universities. The history of household electrical appliances is more modest and has been recorded for many years. On the other hand, in the 1930s it was already known that they were a vital link in the chain of electricity production and use.

An essential study for learning about the arguments in favour of manufacturing household electrical appliances in Spain is the one entitled The Electricity Industry in Spain, published in 1933 by F. F. Sintes and F. Vidal.¹⁴ These writers devoted 24 chapters of their book to the exhaustive analysis of the Spanish electricity industry from the legal, technical and financial points of view, but in the last three, very substantial, chapters they concentrate on the problem of domestic consumption. It seems that in the 1930s demand for electricity came mainly from industry and transport. Conversely, demand from homes was very meagre because it was restricted to lighting. Sintes and Vidal never tire of repeating in their book that there is enormous potential for electricity consumption in homes and that Spanish producers ought to formulate all kinds of campaigns to increase demand through a better structuring of charges and the use of electrical appliances for heating, cooking, cleaning and bathing. The problem was that there were no Spanish manufacturers of these appliances and almost everything had to be imported: “Some of these appliances have been known about in Spain for several years, but the majority of them have not yet found a practical use in this country. Their construction is almost perfect and their use is spreading so prodigiously in other countries that not a month goes by without a new creation, generally successful, being added to their numbers”.¹⁵

The authors complained over and over that, despite the unquestionable advantages, families did not believe in the completely electrified home because the energy was expensive, the installations inappropriate (for example, the initial installations had neither plugs nor electrical circuits) and the appliances did not live up to the promised expectations.

The poor quality of local electrical material was well known, and this is reflected in the imports and exports balance. In 1932 Spain imported electrical material valued at 33,828,323 pesetas and exported 589,414 pesetas’ worth of it. Of this total, the importation of household electrical appliances amounted to 230,513 pesetas, as opposed to exports worth just 2,385.16

These figures are corroborated by the fact that in women’s magazines and in the catalogues of some department stores electrical appliances were advertised as wonderful imported goods. AEG products were advertised in Spain from 1910 onwards, and, from printed advertisements in the period we are looking at, we see that the invasion of European and American brands was a fact. Local workshops made more rudimentary artefacts: heaters, oil stoves, coal-fired kitchen ranges, solid fuel cookers and iceboxes.

Sintes and Vidal were at a loss to explain why Spanish electricity companies, those most interested in selling electricity, did not give a decisive boost to manufacturing household electrical appliances. As a model to follow they gave the case of Switzerland, a small country, lacking cheap raw materials, which had been able to create a high-quality electrical appliance industry that, moreover, exported to the whole of Europe. The authors criticized the ineffectiveness of the electricity companies and the government in rather moralistic terms and yet, curiously, at no time did they mention the need to train young men in applied technical research, nor did they ever use the word “design” or suggest that creation was a strategic factor in industrial production.

Fig. 3 AEG water heater, design by Peter Behrens, 1909 (Germany), advertised in the illustrated general catalogue, Antigua Casa Marín, Madrid. Courtesy of the Alfaro-Hofmann Collection.

In any case, F. Vidal, a lawyer and advertising agent, shows us that he had very clear notions about the potential of advertising in businesses and he regrets that the Spanish electricity companies ignore “rational modern advertising”. The Electricity Industry in Spain devotes an entire chapter to recommending companies to set up an advertising department that would take on board the concept of “investment” in campaigns to win customers’ trust; that would meticulously gather data on consumption and organize customized campaigns to stimulate it; that would publish advertisements in all kinds of media; that would fill shop windows and showrooms with household electrical appliances; that would train staff in customer service, and so on. He also recommends the creation of a loan company so that appliances could be paid for in instalments.

So, despite its structural shortcomings, the electricity industry became an indisputable agent of modernization in Spain. Not just because it was clean energy that provided levels of home comfort hitherto unknown – lighting, hot running water, heating, cooking without smoke or ashes, devices to make cleaning easier – but also because it put into practice modern aggressive marketing strategies the aim of which was to stimulate consumption through advertising and payment in instalments.

Advertising played a pioneering role in the spread of household electrical appliances. Between 1932 and 1936 Eduard Rifà i Anglada, who sold Frigidaire fridges in Barcelona, published an excellent advertising campaign in the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà with photographs that looked like they had been taken in the USA. They showed the kitchens of happy smiling middle-class families and groups of friends who were showing off the fridge. The advertisements did not mention the price, but, as can be deduced from others of the time, we know that an imported electric refrigerator cost about 3,000 pesetas. This was the equivalent of three months’ salary of a high-flying executive. In this Frigidaire campaign the terms were inverted, since a product, which because of its price could only be afforded by an elite, was being shown in a domestic setting – the kitchen – that thanks to technological advances was becoming a place to show off and not a side room reserved for the servants. Modernization was understood here as we understand it now: democratically and technologically.

And so we see that in the 1930s electrical appliances were no longer advertised in an aristocratic manner, as had been the case in the 1920s, but increasingly greater emphasis was placed on the technical specifications. In many women’s magazines of the 1930s, the household electrical appliance no longer appeared in a sumptuous setting, operated by a formally dressed lady; it was decontextualized and accompanied by a text designed to point out its technical specifications, the price or the energy savings. By the first half of the 1930s it was usual to see advertisements proposing payment in instalments – in other words, on credit. The message was that of the “offer” or the “bargain” that could not be missed.

The star appliance of the 1930s was the electric refrigerator. The models were invariably imported from America and sold at an astronomical price given the average Spanish family’s income. Through an advertisement in El Hogar y la Moda it can be calculated that an imported General Electric refrigerator cost the huge sum of 3,456 pesetas.17

The radio business

In all industrialized countries, the business of manufacturing household electrical appliances was based on the consumption of electricity, while the business of manufacturing radio receivers was based on the consumption of radio broadcasting.

They were parallel, highly interdependent industries.

The history of Spanish radio broadcasting has been exhaustively studied by Luis Ezcurra (1974), Carmelo Garitaonaindía (1988) and Armand Balsebre (2001). Ezcurra made a detailed reconstruction of the political, economic and legal aspects of the early years of radio broadcasting whereas Garitaonaindía focused on aspects of Spanish radio programming and content between 1923 and 1939. Balsebre has brought these studies up to date, thus filling in the gap in the second half of the twentieth century. We also find some original data in the studies made by the collector Joan Julià, a specialist in Spanish radios.18

Ezcurra, Garitaonaindía and Balsebre are professors of communication sciences and their study subject is the broadcasting industry rather than the radio receiver industry. The history of the manufacturing and marketing of radio receivers is not particularly important in their context and the few statistical data on radio ownership that they supply are quoted by all of them. Despite everything, the three authors contribute a series of data on the financing of radio broadcasting in Spain that describe a technological and economic scene not too different to that of electricity. It seems that radio broadcasting was introduced thanks to foreign capital and technology.

It is not necessary to say too much about the origins of Spanish radio broadcasting, its rather odd development, or the constant quarrels between Madrid and Barcelona, as it has all been sufficiently explained by the above-mentioned authors. The first Spanish radio stations to broadcast with a legal call sign began in 1924, during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. Financing the stations was problematic. During the 1920s it was believed that the way to make money in the radio business was by marketing and selling receivers. What was not clear was how to make a profit out of broadcasting. People soon realized that it was not enough to issue a decree, according to which listeners, when buying a receiver, had to pay a license, to which a quite expensive compulsory annual charge was added, whereupon the funds raised would be used to finance the radio stations. Setting up a radio station and keeping it going was a ruinous business, but it was obvious that without broadcasting there would be no listeners and no radios would be sold.

With very few exceptions, radio stations were set up in Catalonia and Spain with foreign capital provided by local businessmen who were representing the major American and European manufacturers of radio receivers and electrical goods. They turned to the “parent companies” in search of capital. Unión Radio was established in Madrid in December 1924, becoming the main chain of Spanish radio stations. The company was established with nine partners who each put in 50,000 pesetas, a very high sum at the time. According to Balsebre, the capital contributions represented the interests in Spain of the four majors: Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Marconi, Compagnie Générale de Telegraphie Sans Fil and Telefunken.

URSA was created with the aim of becoming the mainstay of the disembarkation in Spain of the group of multinational interests that was seeking to control the radio broadcasting business in Europe, following in the footsteps of the British group Marconi with its monopoly of radio-telegraphy and the American group ITT with the telephone service.19

One does not need to have a great deal of historical intuition to establish a causal link between the names of the companies that were financing the radio stations and the brands of the radios that were filling Spanish shops and magazine pages, because they were one and the same: Atwater Kent, General Electric (GE), Fada, Philco, RCA, Bell, and so on.

Despite the fact that it ensured the expansion and continuity of radio broadcasting in Spain, at the time the founding of Unión Radio was not wholly welcomed by the press, which perceived it as a conglomerate of foreign companies that wanted to monopolize radio broadcasting here. Run with very modern criteria by Ricardo Urgoiti, Unión Radio undertook a very effective strategy of takeovers of small, already existing stations, which led it to virtually monopolize the entire radio broadcasting business until 1936.20

Notwithstanding this, serious attempts were made to create a Catalan broadcasting system. Ràdio Barcelona was founded in 1924 (a few months before Unión Radio), along with the Associació Nacional de Radiodifusió (National Radio Broadcasting Association), which took it upon itself to collect the license fees of Catalan-speaking listeners. EAJ-1 Ràdio Barcelona was the first to broadcast in Spain with a legal call sign. In this case, the founding partners also appealed to the “parent companies” in search of capital. They were Royston Saint Noble, the owner of Anglo Electricidad, which carried out electrical installations in Barcelona, and the representative of General Electric, Philco and Fada; Pau Llorens Gispert, the owner of Autoelectricidad, a company that marketed Atwater Kent receivers, and Eduard Rifà i Anglada, the owner of the Radio Lot establishments, the exclusive agent of Bell radios and the representative in Catalonia of AT&T products. He was responsible for purchasing the Western Electric 100 W broadcasting equipment that was installed in the studios on the sixth floor of the Hotel Colon. Rifà i Anglada was a great advocate of the social function of radio and kept up a very belligerent stance against Unión Radio’s monopoly and its advertising policy. He stood for quality programming without advertisements.

The case of radio broadcasting is in many ways similar to that of electricity. The radio stations were financed with foreign capital and, very specifically, by companies that manufactured the electrical materials (valves, receivers, amplifiers, and so on) that were sold in Spain. Without this capital, radio broadcasting would not have been possible since, as we have seen, the local companies were too weak to set up and keep competitive stations on air every day, with heads of programming, technicians, announcers and musicians. Ricardo Urgoiti had a more commercial view of broadcasting and soon realized the power of advertising. Thanks to the revenue from advertising, Unión Radio managed to turn a profit, survive and expand. On the other hand, the Catalan businessmen, especially Eduard Rifà i Anglada, were in favour of more musical, “quality” programmes that ought to be financed with the help of businesses and listeners’ fees, and not with advertising. The problem was that not enough people were prepared to subsidize the broadcasting model that Rifà i Anglada upheld:

Except for a few honourable exceptions, the public does not make distinctions. Driven by a feeling of independence, it has purchased radios at will without noticing that it enjoys exquisite concerts thanks to Ràdio Barcelona’s great enterprise, having set up two stations in just over a year. This is due to the efforts of a minority of selfless businessmen, who in return have obtained only the indifference of the paying listeners, unwilling to distinguish between those who have been unstinting when setting up the afore-mentioned stations and those who, unfairly, have profited from the sales without contributing anything for the consolidation of radio broadcasting.21

Radio consumption

Just as there is a connection between the businesses of broadcasting and of manufacturing radio material, there is also a link in the field of consumption. The kinds of programme determine the quality and quantity of the audience and this, in turn, determines preferences in relation to the quality and quantity of receivers.

The first radio audience was elitist and urban, both with regard to the programming and to the real possibilities of listening to the programmes and having a receiver. The first radio stations had so little power that they could only be heard in the city and they did not reach rural areas. They broadcast classical music, opera, news of stocks and shares, and lectures. The audience was a highbrow minority with enough spending power to invest in a receiver. In the 1920s sets looked outlandish, comprising a receiver, a loop antenna and a loudspeaker.²² The design was rather luxurious and the cases, made of wood, were intended to imitate pieces of furniture. To own the device it was also necessary to buy a license at the telegraph office and to pay a compulsory annual fee of five pesetas for private use, or fifty pesetas for collective use. Despite the fact that many people avoided paying the fee, fines were considerable. The first radios ran on heavy batteries that had to be charged regularly. The radio plugged into the electric current, which took over in the 1930s, was a huge improvement. The problem was that there was no electric current in a very high percentage of homes, those in small towns and the countryside. Generally speaking, in rural areas there was no electricity and the broadcasting signal could not be picked up.

Since no studies of audience figures were made it is really difficult to know how many radio receivers there were by the end of the 1920s. It seems that neither Unión Radio nor Ràdio Barcelona managed to exceed 12,000 or 13,000 fee-paying subscribers.²³ Salvador Raurich, in an article published in 1928, mentions 7,500 subscribers and 200,000 listeners in Catalonia.

The 1930s were the golden age of radio. It was then when it became a medium of entertainment in an authentic mass culture, and its power did not go unnoticed by politicians.

In 1931, the new government of the Second Republic found itself saddled with a feeble radio system in which there was a limited number of receivers, radio stations’ broadcasting range was wholly insufficient, and Unión Radio had virtually monopolistic control. The government was aware that the entire broadcasting system was a business in the hands of foreign multinationals, but, in turn, Unión Radio was aware that the government could at any time nationalize it by decree with the aim of creating a national broadcasting service similar to the British BBC.24

Conscious of the fact that listeners had now become “electors”, and to mitigate these failings, the government of the Second Republic introduced a series of measures to reform the Spanish radio broadcasting system. Even so, they do not seem to have been accompanied by any policies aimed at promoting national production of cheap high-quality radio receivers, as Hitler did with the VE-301 W (1933) and DKE (1938) models, of which millions of units were manufactured; or the Radiobalilla (1936), which was the Italian “people’s set” backed by Mussolini. Nor did any private company launch itself decisively into mass-producing cheap radios, as Philco did with the 444 in Great Britain (1935). In the 1930s European politicians implemented industrial programmes to give citizens a car and a radio, but there is no record in Spain of any policy aimed, in this case, at putting radios in homes. Cheap radios were to be found at the low end of the Philips or Emerson range, or in the rather rudimentary models produced locally and purchased in instalments.

However, the improvements in broadcasting in the first half of the 1930s did generate a huge increase in listeners, and this entailed a spectacular rise in the number of receivers. Even though some people cheated with the licenses, the republican government made a great effort to enforce payment, and through its licensing department the approximate number of radios can be deduced:

The increase in radio licenses in Spain25

Despite these obvious improvements, during the Second Republic the Spanish radio system continued to make a loss, if we compare it to those of other countries, and it was very uneven if we compare provinces. Denmark was the country with most radio receivers per 1,000 inhabitants, 155; Madrid on the other hand, the Spanish city with most receivers in relative terms, had 20.04. Vigo did not even manage one radio per 1,000 inhabitants. The Spanish market might have been interesting for foreign brands, but if consumption figures are compared with those of a small country like Denmark one reaches the conclusion that the Spanish “cake” was not exactly enticing. Nor does one need that much historical intuition to understand why, in such an unattractive market, local radio manufacturing companies did not risk making large investments in production. Exportation would have been the only way out for authentic industrial-scale production, but, as we shall see below, during the 1930s there were many problems attached to this option.

With regard to the absolute number of radios in Spain, in 1934 just Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia accounted for 45% of the total number of receivers.²⁶

During the 1920s, the radio was a luxury that reached a minority. The programmes, only broadcast for a few hours a day, usually included classical music (concerts and operas) and book recitals. What is more, the “receiving station” was expensive and it was necessary to pay the license. In all industrialized countries the situation changed radically in the 1930s through action on three parallel fronts: 1) With the aim of obtaining advertising revenue programmes changed to capture a far larger audience. 2) Radio receivers became cheaper thanks to the assembly line manufacturing techniques that were introduced in American and European factories, whereby the unit cost was greatly reduced. 3) Constant investment in R&D turned the radio into an efficient artefact, easy to handle and attractive to look at.

There were prices and models for all segments of the market. In general, a radio’s price was directly related to the number of valves, as the more valves it had the more powerful it was and there was more possibility of capturing faraway stations. Let’s look at some prices in Spain in the 1930s:

• In an advertisement of 1932, Brunet offered a three-valve receiver for 140 pesetas. This price apparently caused a sensation at the second Barcelona Radio Exhibition.

• A Felco Philips receiver cost 250 pesetas in cash, or 12.5 pesetas a month if paid in instalments over two years.

• In the 1930s Emerson models cost from 320 pesetas, if they were four-valve, to 700 pesetas if they were six-valve.

• According to an advertisement published in 1936 in El Hogar y la Moda, His Master’s Voice radios cost between 15 and 50 pesetas a month paid over two years depending on the model.

• Westinghouse seven-valve super-heterodyne receivers cost 975 pesetas, and the eight-valve radio-phonograph, 2,400 pesetas, paid in cash.27

According to the National Institute of Statistics, in 1931 qualified workers earned 10-15 pesetas a day. This means that the monthly instalment for a Felco-Philips was the equivalent of a day’s wage; if paid for in cash it cost a month’s wages.²⁸ On the other hand, Westinghouse radios cost twice or three times as much as a high-ranking executive’s monthly salary.

The design and production of radio receivers in the 1930s

In the 1920s radio receivers were not exactly cheap, easy-to-work consumer items. They had no power supply and to capture the signal it was necessary to install a huge antenna on the roof.

Radios with Lee de Forest’s triode signified a huge step forward: they were far more powerful and made it possible to listen to the broadcast with a loudspeaker. Communal listening was therefore possible. Even so, in order to receive the signal four elements were needed: the receiver, the battery, the loudspeaker and the loop antenna. The set was complicated, expensive and unattractive.

In the 1930s the radio receiver changed a lot. Improvements included the technical specifications, the controls and the look. It was now a single unit that contained the receiver, the antenna and the loudspeaker. It ran on electricity, thus getting rid of the annoying batteries. Moreover, the introduction of the super-heterodyne circuit developed by RCA greatly improved listening quality. The receiver was also easier to work; all it needed was a tuning dial and a volume control knob. Fierce competition between companies aroused concern over the design and to integrate the device in the decoration of the home. During the early thirties “cathedral” models were all the rage, but there were also many in the form of a box. The most revolutionary American brands were made in plastic and followed functionalist or Art Déco trends. On the other hand, the more conservative ones made “console” models with fine cabinetmaking techniques and they were even disguised as part of a bureau. It may be said that in the 1930s, as well as radios to suit all pockets, there were radios for all tastes.

What is most striking during this period in Spain is the extraordinary presence of foreign brands, especially American ones. According to information supplied by the collector Joan Julià and advertisements in the magazines D’Ací i d’Allà, El Hogar y la Moda, Menaje, Ràdio Barcelona and Catalunya Ràdio, during the 1930s brands from the following countries could be bought in Spain:

• Germany: Telefunken, Braun, Seibt, Nora

• The Netherlands: Philips

• Sweden: Ericsson

• Great Britain: His Master’s Voice

• USA: American Radio, Interocean, Philco, Fada, Gloritone, Atwater Kent, Kennedy, Kadette, Westinghouse, Silver Marshall, Cambridge, Vycut, Speed, Clarion, Kenrad, Webster, Motorola, Clearvox, Emerson, Colonial, Zenith, Pilot, RCA, General Electric, Stewart Warner, Concerton, Lutephon, Crosley, Dunn, General motors, Delco, Detrola, Majestic, Air King, Wells, Gardner.

The studies by Joan Julià, a Spanish radio specialist collector, show us that during the 1930s the following local brands could be found: Ans, Armonial, Ascar, Bayona, Best, Brunet, Castilla, Centinela, Doger, Electron, Feare, Felco, Gelco, Good as, Hispano Radio, Invicta, IRE, JMA, Or-mi, Mir, Musivox, Radio Nacional, Radio Madrid, Radio Ohm, Radiofon, Rigom, Roover, Rubí, Saturno, Sentinel, Supremo, Tanks, Teledino, Vica, Wotas.

According to this collector, in Spain radios were virtually made by hand in shop-workshops. Production was very limited and was a world away from the 12,000 receivers manufactured by Atwater Kent in one day at the end of the 1920s.²⁹ The Americans applied Henry Ford’s methods to manufacturing radios and household appliances and achieved astronomical production figures. This enormous output had to be sold at all costs, and exportation was imperative. This was why the advertising campaigns were so good and the marketing techniques so aggressive. American industry published several guides for Spain and Latin America, written in Spanish and very well edited, in which, principally, radios, household electrical appliances and automobiles were advertised.³⁰ Moreover, American manufacturers took great care over the publication of brochures and annual catalogues.

Spanish companies placed hardly any advertisements in magazines and, as Joan Julià says, they never published catalogues. It could be said that they did not take much care over product design, or advertising, nor did they have very sophisticated sales strategies. Their models were scarcely innovative in either the shape or the technology. According to this collector they did not incorporate the super-heterodyne circuit for the simple reason that it was patented by RCA, which was paid royalties by every company in the world for its use. Local receivers perhaps only competed on the price, as imported radios were subjected to certain restrictions.

Castilla radios seem to have been reasonably popular because the receivers were made with Philips components.

One of the people who most actively stood up for radio manufacture as a business was Eduard Rifà i Anglada. This businessman was not satisfied with contributing capital to Ràdio Barcelona, founding Ràdio Associació de Catalunya, managing two shops selling radios and household appliances (Radio Lot and Rifà i Anglada SA), editing two magazines and writing almost a hundred articles about broadcasting; he was also a major promoter of the organization of the sector, taking as an example what was being done in other countries. In 1930 he wrote:

When one goes to any foreign country, in every important city with radio stations one finds makers and sellers of radio receivers grouped together, constantly concerned about the quality of the programmes, organizing exhibitions and giving talks about the latest inventions. At the same time they subsidize schools where technicians are trained, to help them with their work in the workshops that calibrate and assemble the radios that are made by large companies, unknown here. In this country a heroic effort is needed to get this sector off the ground, lacking in all things necessary to make headway.31

In November 1931 the first National Radio Exhibition opened in the basement of Plaça de Catalunya. The event was so successful that there was not enough room for all the brands that wanted to exhibit there. According to Rifà i Anglada, 200,000 visitors were counted, a figure that in relative terms was far higher than that of the Paris exhibitions. The exhibition showed the progress that radio had made, and during it a proposal was made to hold the international shortwave congress in Barcelona. All in all it put radio on the economic map and Barcelona on the map of the sector. Businessmen and the government were invited to take heed:

Radio is an economic, industrial and commercial asset that provides jobs for many people. Attempts should therefore be made, with official help, to nationalize it industrially so that radio might make a profit, not just because of the wealth it represents, but because it is a vital part of modern life for the informative, educational and artistic service it provides.

The success of the latest radio exhibition has not gone unnoticed in the business world. Those in government ought to concern themselves more than they have done up to now. The case of the economic effort to promote radio being left only to dealers and radio listeners must not be repeated.32

In October and November 1932 the second Radio Exhibition was held on Montjuïc, in the recently opened pavilions of the Barcelona Trade Fair. This time, besides radio, photography, sound cinema, gramophones and records were included. If the first exhibition had raised expectations, this one was a complete success and the number of stands and brands surpassed all expectations.

With the aim of joining forces and fighting against the importation of foreign brands, in 1935 the Asociación Nacional de Constructores de Aparatos de Radio (ANCAR) (National Association of Radio Makers) was founded in Barcelona. To date we have found neither its articles of association nor the founding charter, but it could tell us a great deal. Notwithstanding that, it must not be thought that all radio manufacturers joined from the first day. After the war, ANCAR grew to have more than 140 members.

Conclusion

Based on what I have said, it seems clear that the electrical appliance sector did not take off in the period 1929-1936 as it did in other industrialized countries that, paradoxically, were going through an unprecedented economic crisis. In this difficult period there were no investors in either Spain or Catalonia prepared to put money into technological innovation or design, or to set up radio receiver production plants. It looked like an incipient sector with insignificant business figures. This may be why it does not appear in any programmes to relaunch the economy.

Indeed, studies of the period show us that Spain was still a country with a predominantly agrarian economy in which half the population lived off the land in the countryside, with industrial activity concentrated in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Wool, olive oil, wine, fruit, fish, and copper and lead sheeting were exported. The largest imports were cocoa, coffee, cod, leather and raw materials such as coal, petrol, aluminium ingots, cast iron ingots and chemical products.33

During the years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923-1930), a policy of public works was implemented that gave a great boost to the railways and to the production of iron, steel and cement. Electricity production also rose sharply. On the contrary, the peseta’s international exchange rate fell constantly. This was a problem that got worse over time. Notwithstanding that, the 1929 crash hardly affected Spain, given that it was a country with quite limited international economic relations that seemed to live somewhat on the fringes of events taking place elsewhere.³⁴ The textiles sector did not suffer much either, because since the loss of the American colonies it had concentrated wholly on the domestic market, the main source of its revenue.

So, what was the economic and social situation when the Second Republic was proclaimed? As Benavides says:

Certainly not too brilliant and it was to get notably worse in the following years. The concentration of economic activity caused by the restrictive policy of the transitional governments (from the dictatorship to the republic), allegedly the restorers of constitutional order, together with the repercussions of the international economic crisis and the reigning political uncertainty, resulted basically in an ever lower rate of exchange for the peseta, massive capital flight and a sharp fall in foreign trade.³⁵

It is therefore likely that the capital so badly needed by the radio broadcasting and reception industries ended up abroad. The large multinationals were thus able to enter Spain without encountering resistance from any economic groups.

Not only did the electrical appliance industry not have any capital available for investment, it must also have had problems with importing technology and exporting the finished article. I said above that one of the problems of the Spanish economy in the 1930s was the continual depreciation of the peseta on international markets. This meant that it became very expensive to import components with which to manufacture radios and household appliances. Moreover, the exportation of the finished article was a fanciful option. To gain a foothold in a world market dominated by the major American corporations or European companies such as Telefunken, Philips and Ericsson, it was necessary to make products to a similar standard of quality. They did not even have the possibility of competing on the price: in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, governments of industrialized countries were quick to protect their domestic markets by imposing import tariffs.

The real second industrial revolution, that of the internal combustion engine and electricity, did not happen in Spain in the 1930s, as would have been normal, but in the 1960s. According to Alonso and Conde, this delay was caused by the fact that the surpluses of the capital goods industry were moved not into the consumption sector³⁶ but into engineering, in the case of Catalonia.

The only things Spain exported successfully were wine and citrus fruit; however, from 1929 onwards, these products began to run into trouble because the importing countries closed frontiers with the aim of cushioning the effects of the crisis.

As I said at the start of this chapter, industrial design developed as a profession in the USA in branches of industry closely linked to the transport and electrical appliance sectors. In Catalonia, however, these sectors were seriously undercapitalized, with an industrial structure of small and medium-sized workshops that could not finance major mass-production operations. They were rather workshops that made products whose prices were not competitive using quite traditional methods. The case of automobiles is paradigmatic: in 1931 only 80 private cars were made in Spain whilst almost 13,000 units were licensed.37

After the Civil War (1936-1939), the productive and commercial situation was radically reversed. Joan Julià supplies these data about radio receivers:38

With the frontiers closed, the competition eliminated, the workers under control and the increase in GDP, manufacturing radios and household electrical appliances became a good business, so much so that in the 1960s there was an authentic boom in the consumption of devices that ran on electricity. But that is another story.

“Banned Due to the Unpleasant Colour. ”Censorship and Design During the Early Years of Francoism
(1936-1945)1

Raquel Pelta

On 1 April 1939 Franco signed the last war report. Officially, at least, the Spanish Civil War was over.

Nevertheless, and as far as freedom of expression was concerned, with the ceasing of hostilities one of the darkest periods in the recent history of Spain began. In this context, one of the fields that most suffered the lack of freedom was graphic design, given that to a large extent the regime used it to develop its aesthetic and political ideas.

It is easy to see why this was so if we bear in mind that the Franco regime knew the value of political propaganda and was a firm believer in it. And of course, it was well aware that the press, properly controlled, could be a vehicle for ideological propaganda of the first order. What art form was more closely linked to this medium than graphic design?

Aside from some very specific measures, the control of graphic design by the Franco regime was associated with that of publications in general. The laws enacted for the printed media therefore affected graphic productions directly.

Just as the republican government had done, one of the first steps taken by the national army was to immediately take control of the existing media in the areas it was bringing under control. By July 1936 nobody in Spain was unaware of the power of propaganda, which, gaining ground since the start of the twentieth century hand in hand with pubic opinion, had become one of the modulating agents of national and international political decisions. It was the consolidation of so-called mass society, and of the progress of a media that made a big impact on the growing working class. It was the period when public opinion became increasingly important and showed it was capable of taking a stand when faced with the different political options it was offered. Controlling this opinion is an obvious mechanism for gaining power or conserving it. Propaganda thus became an effective instrument for channelling it, and the mass media were essential for achieving this goal .

The First World War had already shown how important it was, to raise morale on the battlefield or to undermine the enemy behind the lines; it was also used by the two opposing sides to justify their cause to the public opinion of other countries. The Republican side was fully aware of this, and nor were the generals who staged the uprising oblivious to its value:

[…] the Great War of 1914-1918 was telling us with its clear lessons that propaganda was a most active and feared weapon, through which the morale of the enemy camp could be severely affected. In that war, Germany suffered the consequences of the organization that the French and English set up. The corrosive message that the authors were putting across gradually infiltrated the soul of the average German and, after destroying morale behind the lines, they eventually reached the nervous system of the front, clearly wreaking havoc, a situation that officers pointed out to the High Command.²

This awareness resulted in the proclamation by General Andrés Saliquet, who, on 18 July 1936, subjected “all printed publications of any kind whatsoever to military censorship”.3

On 28 July, the first major attempt was made to control the media: the National Defence Junta, under General Miguel Cabanellas, declared crimes “committed by means of the printing press or any other form of publicity” subject to summary court-martial, and ordered the “prior censorship of two copies of all printed matter or documents used for advertising”, among other measures.⁴ From the start of the Civil War, therefore, a process began of the concentration of powers in the hands of the future state, which promptly created specific propaganda, press control and censorship bodies.

Moreover, and as Justino Sinova says, “the conquest of the media was a demand of the war, but it was theoretically backed up by the national-syndicalist doctrine that imbued rebel circles”.⁵ Because, although Franco never granted the Falange total freedom, he did adopt many of its postulates in matters of communications and assimilated many of the principles of its founder, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, especially in the early days of the regime.

The Falange was taking control of a large number of periodical publications, many of which were seized from the losing side, and it was always up to date with the press and propaganda measures adopted by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Both countries served as templates, in their organization and legislation, and it is hard to tell whether the model followed was one or the other.⁶ Also, while it is not clear whether the Spanish provisions were a clear transcription of the German and Italian ones, it is true that in them we find notable similarities with those of the other two totalitarian regimes;⁷ not for nothing, both Serrano Suñer and Giménez Arnau – the drafter of the 1938 Press Law – were at that time going through a period of devoted admiration for both regimes.

Whatever the case, as early as 23 December 1936 the Franco government enacted a first Order that set in motion the repressive measures against publications considered to be Marxist, pornographic and disolvente. The preamble of the said Order clearly showed the new state’s ideas in matters of communications: “One of the most effective weapons brought into play by the enemies of the Fatherland has been the spreading of pornographic and disolvente literature. The docile intelligence of young people and the ignorance of the masses were the perfect medium for the development of the culture of revolutionary ideas, and the sad experience of this moment in history demonstrates the success of the process chosen by the enemies of religion, civilization, the family and all the concepts on which society is based. The enormous gravity of the damage requires a prompt, radical remedy. Much blood has been shed and there is now a pressing need to adopt repressive and preventive measures to ensure the stability of a new legal and social order, which will also prevent the tragedy from being repeated”. Article 1 declared illicit: “the production, sale and circulation of books, newspapers, pamphlets and all kinds of pornographic prints, socialist, communist, libertarian and, in general, disolvente literature”.

In January 1937 the first steps were taken towards a more clearly defined organization of the mechanisms of control: the State Press and Propaganda Office was created, which reported to the General Secretariat of State. Directed by Millán Astray, in collaboration with Giménez Caballero, its precedent was the Press and Propaganda Office set up in Salamanca in November 1936. Its chief task was to control publications, and to process applications for the production of all the objects that would be using the symbols of the new regime. The express mission entrusted to the officer – Major Manuel Arias Paz, of the Engineers – was to use the press to “publicize the nature of the National Movement” and to “oppose the libellous campaign being carried out internationally by “red” elements”. For the purpose of carrying out this mission, the officer had “powers to guide the press, to coordinate the service of radio stations, to point out the rules that censorship must obey, and to direct all propaganda via the cinema, radio, newspapers, pamphlets and lectures”. At the same time, he could punish offenders with a fine or with the suspension of the “advertising organs”.8

Along with this body there was another parallel one in the Falange: the National Press and Propaganda Office of FET y de las JONS, which soon began to cultivate what would be the seeds of the Movement’s press: newspapers created with assets seized in the zones that were falling into the hands of the rebel army.

Dated 16 September 1937, a new Order appeared whereby “purging committees” of reading centres were created, tasked with removing from circulation any publications whose text contained “illustrations or prints expounding disolvente ideas, immoral concepts, propaganda of Marxist doctrines and anything that represents a lack of respect for the dignity of our glorious army, attacks against the unity of the Fatherland, contempt for the Catholic religion and anything that opposes the significance and the ends of our great National Crusade”.⁹

The Orders of 29 May and 29 October of that same year took things a step further. Through the former the State Press and Propaganda Office became responsible for the censorship of all “books, pamphlets and other printed matter”, and the latter placed authorization to reproduce, by any process, the effigies of Franco and outstanding figures in the Movement under its control.

All these provisions merely demonstrate the concept of the printed media – and therefore, of the images contained in it – as a key instrument of ideological dissemination and penetration. The interest in controlling books, for example, corresponded to the view of them as, “a form of psychological apparatus, device or instrument that serves to cause certain particular complex experiences in the reader’s psychic being,” and, therefore, “the time is nigh […] when the use of books will, for reasons of physical, mental and social hygiene, have to be regulated and prescribed”.10

This opinion, extendable to any other type of publication, is therefore justification for censorship, since: “Culture, without a moral compass to guide it, is nothing, and it may be like a drug of the great qualities that God placed as a smouldering ember at the bottom of the human soul. Books can be good or bad […]; therefore, in themselves books are tools that can be used for good or ill and the cultural politics of reading consists of adapting the book to the reader …”.11

In 1938, through the Law of 30 January, Franco organized the state’s central administration into ministerial departments. In the Ministry of the Interior he set up the National Propaganda Service, under Dionisio Ridruejo, and that of the Press, directed by José Antonio Giménez-Arnau. Created in the former were the departments of Publications, Radio broadcasting, Film making, Theatre, Music, Plastic Arts, Propaganda at the Fronts and Direct Propaganda. These departments were connected through a Secretariat, with Javier Salas in charge.

As Ridruejo points out, the plan drawn up “pointed towards the control of culture and the organization of instruments of public communication on all levels”.12

Direction of the Publications Department was entrusted to Pedro Laín Entralgo, and the Department of Plastic Arts to the painter and draughtsman Juan Cabanas, who remained in charge of it despite the changes that this section experienced over the years. Other artists worked alongside Cabanas: Emilio Aladrén, Pedro Bueno, Manuel Contreras, José Caballero, José Antonio Morales, Pedro Pruna and Domingo Viladomat. In the words of Pedro Laín Entralgo, this body’s mission was to “aesthetically guide the appearance of the new state”.13

The Censorship Work of the National Propaganda Office: the Plastic Arts Department

Besides the work they did – posters, decoration for public ceremonies, and so on – for the various official bodies, one of the Plastic Arts Department’s first tasks was to review the designs of shop fronts for the celebration of Victory Day. At the same time, and based on an Order of 29 April 1938, it began to do actual censorship, relating to the regulation of the production and distribution of images. Thus, the above-mentioned department had to grant authorization for “the commercial production and circulation of books, pamphlets and all kinds of prints, both Spanish and foreign”.

The Order of 29 April made authors and publishers responsible for the presentation of originals, a responsibility that was later extended to printers, lithographers and engravers. This measure was explained by stating that such works “attack, with alarming frequency, the nation’s artistic prestige, precisely in the reproduction of effigies, symbols and compositions whose significance is directly related to the Movement’s propaganda”.14

In August 1939 Franco created his first post-war government. In charge of the Ministry of the Interior he placed his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer, a figure of especial importance at the time of greatest German influence (brought about, in large part, by his presence in the government). The Press, Propaganda and Architecture General Directorates remained in the said ministry, in charge of the cinema, theatre, books, the press, and so on.

The great importance of the role played by these bodies was continually stressed by the government, especially with regard to education: “The various activities of the Press and Propaganda Services are a most important aspect of the citizens’ spiritual and cultural education, effectively complementing the work of the teaching bodies”.15

The Censorship Section had already been created in July 1939, reporting to the National Propaganda Service and part of the Service’s General Secretariat. As a certain degree of confusion of powers relative to the censorship exercised by the different bodies involved in this work arose, in 1940 everything was centralized in this section, which in turn distributed the work among the various departments. Therefore, the Plastic Arts Department specialized in censoring the graphics of publications and objects in which images played a fundamental role.

A new government, formed on 30 May 1941, established the Vice-secretariat of Popular Education of FET y de las JONS, reporting directly to the Movement’s General Secretariat, which was now given all the services and bodies that, in Press and Propaganda matters, had up to then been in the Ministry of the Interior (Governance). The Plastic Arts Department thus became a Section – Ceremonial and Plastic Arts – of the National Propaganda Office.

In 1942, Gabriel Arias Salgado changed the Plastic Arts Department again and split it in two: the Ceremonial head office and the Public Events and Plastic Arts Organization Section. The latter was split into two sections: organization of public events and exhibitions, and intervention in private artistic activities.

Something that remained unaltered, regardless of all the changes, was the censorship of images in publications. As had been the case previously, reasons again appeared for the overlapping of powers, despite the fact that from February 1941 onwards attempts to sort this out had been made with a note from the head of the General Affairs Section to the head of the Censorship Section, in which it was made clear that, “In the event that the publication to which artistic censorship must be applied is mixed, i.e., it is a book with some prints in which greater importance must be given to the literary part than to the artistic, the censorship section shall request a report from the plastic section before issuing the censorship report. Conversely, when the artistic part is more important than the text, that Section shall request a report on the text from the Censorship Section”.16

Thus, the National Propaganda Office, besides performing other tasks related to the regime’s artistic activities, was in charge of controlling the artwork most closely related to illustrations:

a) The arms of Spain, colours, flags, badges of Spain and of the F.E.T. y de las J.O.N.S., mottoes, slogans, names of the State and the Movement, depictions of figures, episodes, places in the history of Spain, of the Crusade and the Revolution, photographs or depictions of official personalities of the regime or the armies and of any objects that are reproduced as per Order of 27 April 1939 (B.O. 28 October).17

b) Prints of all kinds, covers of novels, illustrations, lithographed books, posters, placards, wall posters, mural newssheets published for promotional purposes by private bodies, including cinemas, theatres, dancehalls and other shows, picture cards, cut-out constructions, children’s drawings to illustrate almanacs, greetings cards, and so on and so forth, as per Order of 29 April 1938 and complementary provision of 15 October 1938 (B.O. 19 October).

c) As per order of 15 October 1942 (B.O. of the M. 20 October) it is the National Propaganda Office’s duty to previously censor and authorize badges, emblems, insignias, posters, wall posters, pamphlets, mural newssheets, and so on, that the various bodies of the party may propose to create, modify and publish.

This text, which appeared on the back of the authorization application forms that had to be submitted,¹⁸ stressed particularly the following: “No book cover shall be authorized without prior censorship and authorization of the text, which must be stated on the form, specifying date and file number”; and it warned, “Any infringement of this order will be punished according to current legislation”.

Through the offices of the Plastic Arts Section passed all manner of objects imaginable: insignias, buttons, belt buckles, embroideries, small flags, maps, cut-outs, book covers, magazines, cinema billing posters, picture cards and albums, school class photo collages, badges of the Falange and the army, bottle labels, paper for wrapping oranges in, colouring books, religious images, Christmas cards, advertising leaflets, picture frames. Nothing escaped the watchful eyes of the censors.¹⁹ Moreover, once authorization had been received to begin manufacturing or publishing the object in question, the following had to be complied with: “Three copies of it will be submitted to this national Office enclosed with the form (on which) its manufacture or publication was authorized, which will be stamped and signed once again to certify that it matches the original, thereby authorizing its circulation in Spain”.

Control was absolute, as shown by one of the files referring to a cover done by the illustrator Adolfo López Rubio for the novel María Teresa Lanuza. The illustration showed a woman in the foreground wearing a decorative comb in her hair; behind her there was a man dressed in military uniform and in the background, a church. The drawing is not one of López Rubio’s best; however, as far as its quality is concerned, it did not differ notably from many others submitted by him and authorized by the censors. File number 16-11941 was resolved with the succinct comment: “Unfortunate in the drawing and the composition: Must be rectified”.

Despite this, the book was published with the original cover, unchanged, something that must have caused the publisher one or two headaches, as we may deduce from the official letters exchanged. One of them, dated 22 January 1942, signed by the National Propaganda officer and sent to the Popular Education provincial officer in Madrid, orders:

When you receive this official letter you will go in person to Ediciones Rábida, whose address is Calle Mayor, 4, in this city, and you will proceed to draft a justificatory report of the possession by the publishers of a cover for the novel María Teresa Lanuza, of which the draughtsman Don Alfonso López Rubio is the author, for a book in the collection Woman by the said publishing house.

I also bring to your knowledge, so that you may proceed accordingly, that on 21 January 1943 the publication of the said cover was banned, pending rectification, by this National Propaganda Office, at the request of its Plastic Arts Section.

It has been seen, by functionaries of this Vice-secretariat, on sale at the newsstand located at the first numbers of Calle Ayala.

For God, for Spain and its National-Syndicalist Revolution.

In the report that was drafted it states that the publisher declares that he has made a mistaken interpretation of the laconic text of the resolution, understanding that with “Unfortunate in the drawing and the composition” the censor was referring to errors of printing, adjustment and colour, which he proceeded to correct. Despite this allegation and the fact that there were no signs of criminal intent in his actions, the National Propaganda Office insisted that the “explanatory processes” should continue:

It is the publishing house’s obligation to submit the cover again, after it has been rectified, to censorship, as this task is the sole competence of the National Propaganda Office, and thus consider if it is fit for circulation.²⁰

Finally, the publisher was able to breathe easily, as “the complete absence of malice and premeditation,” was seen, “[…] due to an erroneous interpretation of the Plastic Arts Section’s resolution …”.21

López Rubio’s drawings usually passed the censorship test, but they had problems on more than one occasion. For example, his cover for the novel Las rosas de ayer, by J. Ortiz de Pinedo, was banned by José Caballero due to “a lack of style and the unpleasant colour”.²² The illustration showed a man and a woman against a yellow background, and on this occasion the quality of drawing did not differ greatly from those presented and authorized at other times.

Nor was the cover for the book El Amazonas, published by Lis, approved, which showed a boy also against a yellow background. This time José Caballero wrote “Banned”, giving no other explanation.23

Occasionally the censor became censorable, as happened to José Caballero with a poster for the Commemoration of the Columbian Festivals in Huelva, in 1943, that did not make it past the censors of the Section for which he worked.²⁴ Or censored, as Juan Cabanas was, whose drawing of a national coat of arms for W. Gustavo Peters was simply refused authorization for publication.²⁵

No detail, no matter how small, escaped the thorough scrutiny to which every work was subjected; any line that could give rise to interpretations different to those intended was eliminated. A poster submitted for their approval, entitled “The Falange’s view of the black market”, was accepted by the censors from the aesthetic point of view but refused for the following reason: “Despite its healthy intentions, the way in which it is executed may suggest twisted interpretations due to the torn and tattered flag depicted in the drawing”.26

Of course so many details had to be borne in mind that, from time to time, the censor let something pass out of ignorance. However, the National Propaganda Office was always there to remind him of his mistake, even though it was sometimes too late, as in the case of one of the five posters published for the 2nd National Trade Fair held in 1942. In this authorized poster, “the National flag, the Party’s flag and the Traditionalist flag” appeared, placed in this order, when the correct way was “the National flag in the middle, to its right that of the Party, and to its left the Traditionalist one”. The official letter from the National Propaganda Office pointed out the need to rectify the posters, if they had not already been printed, “to avoid possible deviations of a political nature”.²⁷ But the posters had already gone into circulation.

Sometimes people saw something where there was absolutely nothing. This is the case with a poster that Teodoro Delgado made for the General Directorate of Tourism in about 1940. The poster in question was entitled Veraneo en las playas de Andalucía (Summer holidays on the beaches of Andalusia) and it featured some women’s slippers abandoned next to a chair. The problem arose due to the slippers, as someone accused Delgado of drawing them in the colours of the republican flag. The poster was referred to the National Propaganda Office, which, after the report by the relevant section, sent the following official letter to the director general of Security:

Having been examined by the corresponding services of the Public Events and Plastic Arts Organization Section, under my command, I have been able to see for myself that the supposition that the colours of the republican flag are reproduced on the woman’s slippers abandoned next to the chair that appears in the said poster, is completely unfounded.

At the same time, I am informed by the Director General of Tourism that he has issued the appropriate orders for a copy of everything published by the Propaganda and Publicity Section of the said body to be referred to this National Propaganda Office in the future.28

Fig. 1 Teodoro Delgado. Poster Veraneo en las playas de Andalucía. Directorate General of Tourism. c. 1940. Photo: Private collection

Suspecting Teodoro Delgado of any kind of ideological deviation seems completely ludicrous, if one looks at the illustrations he did during the Civil War in favour of the Francoist cause; but to also keep an eye on the publications of another like-minded body, with the same ideological ideas, may give us some idea of how far the desire to control went. As Justino Sinova says, quoting Román Gubern, “censorship was not only used against the regime’s ideological enemies, but also to check the hypothetical doctrinal deviations of its followers”.²⁹

If we ignore the works closest to heraldry, which were refused for not adapting to the regulations in force about coats of arms, symbols, signs, etc., in the majority of the unauthorized files to which I have gained access, aesthetic considerations are put forward as the basic argument for justifying the prohibition of the images depicted in them. Phrases habitually appear, such as banned “for being unsightly”, “for lacking aesthetic and compositional quality”, “must be repeated for lack of artistic quality”, “must not be authorized, lacking in drawing, composition and the most elementary aesthetic sense”: criteria, as we see, that depend on the tastes of the censor, his knowledge of art or his convictions about what this should be.

Graphic artists were thus obliged to repeat their works time and again until they adapted to what was appropriate, and what was appropriate varied depending on the end purpose of the project or according to who the censor was. For example, about the sketches submitted for a “Book of emblems, badges of Madrid and material of the Spanish armed forces”, Escassi said, “I find them too sloppy in their presentation, and the drawing seems to me to be very poorly done. Depending on the use to which they are to be put, they may or may not be authorized”.30

As you can see, the criteria corresponded – at least apparently – to the reasons put forward for maintaining the existence of censorship: to prevent an “assault on the nation’s artistic prestige”. And of course, for aesthetic reasons all artwork that did not agree with the regime’s ideas about art – which, moreover, were never clear – had to go. As Ángel Llorente says:

The intellectuals, critics and artists who explained the idiomatic aspects of the new art were the exception. Among those who did so the opinion prevailed that classical art was more appropriate. In fact this was the only opinion. Classical was taken to mean, depending on which critic it was, academicism in the official teaching of the Schools of Fine Art, but also its more correct meaning: compositional harmony, moderation, balanced proportions, and so on.31

It is therefore very likely that all these conceptions influenced the graphics of the post-war years more profoundly than did the rules that ensured there would be no deviations in either morality or politics. In fact, in hardly any of the works that I have found are there any signs of prohibition for being a crime against good manners, and, although that censorship existed³² and did its duty conscientiously, one can sense that every publisher or every illustrator/draughtsman or graphic artist – whatever we may wish to call them – would do a lot of prior self-censorship, so that, when these files were processed, there must surely have been little left to reproach. It could be said, then, that the regime’s policy lay not only in the configuration of a whole iconography, which doubtlessly existed, but in the extremely subtle prohibition of all the styles that were not the style, even though this style was vague and never, in all the years of Francoism, defined.

Such relative aesthetic considerations affected not only the quality of the work, but also the techniques used, as is shown by the file opened to submit for authorization the publication of “Allegorical picture cards of the Defence of Oviedo”, by Máximo Ramos, published by Lieutenant Colonel Juan Hens for the benefit of the Civil Guard’s Orphans’ College. In response to the application, the National Propaganda Office issued the following ruling:

Report on the publication of three picture cards in watercolours depicting the Alcázar, Santa María de la Cabeza and Oviedo, which their author requests to publish sponsored by the Civil Guard headquarters in Valencia.

1. The most prestigious battles in our Crusade must be treated in every case with the greatest austerity, and reproduced with the editorial dignity that their great significance demands.

2. The three watercolour picture cards in question are painted with a criterion that is weak in forms, unfortunate in the colour and cluttered in the composition, being too reminiscent of commercial posters, incompatible with the subjects dealt with.

3. Their publication is banned.

4. Since one of the causes of the above defects is the colour reproduction and the unsuitability of watercolours for the depiction of subjects as vigorous as this, we recommend engraving three illustrations of the same motifs, leaving the legends of the main subjects free.33

Dated 31 July, a letter was sent to Juan Hens informing him that publication of the three picture cards was authorized, provided that he followed the recommendation to use engraving as the technique, and reminding him that he had to send two copies of each illustration to the National Office once they had been printed.

Of course, one had to be very careful when choosing both the subject and the way of depicting it, as very often an excess of patriotic ardour achieved the opposite effect of what was desired. This was the case with an illustration called “I shall return”, apparently on a Carlist theme,³⁴ by Hernandorena, printed by Seix y Barral, and of which 5,000 copies of its print run were confiscated via an official letter signed by the national Propaganda officer, Manuel Torres García, who wrote the following:

The Public Events and Plastic Arts organization of my National Propaganda Office having examined the illustration “I shall return”, I have decided, after the relevant study of its artistic qualities, not to agree to its publication, since the criterion that underlies our censorship of everything that reflects, internationally, historical drawings, figures of our Spain, tradition, ways of being of our Revolution and of our sensibilities, should be treated with the utmost decorum and the greatest artistic dignity, qualities that the poster entitled “I shall return” does not possess. Its composition, colour, format, and the way it reflects the moment in history that it intends to commemorate, are in my opinion completely inadmissible and in utterly bad taste.

As in the case of Máximo Ramos, referred to above, this one clearly shows some of the ideas that spread among Falangist circles about the vital importance of the subject in the work of art, especially in the years immediately following the Civil War: “No great theme of metaphysics, religion, history or politics is indifferent to painting”.35

This was because art had a mission: it had to become a testimony for the future. This obsession with the content would determine a hierarchy within artistic techniques, according to a very subjective “nobility” for expressing this or that subject, which is perhaps merely one of the results of the return to artistic ideas that accentuated the already old division between major and minor arts. In this order, engraving was nobler than watercolour or gouache, oil painting was nobler than engraving, and architecture was more important than painting.

Just as one may generally say that during Francoism art did not have clear guidelines about what it ought or ought not to be, on more than one occasion censorship of the plastic arts, and specifically that of graphic art, reflected this confusion in its methods of action.

In 1942 for example, Juan Cabanas, then head of Ceremonial and Plastic Arts, sent an official letter to Emilio Rodríguez, the head of General Propaganda Affairs, about a cover for the book Así empezamos done by María Rosa Urraca:

Although as it is an individual work, judgment should be more benevolent, nevertheless, as it uses the badge of Fronts and Hospitals, I believe the publisher should be invited to submit a cover conceived with greater artistic sense, something less gloomy than the model that is the subject of this censorship.36

Along with this one he sent other reports referring to two more cases, indicating for one of them that authorization was due to the fact that: “The drawings have the minimum artistic dignity necessary for this kind of illustration”. To which Emilio Rodríguez replied:

Seeing as the Ceremonial and Plastic Arts Section’s mission is to censor book covers and illustrations, and not to inform about their artistic nature, I return to you three applications received with your official letters … so that you may tell me once again whether or not they can be published; you must authorize them through the corresponding censorship report, authorized by you, and in future please stick to performing this service in the way outlined …37

The censor’s job could not have been simple either:³⁸ those in the Plastic Arts Section may really have believed that by doing their duty as censors they were contributing to the artistic excellence of the new state. Maybe they were never aware – or did not wish to be – that hidden beneath all those stylistic rules and aesthetic criteria, which were never specifically defined, were many other questions that had virtually nothing to do with art as such, but which were attempting to turn it into an instrument of ideological manipulation.

The control of the press and publishing

Besides the Plastic Arts Section’s direct censorship, the Franco regime ensured the existence of specific legislation on newspaper and book publishing that indirectly determined a large part of the subject matter and iconography of the graphic arts of that period due to its close and substantial relationship with these media.

By the Law of 22 April 1938 – in actual fact a decree issued provisionally but which was in force until 1966 – the press was turned into a loyal tool of the regime’s policies. From that moment onwards its only purpose was to serve the interests of the state exclusively. Thus, the end of “company journalism” was proclaimed – one of the Falange’s most radical ideas – and the printed media became part of the state structure. According to this, the press’s role was to act as a link between the state and the citizens in order to: “Transmit to the state the voices of the nation and to communicate to the latter the orders and guidelines of the state and its government”.39

In article 1 the evidently totalitarian law stated: “It is the state’s duty to organize, watch over and control the national institution of the periodical press”.

And in article 2, what corresponded to the state was defined in detail:

1) To determine the number and extent of periodical publications.

2) To appoint editors (which the company proposed, but could not appoint).

3) To censor all informative, graphic and advertising material, and to order the obligatory insertion of as many reports or commentaries, chronicles or photographs, as were deemed appropriate.

4) The regulation of the profession of journalist.

The state therefore decided how many newspapers, magazines, and so on could be published, what they were going to say and how they would say it. Nothing could be published without prior authorization. Now not only did editors have the problem of bringing out a “product” that would be accepted or not by readers, they also had to prepare reasons convincing enough for the high-ranking civil servant handling the case to grant them authorization.

An example of this can be seen in an application sent by Rafael Piñeiro de Villar to put into circulation a magazine entitled Arte y Decoración. Despite the fact that this publication was “destined expressly to giving our people guidance about genuinely Spanish decoration”, there is an official letter addressed to the deputy-secretary of Popular Education, Gabriel Arias Salgado, which says:

[Although] the proposition must be deemed to be acceptable, a ruling on the publication of this magazine cannot be issued without knowing beforehand what its content will be and the direction that they wish to give it, whereby it would be necessary for the applicant to send the complementary data that I list below:

– Team of writers, team of contributors, the table of contents of the first issues, a dummy of an issue and a report in which not only material details of how it is put together but also those of style and artistic guidelines are recorded.40

Applications were very often turned down using the shortage of paper as a pretext. Thus, Prensa Española could not publish the magazine Blanco y Negro until the 1950s, as time and again it was refused the necessary authorization because of this scarcity. An order of 29 April 1938 clearly expressed this:

The body in charge of censorship may refuse the authorization of printed matter, not only for reasons of a doctrinal nature, but also in cases of works that, not being considered necessary or irreplaceable, may contribute in the current circumstances of the paper industry to hindering the publication of other printed matter that requires preferential attention.

This regulation, enacted in the middle of the war, would remain in force for many years and, together with the fact that on many occasions new publications were not authorized because they were direct competition for the Movement’s press, it was probably one of the factors that must have limited the job prospects of illustrators, who, on the other hand, would have their hands tied when choosing which medium to work in.

The Press Office interfered in the tiniest details of the publication. As Miguel Delibes, who started out as a caricaturist before becoming a journalist on El Norte de Castilla, says:

[…] censorship in that early post-Civil War period was so thorough that it is hard to imagine a more coercive, closed and Machiavellian inquisitorial machine. Orders arrived every day from the National Press Office, referring not only to what had to be published but also to the way in which it had to be done, and what should not be published under any circumstances. In the 1940s the Spanish press therefore became the most effective propaganda tool of the new state, monotonous and boring in its uniformity, rigidly controlled.41

The orders became one of the fundamental resources for control. They were issued to the media every day and determined every aspect: information, the technical aspects of news presentation (headlines, columns …), the insertion of photo-engravings, the prohibition to take a certain kind of photo, and so on. As if that were not enough, these orders had to be disguised in the publication so that readers would not suspect that what was being offered was the result of an imposition.

There were orders that made it necessary to carry out information campaigns that it is hard to believe anyone could take seriously:

This newspaper will conduct a campaign on prices and supplies from the 30th to the 8th of November inclusive, in accordance with the guidelines that will be sent by post. The campaign will be carried out through editorials, commentaries, articles, drawings, caricatures, etc. The purpose of this campaign will be to demonstrate that the average standard of living and the national regime of supplies and prices is higher than in the majority of European countries, whereby this newspaper will compare our rationing, restrictions on freedom and individual initiative, taxes, etc., with those of other nations. To this end, the agencies will supply data to supplement those that the newspaper has in its files […]. Finally (in view of the results) the National Office will criticize or congratulate the editors.42

The names of certain people, any opposition activity, words in other languages, criticism of any kind, allusions to the economic and social situation,⁴³ breaches of the peace, crimes, suicide, sexuality,⁴⁴ and so on, disappeared from the press. As, gradually, from 1944 onwards, did all mention of earlier relations with Nazism or fascism. Conversely, the cult of Franco appeared, along with the obsession with Freemasonry, fighting communism, attacks on the monarchy (which gradually disappeared), women as wives and mothers, an orderly country, well fed and happy, the uniqueness of our political system, the family, the municipality, the union …

Illustrations were obviously conditioned by these orders, which so directly affected the articles for which they were done, and so the proliferation of a certain kind of iconography is understandable.

Moreover, there are quite a few examples of how censorship set about controlling certain technical matters that, in a democratic political regime, depend solely on the editor’s judgement and opinion. Thus, in the censor’s inspection reports for the Diario de Burgos and the Diario de Barcelona we find reports like the one made about the former, dated 27 October 1942:

The lateral column-rules divide the page vertically and enclose a three-column central block. One sees little variety in the headline fonts […]. In the original, indents and bold and italic lettering are used as highlighting elements. Back page: it has an uncut column-rule, a box too long for a small-format page and the printing of the column-rules is very poor. Little variety in the headline fonts. Printing: clean. Photographs: very few.

Or about the latter, dated 31 March 1942:

In the middle it publishes a page of advertisements presented in an original and attractive way. Taking care of even the advertising section of a newspaper to avoid the annoying insistence of a badly presented advertisement is also part of journalistic technique. The newspaper itself is an advertisement.45

Because advertising was also controlled. There were rules about the maximum number of adverts that the media could contain. But what the censors were most interested in was, of course, controlling their content. “Magazines will be reminded of the obligation to submit for censorship all advertisements and publicity of any kind along with the news and ordinary journalists’ articles”.⁴⁶ Or their pictures, in the event, for example, of them verging on what was considered immoral. To illustrate this we have the following official letter sent by the head of Information and Censorship to the national press officer: “I hereby inform you that, despite the repeated warnings made about newspapers and magazines, the advertisement for Nivea Creme appears in some of them, illustrated with photographs and prints that have not been authorized by the censor”.47

Of course, compliance with these and other “guidelines” already mentioned was scrupulously watched over, and when they were breached the response consisted of threats or economic sanctions, coercions over the paper supply and the sudden dismissal of editors.

With respect to books, and as I briefly mentioned at the beginning of this article, the new state always regarded them as enormously valuable weapons for the transmission of ideology.

It is significant that a month after the end of the war, on 2 May 1939, a “book festival” was held in Madrid in which a mountain of books were burnt:

With this book burning we are also contributing to the edifice of the One, Great and Free Spain. We consign to the flames all separatist, liberal and Marxist books; anti-Catholic ones about the Black Legend, those featuring unhealthy romance, outlandishly modernist ones; pessimistic, corny ones, pseudo-scientific cowards, bad texts, vulgar newspapers.48

There was an entire book policy devised by the Ministries of Education and the Interior referring to the organization of libraries, printing and sales:

It is the state’s mission to scrupulously oversee every aspect of book production. The Directorate General of Propaganda is in charge of censoring books with regard to moral purity and political accuracy, but state intervention in such an interesting matter must not be limited to these tasks, especially when the current paper shortage makes it advisable to regulate the book market in order to avoid a situation in which wholly interesting and useful works cannot be advertised for want of that element, while other totally unnecessary ones are deemed suitable for publication.49

Therefore, it was stipulated that publishers and publishing houses were obliged to submit their work plans to the Directorate General of Propaganda for authorization every six months.⁵⁰ Later, by Order of 3 July 1942, a circular was published to inform all Spanish publishers of the works passed, failed or accepted by the Propaganda office, so that they could not allege ignorance of official decisions.

All private printing houses and publishers were subject to the censorship rules and were obliged to toe the line with the victorious regime’s ideas. An example of the situation may be the following text from 1937, “Report on the educational background of Espasa Calpe”, supplied by Alicia Alted:51

In our Madrid file there are letters that prove the high level of patriotic thinking that at all times guided our publishing with regard to culture, the great care we have taken so that publications designed for Teachers and Schools would be clean in their intentions and form, always aiming to elevate the concept and sentiment of what is Spanish. This correspondence likewise demonstrates how governing minorities of a Marxist advance party did not make Espasa Calpe give in to the temptation of easy commercial success, which at times was offered with flattery and at others with diplomatic threats, and always with the manifest desire for the Educational Department to be hugely porous to the personal and doctrinal influence of the minority of teachers who never achieved their aims.

Of course, it could not have been a good time for private publishing houses, who had to gain the trust of the new regime by all possible means in order to be able to subsist. Their output was controlled by the same prior censorship that affected all other publications, but which harmed them financially by hindering one of the sector’s main sources of income: exports to Latin America.

Nor did booksellers escape receiving the appropriate instructions: “It is the unavoidable duty of every Spanish bookseller to display in their shop windows, highly visible and well placed, those national works whose dogmatic basis or political doctrine contributes to the greater dissemination and the most exalted praise of patriotic feats”.52

But the new regime took a special interest in publications for children:

The Vice-secretariat of Popular Education has informed this National Spanish Book Institute, so that it may in turn pass it on to all the publishing houses interested in it, of the firm decision that children’s publications should be governed by thoroughly edifying educational principles, the order being that only story books of acknowledged outstanding educational value must be published, whereby publishers must follow the tendency of looking for stories in Spanish literature or in classical antiquity that are generally based on heroic and moral themes.⁵³

Attention was paid above all to schoolbooks. Thus, in an official letter from the Vice-secretariat of Popular Education, dated 23 November 1944, it states what these works had to contain and, in some cases, how the subjects had to be shown graphically, literally:

a) Early reading and writing books. The examples they give will have to develop religious and patriotic themes, and about the Movement, without fail. The graphic part will correspond to this, and must include the flag of Spain, those of the Movement, and the portraits of the Caudillo and José Antonio. The author will take the children’s ages into account to graduate this measure.

b) Books for religious teaching. The presentation of ecclesiastical censorship will be inexcusable.

c) Books about geography, history and the social sciences. In all of them patriotic feeling will be exalted. Spain’s part in geographical discoveries and its economic future. The definition of Fatherland will be adapted to the current concept.

In the part referring to history books it says:

[…] it is necessary, with the appropriate graduation, for Spanish children to get a clear idea of Spain through books. The presentation of the following points must be included: Christianity, the formation of nationhood, the reign of the Catholic Kings, exalting their work of unity, Charles I and Philip II, the Spanish Empire and its characteristic and spiritual features, the evangelization of America, Spain’s missionary work in the world, the Inquisition, the dismembering of the Empire as the work of Freemasonry, ending with the National Movement, principal events and figures, presenting the life stories of the Caudillo and José Antonio.54

Here we have, therefore, some of the recurring themes of post-war illustration that, together with the desire to set the aesthetic guidelines that we saw when talking about censorship in the Plastic Arts Section, may go some way to explaining the difficult evolution of graphic design in Spain during those years.

The Fuero de los Españoles (Law of the Spanish People), passed by the Law of 17 July 1945, proclaimed Spaniards’ right to express their ideas freely “provided they did not oppose the fundamental principles of the state”. It would be necessary to make an in-depth study of the effect such relative freedom had on Spanish illustrators, but I know for a fact that control was not relaxed until at least the 1960s (1966 to be exact), the moment when Manuel Fraga Iribarne’s Press Law did away with prior censorship., The freedom it introduced was only very relative, however, as publications continued to be subject to seizure and publishing houses to closure.

Like everyone else in Spain, an entire generation of graphic artists suffered censorship that, in the words of Julián Marías, was “oppressive, arbitrary and irresponsible”.55

The Idea of Design: an Ideal of Modernity or a Model of Modernization?¹
Thoughts on the Idea of Design as it was Formulated in Barcelona in the 1960s and 1970s

Anna Calvera

Introductory abstract. This chapter analyses the connection between design as a historical phenomenon, the dynamics of modernity and the processes of modernization, in order to understand to what extent the attribute “modern”, in its different meanings, is a substantial part of the actual concept of design, at least in the way it was disseminated in the twentieth century. This reflection takes as its starting point the desire for a break that was implicit in the notion of design when it was imported and spread to Catalonia in the 1960s and 1970s. It is an important connotation in the meaning of the term that was also present in many other countries to which the Catalan experience is usually compared; furthermore, it is common and shared by the different specialities of design. This desire for change was made very clear in the different names adopted for a practical profession that wanted to be, and knew that it was, new. Thus, by specialities, the changes were: from advertising drawing to graphic design and visual communication – understood in the sense proposed by Swiss design or the International Typographical Style; the appearance of the term “industrial design” to refer to professional activity as opposed to craftsmanship, whether artistic or simply productive; the recognition of textile design as a specific activity; and finally, the adoption of the term “interior design” to replace all kinds of decorators, even though they were called industrial decorators.

Taking it one step further, the article asks how far the phenomenon of design as a professional practice, and the definition of a concept that identified it as such and made it thoroughly accepted, can be explained from a historical perspective that is longer than the period limited to the two generations that make up modern design (or Modernism) in Catalonia. There is therefore an underlying and sometimes too automatic connection between the parallel concepts of design and those of modernity and modernization, with the intention of observing how design has often been a vehicle of expression of the ideal of modernity and a driver of social and cultural modernization processes.

Modern thinkers, modernities, modernisms and modernizations in the historiography of design: hypotheses, tasks and lines of research

Now that it is quite a few years since I thoroughly revised the meaning of the term “design” and the nature of the practices that are typical of it in the context of various “post-” trends, such as postmodern or post-industrial, it may be interesting to go back to some old issues and see where they ended up, especially the ones that so much has been talked about. This means focusing on the kinds of things, issues or concepts that have the bad habit of lasting a long time. They are the ones that have remained on the horizon because they never pass by. Indeed, as they never disappear completely, they have become classic issues and themes. They evolve very slowly and leave a mark around them. It is now some time since the French historian Fernand Braudel spoke of long-lasting historical phenomena. It may perhaps seem surprising to use the adjective “long-lasting” in a field such as the design one, constantly changing and ever attentive to the latest trends, even in the more developed West. And yet it is an attractive hypothesis. It requires observing and analysing cultural expressions, including those to which design wishes to respond, and often does, at the slow rate of evolution of anthropology, making it possible to distance itself from the sociological mix of fashions, trends and lifestyles.

When thinking about design as a cultural expression and an aesthetic practice there is a recurring question, one of those whose consideration hardly ever changes with the passing of the years. It is the question about the conceptual relationship existing between the idea of design and the ideals of modernity and their forms. Moreover, if, as so many historians, critics and analysts assert or refute, design is an essentially modern phenomenon whose history refers exclusively to modernity, then the fact of being modern is part of the very definition of design as a professional practice and a specific discipline. This is one of the premises of this reflection.

However, if the culture of design is still experiencing a period of profound revision, the same is also true for the word “modernity”. It is not my intention to discuss it here, nor do I wish to critique Modernism or revise the neo-modern legitimacy of the twenty-first century. I shall restrict myself to considering the role that design has historically played in the spread of the idea of modernity, bearing in mind that design also was, and still is, an option chosen in favour of a certain model of modernity, the one adopted as a point of reference and a goal to be achieved by the associations of professional designers at home and abroad. Modernity and the spread of deliberately modern ideals through design went through several phases during the twentieth century, many of which greatly determined how culture was shaped in Barcelona and Catalonia. This is why the title of this article is composed of two opposing aspects as a hypothesis for analysis: on one hand, a generic ideal of modernity, which I shall analyse in its various phases, and, on the other, a process of modernization that, in the case of Barcelona, gradually took shape through specific ideas until it was consolidated and became fully known with the arrival of democracy (1976), the industrial rearrangement of Spain (1980s) and its joining the European Union as a full member (1986). The Barcelona Olympic Games (1992) are a very good example of the symbiosis between modern design, the expression of modernity and the degree of modernization achieved in a city at a particular time in its history.2

Now, without more ado, let us ask the first question: are the concepts of design and modernity really so conceptually linked?

Modernizations and modern precedents: modernisms vary according to the language

In the international historiography of design the concept of modernity has always played a key role. Tracing modernity through its expressive models in each region or country has been a very common method among historians because, up to now, they have devoted themselves fundamentally to following how design spread around the world from some central cores. They have thus gradually imposed an idea of design according to which good design is clear evidence of the most universally shared cosmopolitanism. What is more, the sudden appearance of design in a country and its subsequent spread has been a key theoretical pattern for verifying the degree of modernization of everyday life that has been achieved. Indeed, the histories of design in developing countries have very often paid a great deal of attention to the changes undergone by customs and ways of life. These have been considered the normal context in which the profession of designer appeared and a local design culture developed. The existence of some customs clearly identified as modern, because they are defined in comparison to what has happened in developed countries, becomes the criterion upon which to base the birth of design. Seen in perspective, this has been an explanatory pattern much used in constructing local histories of design and in fact this also happened in Barcelona, as we shall see below. It is thus logical for a virtually inseparable connection between the concepts of design and modernity to have been established. Now, however, it is necessary to analyse to what extent this union is real and, if it is, to see how its significance varies in each country or economic region.

The question can also be asked the other way round: what interpretative models or concepts that are characteristic of the global history of design can be adopted without too many changes by local histories, useful therefore for a better understanding, through comparison, of the nature of a particular local situation. The most discussed concepts probably include those associated with modernity, namely the forms of what is modern, of modernity, of modernism and of the processes of modernization. To give an example, due to the particular meaning of the Catalan word Modernisme (referred to a peculiar local Art Nouveau style) in Catalonia and Spain, when comparing the various local or national histories of design with one another, the Catalan case constitutes a very special phenomenon that gives translators and authors a lot of headaches. Internationally, the English term “Modernism” refers to what we, for want of a better word, call the Modern Movement, which refers to a type of architecture and design called modern, emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and consolidated around the world after the Second World War – in fact, it is the style that won the war. The dates clarify things: if Catalan Modernisme begins in about 1870 and ends in 1906 or 1926 (the year when Gaudí died), the English term “Modernism” begins in 1906 – taking as its starting point German proto-rationalism and the founding of the Deutscher Werkbund – and lasts for at least three generations till about 1970.³ It is worth taking a look at the concept of “modern” that Catalan and Spanish Modernistes promoted at the turn of the last century.

We know that, in Spanish, the term Modernismo was used for the first time by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío in the context of the literary debate in the late nineteenth century. Already then the word referred to the desire to be up to date, to be part of the main trend of the most advanced European literary output. However, when the term was adopted in Catalonia by the team of ideologists and writers of the magazine L’Avenç in about 1884, it kept this meaning but it acquired new ones deriving from the nationalist component of local thinking. Opposed to Spanish pessimism and backwardness, on one hand, and to the romantic and nostalgic conservatism of the idea of Catalonia promoted by the Renaixença (cultural rebirth) on the other, the first Modernistes, those who were mostly progressives and very optimistic, wished to modernize the country by elevating its cultural level. They understood it in terms of bringing it up to date: there was an urgent need to place the country’s artistic creations on the same level as what was happening in the rest of Europe at that time. Perhaps because of this, Catalan Modernisme had two quite different sides to it: incorporating as influences all the foreign trends that seemed to be the most advanced, and at the same time searching for a characteristic autochthonous national past on which to base the renewal of styles and ways. So, on one hand, the first Modernistes were Wagnerians, philo-anarchists, lovers of Japanese style and followers of Zola and Nietzsche, but they also studied Catalan Gothic and Aragonese Mudéjar in search of a national architecture or designing a Gothic alphabet that had to be redesigned to cast it as a font suitable for reprinting bibliophile versions of the classics. It is a search that was ahead of its time in the specific area of graphic design and the renewal of the means of production in the sector. Without going into detail, I would merely like to retrieve from the memory of Modernisme this first meaning of the term, according to which being modern means being cultured and being up to date with everything to do with culture, and very especially with everything going on in the world of culture in other countries. Modernisme in Catalonia signified hence an important step towards an idea of modernity linked to the cosmopolitan ideal.

One last thing: in the most spectacular phase of Catalan Modernisme, when it already consisted basically of an ornamental style practised mostly by decorators and by craftsmen very well aware of the artistic value of their creations, whether they were manufactured industrially – as in the case of so many ceramic pieces for building, wallpapers and fabrics for the home – or they were single items destined for mantelpieces, it is the objects, rather than the plastic arts and artistic tastes, that tell us that an authentic modernization of customs was taking place. Those happy consumers and users of objects in the new style (essentially Art Nouveau like) would soon be part of a second process of modernization of customs, which arrived around the time of the First World War and consisted of the appearance of mass culture in all its different forms: the press, the beach, sports, travelling for pleasure. The scientific excursions of the nineteenth-century positivists were a thing of the past. This was also when cocktails, skirts just below the knee, popular music – first jazz, then the tango – and entertainment for the masses arrived. However, in this second phase of modernization, the meanings of the terms “modern” and “modernista” had changed radically: when they were used to refer to the Modernista intellectuals of the previous generation, they were synonymous with decadent and eccentric; when applied to new modern-style things, they now meant being fashionable, something quite different from the original meaning of the word “modernista” as being culturally up to date. Being fashionable did not require any intellectual effort or being cultured: one only had to be au fait with what was appearing in the press.⁴

If such revealing changes of meaning are observed in Catalonia, modernity takes on even more faces if we consider what was happening elsewhere. Ever since the first meeting of the ICDHS,⁵ authors from Cuba and other parts of Latin America have introduced new elements to the debate. Lucila Fernández has clearly shown several times to what extent in Cuba the idea of modernity was no more than a generic cultural and highbrow ideal that had been imported via different phases of modernization imposed at certain times in the island’s history. Following a Cuban anthropologist, she defined modernizations as moments of sudden transformation of society and its ways of life, system of values included, that arrived and were adopted all at once without having had time to get acclimatized – technically speaking, without undergoing a process of transculturation.⁶ She was explaining the idea of design that was disseminated in Cuba after the Revolution (early 1960s). She ended by concluding that design was at once a product and a vehicle of these imposed processes of modernization. It was quite clear to what extent design was also an imported idea that arrived via the influence exerted by different countries in the centre considered reference models. Therefore, unlike modernity, modernizations can perfectly well be considered as breaks and changes of course in the historical development of a society seen as a whole.

From this perspective, both the ideal of modernity and the idea of design clearly show that, in a particular society, it may perfectly well become a profound change in the way of thinking without this affecting or having important consequences for the region’s productive system; that the wish for design may develop easily, and be imposed as a cultural phenomenon, in objects, visual communications and graphics – in theory and in practice – without the existence of a developed industrial system that historians have traditionally considered the natural environment in which design emerges. As I have said before in other articles, by being imported or developed as a factor of modernization, this is another historic origin of design in which it is the consumers’ demand or the designers’ determined wish to design that acts as the vehicle of possible change. When this occurs, industry and its dynamics appear on the scene as either a relatively distant point of reference, a goal to achieve, or a generic frame of reference.

The phenomenon described, modernization in the sphere of culture and customs, also explains why sometimes the arrival and development of design does not follow the patterns foreseen by comparison with what has happened elsewhere. Alpay and Ozlem Er clearly showed this when discussing the case of Turkey.

From this perspective, the working hypothesis now becomes another one: the idea of design that spread all over the world during the years following the Second World War was not so much linked to industrial development as to the desire for economic development and the transformation of society, which adopted the reference of design as a means by which to reaffirm and express the desire for progress.⁷ In this respect, although the notion of design has been defined mostly as a consequence of processes of industrialization similar to the English one, the fact that industry developed in a peculiar way in many more or less peripheral countries suggests that the sudden appearance of an indigenous design culture may actually be the result of a change of thinking. This is what is suggested by the idea of modernity; or by a longing for modernity, which is what makes it an ideal.

The hypothesis makes it possible to understand why some products and some visual languages have been accepted so quickly all over the world, regardless of the degree of economic and productive development reached. The best examples are technological developments, as Jonathan M. Woodham showed: from the Sony Walkman in the seventies to personal computers, the Internet and mobile phones.⁸ Modernizations can therefore be seen as civilizing processes. Then the models of modernity become very effective tools for understanding the variety of adoption processes that design has known as an activity and which are the basis of the distinct nature of its forms of expression. In Italy it is the models of modernity that do not depend on English-style processes of industrialization that have served to demonstrate the most characteristic traits of its specific way of creating design: talking about incomplete modernity, Andrea Branzi listed the different Italian ways of understanding the city throughout history, clearly referring to civilizing processes.9

Moreover, when doubt has been cast on modern historiography as a result of the irruption of postmodernity, many historians look back and denounce the monolithic nature of so much research into the history of design, now seen as an ideological programme of reconstruction and validation of Modernism (in reference to the period of history as defined in English).¹⁰ It is the historiographical model that Pevsner and Gropius consolidated when presenting the Bauhaus. Parallel to the development of the philosophical debate on the adventure of postmodernity, the historiographical concept of “Modernity” that defines a specific period of history was gradually extended to cover the broad arc of time called Modern and Late Modern. It began in about 1750, as did the Industrial Revolution in England, and it was the period of proto-industrialization in Catalonia. In this way, the arc of modernity almost coincides with the canonical history of design.¹¹ It may be no more than a sign, but a historical coincidence as clear as this one explains why design has so often been considered a phenomenon and an expression of modernity.

I should add that here we have the canonical concept of design again, the same one that was previously placed under suspicion: it is the idea according to which design is merely the natural result of the evolution experienced by systems of production on their path towards industrialization through the division of labour. However, in order to change productive systems, the technological conditions and the productive capacity of supply are just as important as the requirements of demand. Therefore, a change of mentality can also have important effects because it conditions demand and informs on its requirements.

Changing the context entirely now, it is worth taking a look at the end of the story of modernity and, consequently, of the “modern” design that developed along with it. It is probably at the end of modernity as a historical period when the real relationships between design as a specific professional practice and the socio-cultural context in which it developed can best be seen. It must be said that, like any ending, this one is also hard to pin down. The moment of transition is very recent and this may be why it is so difficult to establish a date. While it is easy to find overlaps between the beginnings of design and those of modernity, this is not the case at the end of the period: what has ended is a certain way of understanding design. Indeed, design as a consolidated profession and as an advanced cultural expression is also part – and a very important ingredient – of the current super-modernity or ultra-modernity, just as it was of postmodernity (do you remember the debate about chairs that took place throughout the 1980s on the pages of magazines and at furniture shows?). Furthermore, many countries have begun to create design in the wish to be modern and to join in the process of modernity just when, having gone economically global, it is already struggling in the most developed Western countries. The cases of Southeast Asia and Korea are paradigmatic examples.

In the developed West – which has lost much of its industrial fabric due to processes of relocation, among many other things – the modernity that postmodernity put an end to lasted until about 1970. Or would it be better to come straight out and say 1968, and then the period ends in truly spectacular fashion in Paris in May? Or should we remember what Cirici Pellicer said and make 1966 the year when modernity ended, at least in the case of Barcelona?¹² It is worth noting that, as always, before these dates, various clues were pointing to the fact that something very profound was changing, but it is sometimes a good idea to make certain events paradigmatic and establish them as milestones to mark historic changes. They are tricks of historiography, as Renato De Fusco called them.¹³ It may be useful to focus on these developments and discuss their historical significance.

1968 Almost everyone is very clear about the historical significance of May 1968, whether in Paris, Germany or California, although the latter was a sociological and cultural signification rather than a political one. Among many other things, 1968 shows how far, popularly speaking at least, the model of ideal modernity had changed and how critical people were of the ideals that had been established up to then, basically the model of economic development based on industrial growth and the American way of life, so well portrayed by Josep Renau in his post-war photomontages, a lifestyle so clearly condemned by French youngsters with the saying metro, boulot, dodo (metro, work, sleep). In the small history of design, 1968 is also a significant year because it was then when the HfG in Ulm closed, and with it the reference model of the theorization of the most advanced design in the world since the war. Everybody was thus beginning to find white products too white. It was also in 1968 when Wolfgang Weinhart produced his small typographical revolution at the School of Basel by rejecting out of hand the legacy of the Neue Graphik and, therefore, the expression of Modernism in graphic design: after him the dictatorship of the sans-serif ended and it was possible to appreciate – and use! – Roman letters again.

1966 In Catalonia, and probably for the rest of Spain too, this was the year in which the change that had been announced became clear for the first time and burst onto the scene of cultural debate. In 1967 the Beatles released their LP Sgt. Pepper’s, the debate about the consumer society began, and Team X had for some time been declaring architectural Modernism, rationalism as a method, and functionalism as an approach, to be failures. In short, they considered them to be an idea of architecture and urban planning that was “poor in spirit”. For its part, Pop Art was also starting to get boring, although its corrosive side had not yet been incorporated, and Conceptual Art was setting out on a new path forwards via the avant-garde, probably the last one there has been. The crisis of 1966, and here I quote Cirici, made it clear that a new generation of professionals had arrived, people dissatisfied with the consumer society and who no longer believed in economic development or industrialization as the path of progress. The consumer society and the industrial system were seen as the most patent forces of conservative reaction. Cirici spoke above all of the trends in architecture, but, given the subsequent development of graphic and industrial design, it goes without saying that he was completely right. The professional careers of furniture and product designers, like Carles Riart and Santi Roqueta, always in “alternative” businesses producing small series and single pieces that revived artisanal wisdom, more than demonstrate this. In the case of graphic design, criticism of the system marked a change for many professionals. A large number of them abandoned advertising, which was suspected of collaborating with the system, and devoted themselves almost entirely to the press and editorial design. They also revised popular but modern graphic traditions, from before the war, to use them as alternative sources of inspiration to Modernism or the avant-garde plastic arts.¹⁴

1971 Many things happened this year, but none as spectacular as what had gone before. Seen in hindsight, however, it may be considered the moment when the alternative cultural movements to Modernism appear consolidated and fully formed: Susan Sontag had theorized about camp and retro (the style of grandma’s house), trends analysed well by Rubert de Ventós in his Theory of Sensitivity (1968). Alternative businesses and products were welcomed, like the neo-Victorian fabrics of Laura Ashley or, in Catalonia, the neo-Modernisme or neo-Liberty – to give it its international name – spread by the gauche divine at Bocaccio. The appearance of the book Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, hit the nail on the head for the first time by incorporating the lessons of Pop Art into architecture d’auteur. Tomàs Maldonado published La speranza progettuale, a proposal that, while on one hand it clearly shows the failure of Ulm, on the other it sets forth a programme for the future in which design and its different specialities continue to be seen as routes to modernization and the fulfilment of a project, the modern one, that is seen as unfinished and deviating from the true path: it was an initial declaration of intent by modern thinkers endlessly unhappy with modernity since the days of Marx. The famous book by Victor Papanek about designers’ social responsibility (Designing for a Real World) also appeared. Although Papanek maintained the standpoint of the USA professional with a colonialist mentality, he also accused designers of being responsible for the general poverty of so many people around the world, even the richest countries, and the scant comfort existing in most contemporary cities. From our point of view, perceiving as the world has not improved since then, that it is increasingly ugly everywhere, analysing the reasons for the prevailing ugliness has once again become a topical issue, more or less as it was in the mid nineteenth century, when design became aware of its historic mission, that of being responsible for the aesthetic quality of everything that was produced industrially.15

In Spain, 1971 was the year when the ICSID congress was held on Ibiza. The island was starting to be an international hippy paradise and a local avant-garde had built up around the architects and modern artists living there. The Ibiza ICSID has gone down in history as an academically chaotic congress, but at the same time one of the most interesting on the whole, the only one everybody remembers with a certain nostalgia: the Instant City, living on the beach, Ponsetí’s balloons, Muntadas’s coloured dinners.¹⁶ One or two years later, this small local avant-garde could often be seen in the neighbourhoods of La Ribera in Barcelona, El Carme in Valencia and Malasaña in Madrid, full of transvestites, progressive rock musicians, conceptual artists and comic artists.

It is obvious that those years, 1966 to 1971, were times of transition and change. For the history of design, they are strictly considered the end of a period, that of Modernism and its expressive language. This also has repercussions for the historiography and so, from this perspective, along with the casting of doubt on the canonical idea of design disseminated and promoted internationally by the ICSID, design historians have begun to think more and more intensely that their mission is no longer, as it once was, to monitor the introduction of design through the incorporation of the implicit models of modernity established as a point of reference by post-war Modernism and consolidated by the ICSID. On the contrary, now the aim is to find interpretative patterns flexible enough to understand processes that do not correspond to the habitual model and might even be opposed to it. Perhaps what has to be highlighted now is the fact that it was during the last historical period of modernity, namely, during the process of consolidation and dissemination of Modernism, when design spread all over the world, Spain included. Therefore, the relationship between design and modernity now takes a completely different form. In fact, the idea of design adopted during the years following the Second World War in many regions becomes a historical phenomenon in itself. It is an idea of design that, turned into a formal model and also a style, that of good design defined according to a criterion and an implicit level of quality, also contained a concept of modernity based on confidence in economic development according to the model of industrialization as a guarantee of social progress and cultural advancement. It was, logically, a teleological concept in which the future, besides being achievable, always seemed better. This is why the existence of design in accordance with the model imported from more developed countries very often represented – and this is how it was regarded by many designers and consumers – a sign of modernity. It was also seen as a factor from which a process of modernization could be promoted socially. What I find significant, moreover, is to what extent a process of modernization of this kind signified imposing a violent, profound break with local productive traditions, but also with the customs and the ways of life now regarded as antiquated and outmoded. And so, in many countries design very often arrived as a factor causing a rupture, completely at odds with the most recent past on which its innovative potential had been based. As I see it this was the case with Catalonia, where the desire for a break with the past, with the political scene and with the economic situation was clear right from the start – it is useful here to remember that one of the many meanings of the R adopted by Grup R, the group of architects formed in 1951, was Renewal. The concepts of design and modernity here find something else in common: both are, and set out to be, a radical renewal, almost a revolution, to make it possible to leave the past behind. To know which direction this break took, we now have to go to the moment in history when design arrived in the country as a self-aware profession.

ADI FAD (1960), ADG FAD (1961), BCD (1973), ADP and CODIG (1978).

The institutionalization of a profession that is modern by definition

In this general context, in Barcelona too the official history of design is basically the story of the process by which the notion of design was discovered and imported, a professional activity that was already aware of its specificity and which had to be introduced to the labour market. In order to achieve this, the people working in it became organized and set about institutionalizing the profession. This story, which can be considered the third and definitive origin of design, explains above all how design gradually acquired a certain degree of popularity by fighting, firstly, against the industrialists and businessmen who had not understood what design could do for them. Secondly, by fighting against the cultural policies of the Franco regime in order to be able to rejoin the general process of the international avant-garde. And finally, by fighting against the socio-economic models of development of the Western economy, which Spain had joined after the failure of the Falangist and Francoist policy of autarky, because the economic measures taken by the Opus Dei ministers (1957). As has been said many times, this is a story that only explains part of the process, but it is the one that has been established as the official story, that of design pioneers. The Barcelona version is not a particularly original story; indeed, it coincides word for word with the one that Bonsiepe told for the countries of the Southern Cone and which Jonathan M. Woodham has established as a model of reference through comparison with the English experience (1997). The path taken by this professional self-awareness usually ends with the opening of a Design Council after the foundation of professional associations and the establishment of prizes to consolidate and display examples of good design in the press. They are the ones that have to be considered models of reference for the professionals by demonstrating the advantages that they entail for industrialists. The Catalan case is well enough known to be repeated once again: conferences and debates in the 1950s; the formation of ADI FAD in 1960 and of ADG FAD in 1961; the foundation of the first school of design, Elisava, in 1961;¹⁷ the introduction of the Delta awards in 1961 and the Laus in 1964, which were consolidated in 1970. Finally, the foundation of the BCD, the Barcelona Design Centre, in 1972 and the appearance of other professional associations in 1978, when the abolition of the Francoist “vertical” trade union made it possible to create professional associations all over Spain.

One original detail, however: unlike what happened in other countries – Italy, for example – in Catalonia the respective institutionalizations of graphic design (ADG) and industrial design (ADI) took place at the same time, and this has led to the notion of design being consolidated as a single discipline with different specialities.¹⁸ Perhaps the great unresolved matter has always been the existence of publications to publicize the work of the professionals of the time, despite the many attempts that have been made in this respect: the history of the FAD is full of books produced with a founding wish. In 1964 the first graphic artists’ yearbook/directory by the ADG FAD saw the light (Publicity in Spain), and in 1965 attempts were made to publish a journal, Azimut, an adventure that got no further than a single issue and a folder of prints called 4 assaigs gràfics (4 graphic essays). It is the Gustavo Gili publishing house, with a good translations policy, that has met the need for printed materials and has placed at the disposal of Spanish-speaking designers a notable collection of fundamental texts about design. This, together with the importation of the major journals by the company Comercial Atheneum, later Index Book, has enabled them to be up to date with what is happening in design culture around the world. Since then, as the profession has become consolidated and new generations have joined it, every new trend has tried to bring out a specific publication. In the renewed journal CAU, published by the Architects Assistants’ Bar Association of Catalonia, the Design Industry found an important medium of publicity, above all in the Pop Art period (that is, after the above-mentioned crisis of 1966), of which it became a sort of mouthpiece, even visually and graphically. In the 1970s, when the task was still pedagogical, designers such as Jordi Mañà, Modest Massides and Pepe Calvo were explaining design on the pages of Hogares Modernos. For the experiments of the 1980s, after the Disueño show in 1977 –an event that deserves further and urgent research to capture the spirit of design in the eighties in Barcelona and other areas of Spain –. During the 1980s, the journals Dediseño, first, and Ardi, later, were the main communication outlets. Whereas up to then people had always preferred to look towards Germany and Switzerland, from this point onwards Italy became the main point of reference, even in the layout of the journals themselves. On Diseño is a special case, but not as significant as it may seem because it very soon turned into an architectural journal in which design was relegated to secondary status, a matter of finishes. Perhaps it is Experimenta, published in Madrid (and since the demise of Ardi) that has managed to consolidate a Spanish design culture. In the 1990s a rethink of design began in the context of the information and knowledge society, and that brought with it very new and different problems.

Design needs a rethink: modernity no longer depends on industry …

What definition of design was imported to Barcelona in the mid 1950s? It has been said many times that it was fundamentally the idea of design that the Italians had come up with in the post-war years after the debate between the journals Domus and Casabella in the founding period of Modernism. It was a consequence of modern architecture, its logical complement in the context of the building understood as a unitary whole. Utensils and electrical appliances were still left out of the model, however. Their suitability was only understood when HfG Ulm and, through it, the legacy of the Bauhaus reappeared on the horizon. This can clearly be seen in the exhibitions organized by Grup R, in which furniture played an increasingly large part in them. In any case, at the first Delta awards ceremony design’s specific sphere of action was well defined thanks to Gabriel Lluelles and his hand blender (Minipimer), Miguel Milá’s TMC lamp, Marquina’s oil and vinegar cruet stand, and Manuel Pontús’s fountain pen.¹⁹ At the founding moment, though, perhaps the most outstanding thing, which is hardly ever talked about, was the debate that took place at the ADI over the name of the profession. As he himself told me, Santiago Pey, a philologist besides being an industrial designer, justified the appropriateness and demonstrated the philological correctness of the words disseny in Catalan and diseño in Spanish because they made it possible to put the emphasis on the evolving nature of the project. However, in the theorization of design in Catalonia the name of Alexandre Cirici became increasingly important, far more so than the architects, when he considered the subject we are looking at here, the model of modernity implicit in the concept of design. In fact, it was he who suggested talking about “interior design” to once and for all move beyond the terms “decoration” and “advertising decoration” and he thus clearly signalled the modernization represented by accepting the concept of “design”. FAD quickly agreed to it. As for graphic design, after the contributions of the graphic artists themselves in favour of – as Amand Domènech always said – the elevation of the profession, the key figure was soon to be Joan Perucho in his work as a critic. It is no surprise at all that the two critics, Cirici and Perucho, spent the following decade discussing art and its social function, the artist and his/her political commitment, and popular art and new expressions of it in developed industrialized societies, but this is an episode that ought to be analysed from the perspective of the history of Art Criticism and its leading figures.20

In effect, when one talks about design in Catalonia, an article by Cirici published in 1946 in the clandestine journal Ariel is mentioned as a founding text. In it he claimed that the day would come when a record player or any other utilitarian device might be considered a work of art. Later, either at the FAD or as the inspiration for the Elisava and Eina schools of design, Cirici made a determined commitment to the Bauhaus model when organizing the teaching of design in Catalonia. The issues are well known: the presence of the avant-garde as a creative option and as plastic language, for both the arts and design; functionalism as a working method and as a way of making professionals feel responsible for their environment; the designer’s connections with industry as the only possible path towards modernization and the country’s economic development, and so on. However, something was already beginning to go wrong: advertising was no longer considered a cultural expression of the new times, as it had been in the days of Kurt Schwitters, or of Sebastià Gasch in his battle against local Noucentisme art and design survival in the postwar. Mass culture was starting to look very different to the way it had done before the war.

Of all Cirici’s work as a journalist, perhaps it is the above-mentioned article in Serra d’Or in 1977 in which he reviewed the significance of Catalan design is the most substantial one. He showed that the reference points of modernity had changed and he proposed a rethink on issues that introduced a certain degree of distrust in the monolithic interpretation of Catalan design. He cast doubt on the trust that so many designers placed in design’s inherent desire for progress and its indisputable capability to modernize. Cirici thus added his voice to the group of critics that emerged as a result of the crisis of 1966 that he himself so well identified and outlined in this same text. Let us look at his argument.21

The result of the abovementioned founding debate was that design, both in Barcelona and all over Spain, began to refer very clearly to the activity of making objects and graphic communications using materials and technical processes in the context of an economically developed industrial society, modern with regard to its aesthetic preferences and wealthy enough to be resolutely consumerist. Therefore, thinking about modernity in civilizing terms may help to explain why the concept of design ceased to be associated only with the productive structure and became an activity that was also to play a cultural and political role in the general transformation of society. Indeed, it is a widely accepted idea that Catalan design implicitly possessed a desire to fight the Franco regime so that it could help to culturally and intellectually improve the people’s everyday lives. In accordance with the modern project of aesthetics, it was thought that by improving everyday objects aesthetically it would be possible to combat the degradation and the impoverishment of Spanish society caused by the political situation and by the subordination of growth to the most unfettered economic interests in the period of speculation and the accumulation of capital. The process had two quite distinct phases. Firstly, design had to direct and take part in industrial and technological development and thus overcome the rural outlook of the most conservative part of Spain. Formulated in these terms, this concept is not all that different to the social and political debates that took place throughout the nineteenth century, when the discussion was about the industrial arts and how to improve them. The problem was still there after the Civil War. In the post-war years, though, there was a desire to break with that poor and violent past in order to make a fresh start on new foundations in a truly modern adventure. In the second phase, design had to put itself forward as an alternative to the vulgar consumerism that spread in the period of desarrollismo (development policy) through the media, football, television and the architecture of speculative consumption, “the little flat in a block” in cities that were growing haphazardly.

However, without renouncing or discussing these basic ideas, which, moreover, were right, Cirici also showed that, despite everything, during these two phases there was also a certain overlap of interests between the ideas of the cultural avant-garde formed around design in Catalonia and those of the political regime that governed the country from Madrid. Cirici said that when design was seen as a means of strengthening industrial development and technological innovation, the Francoist government, once autarky had failed, also pursued the industrial development of the most backward parts of the country. This corresponds to the regime’s period of stabilization, just before the economic plan in fact called the “Stabilization Plan” was drafted. We now know that important initiatives to promote industrial design came from the ministries in the 1950s. Furthermore, Cirici continues, from the 1960s onwards, industrial design, given the emphasis it placed on the design of products, came to coincide with – and in some ways it was also quite a suitable response to – the development plans promoted by the Opus Dei government drafted in that same period. As you can see, Cirici was not so much making an ideological criticism (or self-criticism), he was rather thinking out loud about the different possible ideals of modernity and the corresponding imaginaries. With this he was suggesting that perhaps during Modernism there were not so many models of modernity and therefore the modernization that had to be undertaken, despite the profound disagreement that existed with regard to the way of achieving it and proceeding with it, was not as different as it might have seemed through political reflection. Only one profound difference of opinion emerged between what the designers were after and what the Establishment wanted after the crisis of 1966. From then on two opposing models of modernity, and of civilization too, did confront one another: in short, two completely different ideals of the future. And, what is more important, together with the models of modernity, two clearly distinct types and ideas of design also appeared. The same thing was happening in other countries, especially in Germany. In fact it was in this period when designers were able to begin to make their own critique of modernity as a technical issue within the profession. It was a result of the many and varied trends existing within the profession, which no longer cast doubt on a professional activity or a discipline, but which merely reflected the many possible options that could be chosen in accordance with designers’ ideological, or ethical, standpoints as people. It is worth taking a closer look at this. Essentially, the crisis of 1966, on the threshold of post-modern awareness, completely called into question the industry’s progressive view. As we saw above, this had a radical effect on the basic essence of design: if design was the natural product of industrialization, then it lost all chance of being a factor of progress and innovation. It remained associated with the conservation and consolidation of the industrial system and it thus became a conservative and reactionary activity that served only the survival of the system. To put it in the Marxist terms also habitual in Barcelona in the 1960s and 1970s, design was contributing to the fetishization of merchandise via its incorporated added value. Whether as use value, an aesthetic improvement or a symbolic capability, design served the interests of the dominant economic system. Some books made this quite clear. In 1973 Gert Selle showed that good design, that is, the Gute Form promoted in Ulm, had only been a key factor in the German economic miracle in the period of post-war rebuilding. He based his analysis on Haug’s theories on the aesthetics of merchandise that were going in a similar direction. Therefore, the professional consolidation of design, as it found its natural place in the productive process of businesses, gradually ceased to be an ideal of renewal and rupture and became one of the forces of production. If this was happening with product design or industrial design, the same thing was true in the world of graphic design with the dialogue/confrontation between graphic design and advertising, the latter being in league with the mass media.

Logically, design had to reconsider its view of itself and of its ability to progress if it wished to continue playing a civilizing role and exercising cultural action. Later, as postmodernity was becoming consolidated new trends in design began appearing. Some corresponded to other ideals of progress, others simply incorporated innovative ideas and hypothesized scenarios of progress; others showed other ways of working and living through the practice of design. In the process, perhaps the most significant detail is the fact that a profound break occurred between the experience of modernity and the professional reality of design: along with the reference point of good design as the only model of technological and aesthetic quality, the only form of modernity implicit in it also disappeared and so both concepts became divorced. If modernity corresponds to a historical period, modernization was expressed though a type of design that in turn became a style. Each of them has followed its own process, connected, yes, but separate and above all far more technical in the case of design. In fact, the possible renewals and innovations are now an exclusive matter of design. They can only be explained, stated and proved within the discipline and always with their own theoretical and conceptual tools. However, for design and its culture, this is the discourse of normalization, of the normality typical of advanced societies that face new issues in a quite different historical context.

We could go on talking at length about other factors that relate the experience of design to the ideals of modernity in the different periods; we could also talk about the many aspects that go to make the notion of design according to how it was shaped over time. Thus, for example, the consideration of its relationship with the arts, so often troubled, or the existence of a constant desire to innovate, or the validity of the avant-garde attitude and its current significance, are things that could warrant us giving further consideration to design, a concept that is so polysemic and which changes with the times: the ideal of committed art, the view of design as the popular art of the period, an old conceptual problem experienced quite dramatically by many creators throughout the arc of modernity. It would also be necessary to tackle design’s troubled relationship with the mass media and the controversial culture of the image, but all this would lead us to talk about that moment of crisis, so particular, that the irruption of postmodernity is often thought to be. However, as it is “post”, we have strayed from the original question: design and modernity.

One last thought. Nowadays, now that we know we are living in a different time, some important questions have been asked, one of which is precisely the aesthetic status that design has acquired after its brief history as a self-aware discipline. A recurring theme in the current aesthetic debate is that of the aestheticization of everyday life. There are still only two reactions to this phenomenon: those who feel apocalyptic and those who feel integrated using the old formula of Umberto Eco. For someone like me, halfway between two periods, and who has always liked the importance for the modern project of both the aesthetic dimension of things and the aesthetic experience in the training of people, I very much approve of the aestheticization of everyday life and I consider it to be the logical result of the advancement and the introduction of the practices of design in today’s urban society. I even find it a desirable phenomenon, on the understanding that aesthetics continue to correspond to what in the eighteenth century was defined as one of the most human faculties and skills, one of the factors that could do most for the general march of civilization and humanization of cultures. I know that behind this phenomenon of everyday aestheticization there also lies hidden a certain abandonment of the axiological component of aesthetics – as I said before, the world is still quite ugly. However, if it is design’s job if it still is a cultural phenomenon, to continue taking care of the appearance of this everyday nature, we need not lose hope. We have to let it work calmly and respectfully, as this way it will finally be able to propose the veritable terms of aesthetics when it takes care of things down here. To paraphrase Cirici in 1946, there will come a day when record players – or the devices used to listen to music – will no longer need to be a work of art in order to fulfil their aesthetic function in society.

ANNA CALVERA

Barcelona, December 2015

The Photographs of Xavier Miserachs: Constructing the Image of Barcelona¹

Maria Dolors Tapias

Barcelona began life on a hill, Mons Taber. Now the hill can no longer be seen. The fields, the streams, the marshes, the reed beds, the paths and the coppices have all disappeared.

On top of this landscape man built, with his own hands, another landscape. The city that began by dividing the ground into square plots now divides the air into squares. The city organizes life and death in immense sets of shelves.

Josep M. Espinàs, Barcelona, Black and White (1964)

In the early 1960s, the Barcelona photographer Xavier Miserachs produced an emblematic photo-essay on Barcelona at a time when the city was immersed in great urban and social changes, caused by the deindustrialization of the town centre, due to the need to cover a more extensive urban area and make room for the massive arrival of migrants, as well as the new policy of opening up to tourism. In 1960 Barcelona was growing at a dramatic rate. The socio-political conditions of the moment meant that people from underdeveloped regions of Spain found themselves forced to move, and the country’s more developed large cities found themselves in turn obliged to take them in. For its part, the city turned its back on this situation, unwilling to accept it.

The new Barcelona, the one we know today, began life in the mid 1950s with the reclassification of land resulting from the process of alienation of industrial land, which introduced the urgent need to “demolish and build”. The development policy that has made Barcelona’s town planning paradigmatic was first prefigured in the Regional Plan of 1953, an initial attempt to plan the city of Barcelona, which put forward the need to cover a larger area than the strictly municipal, the revision of which in 1964 gave rise to the Metropolitan Area Master Plan² approved in 1968. The changes introduced in this period and their principal actors subsequently gave rise to what is known today as the “Barcelona model”.

In 1960 the transformation that the city was about to undergo was still in the air. In this context, Xavier Miserachs prepared his photographic project, which was published in the book entitled Barcelona, blanco y negro (Barcelona, Black and White). The novelty of this work lay in the fact that it showed up the urban, social and cultural transformations in the city at that time. It was not a conventional essay; it presented a dynamic city in which the citizens and their activities became the core subject of the photo-essay. It would seem that Miserachs sensed the city’s future and showed for the first time a globalized city that integrated the periphery and the marginal neighbourhoods, to which he paid as much or more attention than to the emblematic and monumental areas of the city. In this way, he recreated a set of urban images in which the characteristics typical of the megacities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are noted. Hence the importance of the symbols that he shows us, as through them the complex panorama that was to determine the city’s future can be synthetically detected.

The book, published by Aymà, was an editorial challenge due both to its square shape and the interior page layout, in which the big pictures, bleeding off the page, without margins and inserts, side by side or on their own, seemed to expand the limits of the book. An effort was made to maintain the photographic finish typical of Miserachs, using the photogravure technique so that the grain of the emulsion and the high contrast of the developing would be kept as much as possible. Special importance was also given to the visual route of the images.

At the height of General Franco’s dictatorship, with the regime well established politically, the social reality of the city and the whole country was to say the least harsh. The regime controlled the social media, and politically committed photographers found it very hard to show their point of view of current events.

The aim of this text is to present the ideas and trends that were implicit in the construction of Miserachs’ photo-essay, something that will enable us to better observe and analyse the selected photographs. However, to understand how this book came into being, it is important first to learn about its author’s career as a photographer.

Xavier Miserachs (1937-1998) was a photographer from Barcelona who started out in amateur photography in 1950, when he was 13 years old, and at the age of 15 he joined the Agrupación Fotográfica de Cataluña. His first photographs were clearly associated with subjective photography, on themes justified by abstraction and the composition. The desire to explore and get to know new ways of creating, together with his concerns about the society of the day, made the photographic report his ideal medium of expression, so he decided to take pictures of the street and everything that happened in it as he walked around with his camera hanging round his neck.

However, before going into photographic reporting, in 1960, when he was just 23, Miserachs decided to set up his own studio together with his friend and fellow photographer Oriol Maspons. They were both interested in the professionalism inherent in fashion and advertising photography, and so they went to Paris in order to contact the photographers who were already working in the medium. Among others, they met William Klein.

Miserachs was impressed by the style and the diversity of Klein’s work. Essentially, he was interested in his books New York and Rome, because of the blurred and out-of-focus photographs and the way he approached people who were walking around the city with his wide-angle lens. Another thing he admired was the layout of the photographs bleeding off the pages of those books. He was also interested in the superb exquisiteness of his fashion shots for Vogue magazine, his cover designs for the Italian magazine Domus, the large boxes with typographical trials, his film projects and the project for a new book, Moscow.

The journey turned out to be crucial, as it gave them the necessary courage to set out on a new path and give a new direction to the profession they had just embarked upon. New York became the book of reference for Miserachs, so much so that when he was taking the photographs for his project Barcelona, Black and White, he put into practice the technical resources that he had learned from Klein. Miserachs’ great wish was to be able to use “the world” as his studio.

A look at the period

Spanish photography was not too far removed from what was going on in the rest of Europe. In the 1950s young photographers had rebelled against the traditional photographic associations and against the routine of shows, given over to conservative, pictorial photography. For their part, Spanish photographers, restless due to the social and professional period that Spain was going through, were longing to get to know and use the trends that were then in vogue in Europe and the United States. American influences generally arrived via publications; on the other hand, with nearby countries such as France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland direct contact was made between local and international photographers and groups. The debate about photography was established among three main currents disseminated in different exhibitions: subjective photography advocated in Germany; the effects resulting from the exhibition The Family of Man, presented in New York and which travelled all over the world, and Italian neorealism. It is worth taking a very brief look at these movements and events that influenced the photography of Barcelona and Spain in that period.

Subjective photography

Subjective photography was a German movement championed by Professor Otto Steinert, who put on three major exhibitions: Staatliche Schule für Kunst und Handwerk (Sarrebruck, 1951), Subjektive Fotografie 1 (Brüder Auer Verlag, 1952) and Subjektive Fotografie 2 (Brüder Auer Verlag, 1965). It brought together people associated with such diverse fields of photography as Dadaism, abstraction and reportage. It was presented above all as an exaltation of each individual creator’s free will. Its philosophical environment was existentialism, which insisted on the radical freedom of the human being. But this freedom is subject to conditions, those imposed by photographic technology, in fact. As had been the case with Neue Sachlichkeit in pre-war Germany and partly with the American Group f/64, subjective photography wished to base itself exclusively on the purity of the medium. Creativity could no longer be justified by extra-photographic aspects, as it had been by the pictorialists at the turn of the century; it was now based on the in-depth study of the materials, as occurred in contemporary abstract painting and Informalism.

In a text written in 1955 for the exhibition Subjektive Fotografie 2, Steinert mentioned that photography had provided the structural feeling of things. In the same text he based the limits of photographic objectivity on the essential elements of creation in this medium. These are: “the choice of the subject (or motif) and the act of isolating it from nature (framing); the view in photographic perspective; the view within photo-optical representation; the transposition of the scale of photographic tones, and the isolation of temporariness due to photographic exposure”.3

The exhibition The Family of Man

In 1955, the MoMA in New York promoted an international campaign with the photography exhibition The Family of Man, principally interested in sending a message to the world, using the subtleties of personal sensibility. This was the initial premise of Edward Steichen, the curator and director of photography at the MoMA, but it was his ultimate intention to proclaim the paradox of the universality of the personal, the universality of the individual.

The exhibition was conceived as a mirror of the principles and feelings that are universal in everyday life, a sort of mirror of the essential unity of mankind. To achieve it he began with the life cycle, from birth to death, highlighting man’s everyday relationships with himself, his family, the community and the world.

The show travelled all over the world from 1956 to 1963 and attracted all kinds of visitors, which demonstrated the general acceptance of the communicative role of photography and subsequently generated a photographic movement with a clear humanist tendency. The exhibition did not come to Spain, although the catalogue did. Those most interested had to travel to France or Italy to visit it.

Neorealism

Neorealism was a social protest movement that grew in Italy after the Second World War. It involved scholars, filmmakers and photographers. Cesare Zavattini, considered the movement’s chief ideologue, thought that the camera should be at the service of reality, capture it and turn everyday events into a story. The films made in that period typically showed everyday life, half story-half documentary, and to do this they mostly used ordinary people instead of professional actors to construct the characters, whereby interest in the individual was transferred to the group.

The photographers in this group, committed to the social reality of their time, bore witness to the social situation after the war and its biggest problems: poverty, working-class unemployment, and the predicament of women and children.

The local version: la gauche divine

Lastly, it is necessary now to mention a very local phenomenon but one that made a great impact on society and cultural circles in the city: the gauche divine. Called by this rather disparaging name, it was a group of people, mostly liberal professionals and artists of all kinds, united ideologically in their opposition to the policies of Francoism and culturally in their profound dissatisfaction with the sad, dark, straight-laced, oppressive reality that it had been their lot to experience. With their way of life, at times rather snobbish, at others frivolous, but almost always fun and interesting, they managed to create their own space, meeting places whence to resist and face up to the situation. They advocated and really managed to liberate customs from the moral impositions of a Catholic Church that was conservative, hostile and committed to the regime. In the beginning the idea was to recreate the Paris of the 1940s and 1950s in Barcelona and in some very carefully chosen places on the Costa Brava. They later focused on “Swinging London” with its Carnaby Street. Hence they were considered left wing but they were caricatured as “divine”.

Featuring very diverse personalities from the world of culture and the intelligentsia, the group was eager to interrelate different disciplines and mix up the social classes, as this was what was “fun and creative”. And so professionals from different fields mingled, from the traditional arts to the new creative professions, to “manufacture” the culture of the time. The high point of the movement’s activity was the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s.

Barcelona, Black and White:

The image of a city in the midst of change

The book Barcelona, Black and White, produced between 1960 and 1962 and published in 1964 by the Barcelona publishing house Aymà, is a work produced by the young Miserachs with a wholly unexpected maturity. When examining his negatives one perceives how far he was able to assimilate the external influences and offer an absolutely personal view of the city. His putting into practice the influence exerted on him by William Klein, Cartier-Bresson, the model created by The Family of Man or by Subjective Photography is no hindrance whatsoever to recognizing the originality of his work and his ability to innovate in the face of the dominant model from the remote periphery that was Barcelona then.

Different ways of processing the images coexist in the book that, combined with one another, help to construct a compact overview of the city and its people. Miserachs successfully assimilated the prevailing models and used them as he wished and, in this way, he managed to create a set of images of the city and shun conventional ways of depicting the city. He broke with the model, so typical of city guidebooks, in which the photography is limited to showing postcards or views, and in which individuals either do not appear or they are treated as just another element of the composition. Miserachs went for a stroll around the city’s emblematic places, but he also looked at the most significant activities and he always did so using his leading actors, the citizens, avoiding corny or picturesque treatment. His photographs are an invitation to drift around the place, to lose oneself in a diverse city that is halfway between the old traditions and opening up to the new times and needs, placing special emphasis on highlighting gestures and expressions. As Ferran Mascarell, the Generalitat’s former minister for Culture and presently the City Council’s councillor for Culture, says: “Cities, like peoples, have a soul. The soul of every city is born of the decisions made by its people, in the past and in the present, the conscious and the unconscious, the causal and the planned. And yet, the fact is that those who experience them do not always realize”.4

It is precisely this soul of the city that Miserachs realized. The image of the city he offers us exudes a feeling of restlessness and nostalgia. Barcelona was changing, it might lose its signs of identity; hence the importance of leaving a graphic testimony of all its peculiarities, a testimony for the future of the collective memory.

The book was very well received by the people, the citizens – but not so much by the politicians. In the Town Hall it was said that it ought perhaps to have been called “Barcelona, Black and Grey”, as it showed aspects that the politicians would rather have kept hidden. Indeed, the images pointed the finger at the contrasts in the complex social times that the city was living through. It is now worth spending some time looking at the photographs that best depict this soul of the city, as Miserachs revealed it.

A look at some images

The book contains 371 photographs. Choosing eight to comment on is difficult and very biased, but I shall try with the selection to show the style, influences and period to which I have referred in this text. Special attention should be given to the process of symbolization used by the photographer and what effect this has on the depiction and, of course, on the construction of an image of the city of Barcelona. The photographs chosen are reprints that I made in 1990 with the photographer’s consent, for the research of my doctoral thesis Barcelona en blanco y negro de Xavier Miserachs y el reportaje urbano en la Barcelona de los años sesenta (Barcelona in Black and White by Xavier Miserachs and urban reportage in 1960s Barcelona), presented in 1991. Most of the photographs in the book were cropped. Those shown here and which are vertical in the book are square-shaped, so they are basically cut off at the top and bottom, while the horizontal ones are cut slightly on all sides. For the research, I developed them as full negatives in order to better observe the photographer’s method of composition.

Calle Pelayo marks the boundary between the districts of Ciutat Vella and L’Eixample in Barcelona. It is an important shopping street and also a place that people have to pass through quickly in order to get to certain parts of the centre. This is the first image that we see in the book after Joan Oliver’s foreword about “Man and the City”. The processing of the image is influenced by William Klein’s New York. The citizens walking quickly become a many-headed black mass that advances towards the viewer. Small details of the individuals and the street can be seen, though they are very blurred. It corresponds perfectly to some of the observations that Joan Oliver makes in the foreword: “In the city life crowds together, it intensifies, it multiplies […]. Man tries more than ever to immerse himself in the vast dense crowds of citizens […]. Today, everything tends to ‘massification’: entertainment and political action, wars and religious worship. To feel oneself part of a mass, to feel one of so many, gives the citizen an idea of security, of certainty”.5

Fig. 1 Passers-by in Calle Pelayo (Creative Commons).

In the La Verneda area, a farmer working in the field; in the background, the landscape generated by the structures of the buildings under construction. One clearly sees the loss of the dividing lines between the countryside and the city. The hardness of the farmer’s posture and the place he occupies in the image invite us to interpret in the posture, not just the action of digging the soil, but rather an attitude of resistance and threat towards the buildings that are inevitably gaining ground on the countryside.

Fig. 2 The city gaining ground on the countryside (Creastive Commons).

A high-class wedding with a bride, a wedding party and onlookers in the centre of the Gothic quarter. The treatment of the bride is spectacular. The high contrast of the negative – common in Miserach’s work – added to the contrast of the print, resulted in the white of the wedding dress lacking all detail. This gives the feeling that the image of the bride has been cut out, it is missing, and only the surroundings remain. The father accompanies an invisible bride who, despite everything, monopolizes the expectations of the party and the onlookers, who are an important part of the image.

Fig. 3 A wedding and onlookers at the church of San Sever (Creative Commons).

A junction in the Gothic quarter. In the image we can make out little stories that take place in the narrowness of the streets. A snapshot that captures the hustle and bustle and the contrasts that rub shoulders in the city. People talking calmly on a street corner, people walking quickly, a Vespa scooter going away that vies for attention with the donkey loaded down with simple earthenware pottery. Rural tradition and modern city coexisting in perfect harmony.

Fig. 4 Calle de Escudellers (Creative Commons).

A porter from the El Borne food market lifting a small cart with 43 empty wooden crates on it. This is one of Miserachs’ best-known images, a tribute to the toughness of the job. In the composition, the crates reach almost to the edges of the frame, whilst the market and its activity are blurred on either side of the picture. Notice the subjectivity of the point of view, which goes beyond the sizes and number of creates that the porter is handling and which are shown side-on to the viewer, forcing him to lose himself among the immensity of the crates.

Fig. 5 In El Borne (Creative Commons).

At the fairground on the mountain of Tibidabo, three young people are having fun on the roller coaster against the blurred backdrop of the city and the port of Barcelona on the horizon. We can make out the three chimneys of the Fecsa electricity company and the Jaime I Tower, the midway tower of the cable car that connects the port with the mountain of Montjuïc. A simple, balanced composition in which our attention is focused on the three youngsters’ happy smiling faces.

Fig. 6 Scenes and attractions at Tibidabo (Creative Commons).

This is one of the series of images that the politicians would rather have suppressed. In that period, the most deserted areas of some Barcelona neighbourhoods were inhabited by groups of Gypsies. The group’s life was organized around chabolas (shanty towns). The group’s activity takes place in the open air: barefoot children playing or feeding the fire, discussions, relaxation, domestic chores, all in the bosom of the community. The photographer is discovered by a woman, who raises her arms in protest.

Fig. 7 Gypsies in the Pueblo Nuevo neighbourhood (Creative Commons).

Miserachs avoids choosing a stereotyped view of the famous temple and, from the inside, like just any other visitor, he observes the city through the small chinks provided by the sculptural decoration. Like a voyeur, he shows a group of buildings in the middle of the picture, which appear out of the darkness of the shadow cast by the stone figure of an angel in the basilica. The siting of the buildings with respect to the angel, beneath its head, invites the interpretation that they are the reason for its pensive pose.

Fig. 8 Detail of the Sagrada Familia with the city in the background (Creative Commons).

I hope that the contextualization and the analysis of the selected images have offered the possibility of understanding how, through his photographs, Miserachs presented an image of the city different to what had been shown up to then. While acknowledging the working methods of other photographers, as has been said in the text, the value of this work lies in the fact that it does not imitate what has been done previously, but it assimilates it in a new way of looking at the surroundings and applying this knowledge to the particular case of the city of Barcelona. In order to achieve it, technological standards took a back seat, despite the fact that the technical processing was novel, to make room for what was truly important at that moment: managing to capture and present an image of an active and changing city in which difference, tradition and new values coexisted amiably.

The Conceptualization of Design: Joan Perucho’s Contribution and the Nature of Graphic Art in the Founding Period of Design in Spain¹

Anna Calvera

Parallels between graphic design and industrial design: the conceptualization of design in Barcelona in the 1960s

Apropos of the definition of graphic design put forward by Maurizio Vitta,² the research that has been carried out here corresponds to the effort to answer two questions asked by the author, and to see if this possible answer is applicable to research into the history of design as it played out in Barcelona in the second half of the twentieth century. Vitta takes as his starting point the concept of Visual Design, a term that, in his opinion, is more useful than graphic art – grafica in Italian – for very clearly marking a turning point in the tradition of graphic production and visual communication that may be compared, and which establishes a correlation, with what was meant by the concept of industrial design in the production of useful objects.

In Barcelona, the adoption of the notion of graphic design in the mid 1960s was powerful and innovative enough in itself to mark this turning point to which Vitta refers, and it signals the moment when design burst in on local culture. But in Barcelona there was also a time before that when the term “graphic art” was used to refer to graphic design. Through Grafistes Agrupació FAD, founded in 1961, the term was used to once and for all institutionalize graphic creation applied to visual communication as one of the professional specialities of design, something that represented a step forward from earlier attempts made by advertising draughtsmen or commercial artists. Graphic Design was the English term referring to what, in Switzerland, was called Graphisme, Graphik or Grafica depending on the canton. In the long run, at least in Barcelona, both terms, although originally considered synonyms according to the languages of reference, ended up describing two different approaches to professional activity, two contrasting methods of working and two different trends in the conception of design. But this was an internal debate in an industry that had already established itself as a professional practice.

Besides the question of terminology, Vitta establishes three different kinds of discourse in order to define the profession’s point of reference as required: “To outline the professional contours of the phenomenon, the technical skills of the discipline or the forms of knowledge pertaining to its cultural field”. However, it is the second one that interests us: indeed, “in the second one, theoretical knowledge relative to production and the interpretation of images, the projective and executive types of communication devices, and the linguistic and iconic systems adopted or being experimented with, are indicated”.

The challenge has been to look for data in the writings of the period in order to propose, from the Catalan graphic arts tradition, an answer to what, according to Vitta, constitutes the third level of relevant analysis for graphic design:

[…] the third one identifies and defines the aspects on which Visual Design is based, the meaning and the direction of the effects that it produces and, above all, their integration in a broader cultural system, which can be analysed in the light of anthropological, sociological and aesthetic models that point to making everyday visual experience – and therefore the images that constitute its representations – the basis of our social and cultural dynamic.3

The aim of this short essay is to review, through the writings of art critics and historians, how the process took place in Barcelona in the 1960s whereby graphic design attained the level of categorization that incorporated it into the phenomenon of design, understood as a whole in the collective imagination, and, what is even more important, into the idea that graphic designers have had of themselves and their profession since the founding period of design, namely, when Grafistes Agrupació FAD was created in 1961. Besides reviewing the historical situation at the time, the analysis will consider the efforts made from outside the discipline to explain the nature of design and to understand what is special about the images created by graphic artists and graphic designers that distinguishes them from artistic productions.

One must bear in mind that, in the context of Barcelona, the debate about parallels and the possible links existing between the different forms of design took place in the 1960s; since then, once it had been accepted and taken on board by everyone as the most natural thing, the relationship has become part of local design culture. It was the schools that contributed the most to consolidating this conceptual link, given that, from the earliest educational experiences onwards, in Barcelona graphic design and industrial design were conceived as, and have always been presented as, two specialities of the same discipline, design. The work of publishers gradually confirmed it; the specialist press, on the other hand, has tended to clearly separate the different specialities of design and to treat them as autonomous. Therefore, the industrial dimension of graphic design was perfectly established right from the start and it may be considered one of the peculiarities of design culture in Barcelona.4

Indeed, the foundations of this link were laid in Barcelona as a logical consequence of the many interpretations made of the interest and the relevance to modern society of the Bauhaus experience after the Civil War, every time it was necessary to consider an advanced study plan to meet designers’ training needs. This is one of the basic concerns that explain the career of Alexandre Cirici Pellicer at the head of various teaching experiences: the FAD’s Escola d’Art Vivent (1959-1960), Elisava (1961-1967) and Eina from 1967 onwards, just when the HfG Ulm’s leadership began to be reviewed. The conceptual relationship between both types of design was strengthened by the fact that the first two groups of professionals joined the FAD with a similar formula: ADI-FAD by industrial designers in 1960, and Grafistes FAD by graphic designers the following year. The idea found its correlate and was wholly consistent with what was going on abroad as a result of the foundation of ICSID and ICOGRADA a few years earlier, two separate bodies that have maintained parallel and very often coincident paths.

Therefore, the fact that graphic design is to visual communication and to publishing and printing industries what industrial design is to industrial manufacture is one of the premises of the discourse about design in Barcelona since the founding period. Thus, when taking into account the reasons why a certain idea of design has been spread in Barcelona and realizing the various shades of this notion in an exercise of the history of ideas, the key moment is the founding one. The different trends that appeared later, the different existing approaches and the many ideas that emerged with regard to the way of understanding the practice and theory of design, and also its teaching, have developed in a dialogue with these early approaches, which paved the way. This essay reviews the writings of art critics and historians who talked about design in the 1960s to discover in them the many efforts made to explain to people what design was, what its modus operandi consisted of, what its quality depended on and why it could be considered a phenomenon of cultural interest. In short, the way the city’s intellectuals accepted design as an important new form of cultural expression, characteristic of modernity. The inquiry focuses on the newspaper articles by the Barcelona writer Joan Perucho (Barcelona, 1920-2003), who took part in the discussion about the arts in the society of the time, debating with other important authors, Cirici included.

Speaking about design: international points of reference and sources of inspiration

With regard to industrial design, in Barcelona the models of reference were soon clear. The lectures of the COACB, the Architects’ Bar Association, given throughout the 1950s, and a product design exhibitions organized in those early years, pointed the way forward: Pevsner, Aalto and Ponti are three of the lecturers whose influence was most decisive; the exhibitions on, respectively, Finnish and Scandinavian design first, and German design later, are highly significant of the standards of quality adopted during the early years of the institutionalization of design. Nikolaus Pevsner set the standard for historical points of reference and established the significance of design in art history and modern culture. Through his historiographical model, the adventure of the early avant-garde’s dependence on the practice and the idea of design was clearly established, and this was also to be important for advertising graphic art, a form of design that had had a long and to a certain extent alternative history in the acceptance of the Bauhaus legacy around the world. The visit that Pevsner made to Barcelona in 1952 for his lecture at the COACB was given a lot of coverage in the local press. His host, te architect Antoni de Moragas i Gallissà, then the Bar Association’s head of culture, has recalled in several articles the stroll that they took around the city together, and Pevsner’s surprise at the paltry aesthetics of most of the shop signs he saw, but also the impact that seeing Gaudí’s most important buildings had on him.⁵

For his part, Alvar Aalto and, through him, the whole of Scandinavian design, showed a specific way to designing objects and products, an example that, as Isabel Campi has so often claimed, was not only seen as the development of the Modern Movement’s international style by the third generation, but as a model of design’s social responsibility as part of a fully democratic society. Finally, Gio Ponti became the embodiment of the possibilities that existed of creating design in Barcelona and a point of reference with regard to the model and the discourse of the modernity to be imported. In this way, the notion of design that was held and upheld in Barcelona had been formed by adopting the canonical theory of the Modern Movement, and it was adapted to be able to fulfil the ideals of modernity and regeneration that were expected of it and desired for Catalan society as a whole.

The conceptual points of reference were not as clear in the case of graphic design, a sector with a history of its own, with periods and trends somewhat different to those that had taken place in the conceptualization and introduction of industrial design throughout the world. On the one hand, as professionals, poster artists and draughtsmen had already enjoyed a high profile before the war. In the 1960s the dispute arose in Barcelona between some graphic artists, who considered themselves to be the repositories of a long tradition, and those who already felt that they were graphic designers and advocated the total renewal of the profession along the lines proposed by the Modern Movement. The two names were not entirely synonymous because they concealed slight differences in their way of understanding the profession and the particular activity they did. It could be said that they differed due to the graphic and expressive resources used, the work tools, the way they conceived visual communication and expressive processes, but, historically at least, they also differed due to their relationship with advertising: thus, for example, graphic artists were still painting commercial posters whereas graphic designers seldom did so: they virtually only received orders for cultural, commemorative or educational posters, but, moreover, they no longer painted them. Coinciding with this discussion, it so happened that advertising had adapted to the new social media and the poster had become less important as an advertising medium, even in the underground. The poster is probably the graphic item that best exemplifies the process, but the same could be said of other media such as advertisements in the press or direct mailing, to which graphic design was beginning to give another meaning from the point of view of incipient corporate identity programmes.

The recognition of design and advertising graphic art as a new aesthetic practice coincided when the debate about contemporary art and the significance then of the avant-garde was in full swing. This was a polemic among art critics. It was between those who wished to legitimate the avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s, such as plastic Informalism, the latest expressions of pictorial abstraction and the arrival of conceptual art in its different versions, and those who, without giving up on the avant-garde for good, had taken on board the criticisms that Pop was making of high culture in general and were arguing about the artist’s social commitment. The concept of Realism was prevalent in Barcelona at the time; as Ignasi de Solà-Morales has clearly stated, it implied and contained all the connotations of the term, from the return to figure painting, to artists stating the case for their political commitment in literature and the plastic arts, or the very common-sense proposal of planning and thinking about architecture in accordance with the real technological possibilities of contemporary society and dropping the old presumption that rationalist architecture and industrial design could drive the country’s technological revival.⁶ In this context, design, as the new progressive cultural phenomenon it was, became an interesting subject and it was often approached as the necessary bridge between progressive cultural production and the public, the place where art made a commitment to society, a reflection very much in line with Russian productivism between the wars. Applied art or involved art, design could make the enlightened commitment of contributing to the progress of society through the aesthetic improvement of products and landscapes and thus facilitate the working class’s access to real culture. This was the ideal, but also the dictates of the Modern Movement.⁷

The initial approaches were still indebted to the legacy of the Bauhaus, as can be seen in the text by Alexandre Cirici that had been published in 1946 in Ariel, a clandestine journal very Noucentista in spirit and mise-en-page layout. In “The Art of Wisdom”, the creation of useful objects was presented as a major form of artistic expression, typical of the age, in keeping with one of the most influential ideas in the philosophy of modern architecture. In the 1960s, the idea had been disseminated, and it was largely accepted by the majority of critics and historians, that design was the popular art of the industrial age, the result of technological progress and of the industrial system of production, an aesthetic practice that, moreover, could act as a bridge between high culture and the culture of ordinary people that was beginning to be called “mass culture”. After the cultural crisis of 1966-1968, industrial development, in view of the path taken by Spanish desarrollismo (economic development policy characteristic on national second industrial revolution), ceased to be considered a factor of true progress, and Pop’s criticisms of modernity turned into a socio-cultural and even a political alternative. It was then when the products of mass culture began to be viewed differently and were considered the products that best identified the civilization of the time: the welfare state, based on the dynamics of consumerism. The Frankfurt School had systematically condemned any expression of modernity by popular art, presenting it as the artificial product of cultural industries that were just that, industries like any other, subject to the rises and falls of a market in which they competed, by placing consumer products of rather doubtful quality in it. Design was also suspect, considered a simple factor for differentiating between consumer products, the modern style that allowed them to enter and compete in the market aided by advertising that seemed utterly deceptive and mystifying. Design was responsible for a factor that was only important commercially. What’s more, in 1967 semiology disembarked in Barcelona and the most committed scholars of design now found themselves faced with a methodological approach that, if the latest works published by the HfG Ulm were on the right track, might supply the theoretical foundations on which to base the subject of design. Thus, from that moment onwards, what was needed was to research the aspects of design capable of transmitting symbolic values and of functioning within the logic of symbolic ostentation. But all this belongs to a later period that explains, for example, what lay behind Pop design in the fields of the product and graphic art as it developed in Barcelona in the 1970s, and which led to the formation of the home-grown avant-garde that was already announcing itself with the organization of the 6th ICSID Congress held in Ibiza in 1971.

Although it may seem like a mere anecdote, it is worth remembering that Joan Perucho had been perfectly well aware of all this and what it implied for the local design culture. For some time he had been assessing the exhaustion of the models inherited from the Modern Movement, and around that same time, in 1966 to be precise, he wished to reflect on what was happening in one of his articles in the magazine Destino. It is worth recalling what he wrote:

Increased awareness, in the field of aesthetic creation, has to date found two bastions in which the rationalist spirit took refuge: they were industrial design and advertising graphics. The survival of the functional postulates inherited from the Bauhaus meant that these two centres of creation did not go very well with the general tastes of the time […] Things have changed or are beginning to change, and, while in the world of objects for practical use the concept of beauty tends to be valued rather separately from a problematic function, in the field of advertising, the rigour and accuracy advocated by Swiss and Central European graphic arts have given way to profoundly intuitive creation. Hence the cult of detachment; in other words, from contempt for decorativism, we may quite possibly have arrived at the cult of the border.8

Joan Perucho was by no means an isolated case. In the years between the founding of ADI-FAD and the crisis of 1966-1968, some art critics and historians had accepted the challenge of explaining the design that was being created in the city in the non-specialist press. Oriol Bohigas and Alexandre Cirici wrote about it in the cultural magazine Serra d’Or; others, architects mostly, in the pages of the COACB’s Cuadernos de Arquitectura, the Bar Association’s journal. Joan Perucho, Sebastià Gasch and Joan Teixidor spoke about it in Destino, a very popular magazine in Barcelona after the war. They were virtually the same authors who were discussing the art of the moment. The poet and writer Joan Perucho wanted to take a step further and understand what made design and advertising graphics a new, different art in relation to the various traditional arts, whether Fine Art or Fine Crafts. So, what did design contribute to the debate about the arts and what did the modernity of its creations depend on?

To sum it up in a few words, Perucho realized that graphic commercial art worked with wholly specific values that distinguished it from the plastic idiom so characteristic of 1950s art isms. He dealt with it in a series of articles appearing each week in the section “Invention and good sense in the arts” in Destino from 1960 to 1970. He also wrote about design, architecture and art in the pages of La Vanguardia, the newspaper in which he had been writing regularly since 1962. In his section in Destino, above all, Perucho devoted some of these many articles to commenting on the work of the Catalan graphic artists and industrial designers that he thought were the most interesting, combined with commentaries about the Spanish and foreign painters of the Informalist movement; also about the most outstanding photographers of the incipient School of Barcelona.⁹ His reviews and commentaries cover quite a long time span and a very interesting moment in the debate in Barcelona that, according to Daniel Giralt-Miracle, runs from the decline of Noucentisme to the irruption of American Pop Art that Perucho observed first-hand at the 1964 Venice Biennale.10

Perucho’s writings about different aspects of design will be useful for noting the Catalan interpretation of the aspects that Vitta summed up as the three levels of analysis of the processes and the results of this professional activity, now called graphic design.

Design, today’s popular art

When Joan Perucho began his reflections, he accepted the hypothesis so popular with most critics of the day according to which design could be understood theoretically as the popular art of the modern age: “the graphic artist is a typical product of our times. The creations of the graphic artist, like those of the industrial designer, are linked on one hand to popular works of art insofar that they have replaced them due to their closeness to society and everything in it”.11

Quite soon, however, he saw that this idea had to be qualified, since, in fact, there were substantial differences between the design of the time and the popular art of the past, namely, the various products of craftsmanship. Indeed, design, and very especially graphic art, did not quite correspond fully to the canonical idea of popular art because in all its creations it was very clear how connected and how indebted it had been to the more progressive trends of Fine Art – or pure art, as he often referred to painting and sculpture – since the period of the avant-garde: “One may say that, since 1907, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Neoplasticism, Surrealism and geometric and lyrical abstraction have been filtered thanks to and through the graphic artist, towards an uninitiated public, or, what amounts to the same thing, towards a popular sector”.

The same condition was observed in industrial design, in which the work of the designer consisted, among many other things, “of adapting the shapes of the object designed to the spirit of the taste of our times”.

But this spirit:

[…] has been forged by the great creators of the pure arts, and industrial designers follow the guidelines that the former have imposed on them: […] the taste for authenticity and for the naked beauty of things would not have been possible without the great names in modern art (Lipchitz, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Miró, Tatlin, Mondrian). They were ahead of the industrial process and they created pure life-giving forms.12

Graphic and industrial design are, therefore, indebted to the sensibility and the aesthetic imposed by the early avant-garde and consequently they share with it the same formal, visual and stylistic elements that made art incomprehensible for the general public. The evidence of this close link between the plastic avant-garde and the expressions of modern design led Perucho to develop his analysis of design by always comparing it to what was going on in the art world and seeking in painting the models of references from which to understand and assess design’s actual contribution. On one hand, the assimilation of design to popular art went perfectly well with design’s mission of acting as a chain of transmission between the experiments of art, and of high culture, and the general public: this was its cultural purpose, the education of the masses. “Graphic art, chiefly through the poster, always fulfils an educational function because it presents the masses with the major aesthetic trends of the moment, refines their sensibility and prepares them for further experiences”.13

But the fact that design and advertising graphic art could be understood without too much effort by the public to whom they were addressed, despite using the same formal language as the most progressive avant-garde trends, made him think that it was necessary to go and look all around for the reasons for design’s popularity, which was obvious, and it was therefore necessary to observe other socio-cultural phenomena whose range transcended the limited world of art. Influenced by sociologists and philosophers, he generically referred to it as the “civilization of the image”, a new situation in relation to the past but highly characteristic of the times and the spirit of the new modernity, a definitely urban industrial culture.¹⁴ Perucho, a distinguished bibliophile and a keen collector of beautiful old books, had for sometime been shifting his focus of attention towards all the other visual productions that were encroaching and becoming increasingly present in people’s everyday lives – “we see that after painting and drawing, photography, film and television have entered our lives”. Of all these new expressions of visual culture, there was one that he found particularly attractive, advertising, “a recently invented technique, but which has became one of the great influences of our times”.15

It may seem that, by wishing to consider all the arts that make up the civilization of the image, Perucho had resumed Walter Benjamin’s research into technical reproduction in the arts and regarded it as necessary to review the Fine Art system by moreover incorporating into it the heirs to the craft traditions (precious metalworking, tapestry making and jewellery), but this way of thinking never truly convinced him, quite the contrary. Only when American Pop Art clearly dominated the European discussion on art and artistic production did Perucho review the phenomenon of advertising in terms clearly showing that it had ceased to interest him. On one hand, advertising looked like a power to him; but on the other, it was obvious that its creations were the work of a minority as select as the artistic elite and, therefore, what seemed to be the popular art of the day was nothing more than a sort of “urban folklore”. His hypothesis totally refuted the class-based approach in the criticism of culture because all the social classes were mixed on all levels of cultural production:

Through the media, the huge power of advertising has imposed on men’s and women’s subconscious all manner of signs, symbols and badges that are leaving a particular mark on our private life. 99% of the images are, for the average man, anonymous, and hence one may speak in this respect of folkloric art or, as the Americans prefer, Popular art: made, however, not by the majority but by a refined and, in many cases, sophisticated minority, and for clearly materialistic and commercial purposes.¹⁶

However, if the study of Pop Art and its implications is a sort of finishing line in Perucho’s thoughts about art, he had previously been interested in advertising and the culture of the image because he basically wanted to understand the world he had to live in and to know what was happening in front of his eyes: “Thinking about culture entails bearing in mind the visual repertoire that the pace of life imposes”.

When he began his research into the advertising and the graphic production that was being created just when the professionalization of graphic design was taking place, there was something that did not quite fit in with the usual methods of analysing the arts. This was the graphic quality and the new expressiveness evident in so many advertisements. Perucho considered it openly when talking about photography. “I am absolutely not lying if I say that, today, as a general rule, advertising is in the hands of professionals with great creative drive. Thanks to them, the power of invention has to a large extent taken refuge in the advertising business, so much so that it decisively influences certain manifestations of pure creation”. Photographers and graphic artists were the people most directly responsible for it.¹⁷

Perucho’s inquiry could thus be seen as a reflection on the image and everything to do with it; in this general context, not so much advertising in general but graphic arts advertising in particular has an important place in it as a creative practice whose quality is in itself interesting: “The images burst out all around and the graphic artist has in a certain way transformed the language of images”.¹⁸ From there, the research branched out into two lines of reasoning: the first dealt with the communicative capacity of the image as a phenomenon; the second analysed the expressive language of graphics and its specific characteristics as a form of visual art. In the first, Perucho reflected on the nature of the society that he had to live in. He took the idea of the civilization of the image as a framework from which to understand both the new artistic forms of expression and the power of advertising, something that seemed obvious to him, in order to finally explain the specific nature of advertising graphics as an artistic expression typical of modernity. In the second, Perucho wished to understand and define what it is that visually distinguishes graphic art, whether for advertising or not, and he tried to explain the nature of the graphic arts. It is a question that many designers have wished to answer when talking about their work.

A world of images

A poet and novelist by vocation, Perucho could not stop thinking about language when speaking about this new visual civilization that was taking over everywhere and, consequently, he wanted to predict the possible effects that the culture of the image had or might have on oral expression and the printed word. To begin with, he assumed as a real possibility that the triumph of the image over the word might be due to the failure of language to communicate, or at least to communicate in the way that the media and advertising needed. And that necessarily had to influence the forms of culture. It was obvious that advertising made no use whatsoever of oral language’s powers of reasoning and argument; advertising no longer sought le mot juste, quite the contrary – “modern advertising is not a simple list of advantages, a longer or shorter list of specifications or usefulness” – and he noted in passing the possibility of the word being completely discredited as a vehicle of culture, something that at least demanded a reflection on modern society’s values and way of life.¹⁹ In one passage he observes the fleeting nature of so many cultural products, such as the comic, and how quickly so many cultural articles and movements are produced and consumed. Therefore, in the long run, the evident discredit of the word in the modern world might lead to culture being turned into a “culture of the pocket”, made up of a series of products created with a basically bon marché mentality. Perucho was referring specifically to the sort of culture that Pop Art was reassessing.²⁰ But if this was a conclusion reached from the ideas of Pop Art and the studies of the mass media and mass culture, it did not question the premises adopted at the beginning of his reflection when the basic issue was to review the effects of the early avant-garde on the world and the society that emerged after the Second World War. In this first context, the power of advertising lies, in his opinion, precisely in the fact of directly addressing people’s emotional influences, of working in pre-logical processes, of looking for the emotional association that leads to action: “Advertising is a primitive form of communication [and] our attitude with regard to advertising is a temporary suspension of doubt”.²¹ It thus constituted a clear sign of the personality’s many resources that are needed for living and which complement the use of reason; this connected advertising with the use of the imagination, with the irrational dimension of the personality – in other words, with that hidden, eternal world with which the arts deal.

As a writer, Joan Perucho is known for his constant fascination with the areas of mystery and irrationality that surround human life and which inform, from behind the mirror, all culturally significant production. He always sought out and amused himself with the small disguised manifestations of that which is eternal and intangible that governs human life from afar and ultimately gives meaning to the smallest things in a constant dialogue between the two infinites. If, as psychologists said, advertising works on the most hidden levels of the personality, such as the motivations and the emotions, in order to associate them with previously established forms of action and behaviour, this necessarily had to interest him, not so much because it was a very powerful manipulation technique, but because it only worked when certain communicative conditions were achieved, of which the most interesting and careful expression was precisely advertising graphic art.

Furthermore, in the civilization of the image, the superiority of the images prevails for reasons of effectiveness in a form of communication, advertising, which is essentially and necessarily primitive: “These days, the simple naked truth of the image, the direct decisive impact of everything that enters through the eyes, has been clearly seen”. The most interesting thing about a reflection such as Perucho’s is that it has managed to reposition the discourse about the image and the nature of it in a new context:

The language of silence, the language that cannot be articulated with words, has thus been introduced. Some images may possibly limit the imagination and allow the inner reality of things to escape, but what the image can express, what comes within the possibility of expression, is defined once and for all with extraordinary forcefulness […] behind the conscious appearance of an image there is always an unconscious meaning, a latent content.22

If only for that, images and the world they conceal in their very bare exhibition were a highly interesting phenomenon for a thinker such as Perucho. He was attracted above all by what he very poetically described as “the naked fertility of the eye through the image, through what is there, terribly alive before us”.23

However, what is the image and how does it work? Seen from a historical perspective, from the iconoclasts to the appearance of engraving and the reproduction of plates with scientific illustrations, the image has entered people’s lives as a means of learning, parallel and complementary to language. But in the civilization of the image things have changed and what makes the image an unbeatable resource for mass communication is its immediacy, its ability to become fashionable by itself. “[…] the impact of the image is frontal and rapid and, what is even more important, it does not require any effort of comprehension, of understanding”.²⁴ However, if this can be applied to all kinds of images, in today’s civilization only those that adapt and are transmitted through the mass-media are relevant: they are “artificial visual requests, understood as man-made elements to be observed, so that they may perform a specific function in the human mind”, and, therefore, they must be “images that are repeated, that quickly multiply, that spread over diverse remote environments”. They are images like those of advertising, or rather, those that have been spread thanks to the power of advertising. If one adds the immediacy of images, their constant repetition due to being massively reproduced and the ease of understanding as well as their power of suggestion, their predominance is total:

The reason for this efficiency of the image must be sought in fast, easy understanding, in its brilliant and fabulous suggestion. The most diverse techniques drive the image, develop it, stylize it and create appropriate visual semantics. The coercive value of all this is enormous, and so, from traffic signals to advertising films, people are constantly being advised, informed and solicited.²⁵

The text dates from 1963. Many years later, when reviewing his articles and republishing them, Perucho briefly summed up the essential complexity of the image and its communicative value as a means of expression, thus legitimating his thoughts on the various arts in the contemporary world:

[…] the image per se, devoid of intentional content but full of value added on regardless of a wish for signification. It is in this respect that the image appears as a decisive factor of expression, a veritable mechanism of integration, which ranges from the popular forms (including craftsmanship and the comic) to the highbrow (photography and film) via those that industry and advertising have revealed to us lately (designs, window dressing, fashion).26

The basic image thus becomes the feature common to so many contemporary human productions, what makes them all equally interesting and important and gives them meaning as the cultural expression they are. Therefore, reflection on the image comes close to and shares in reflection on contemporary art; it becomes an art form that, without necessarily sharing in the aesthetic autonomy of the arts, is confirmed as an aesthetic practice perfectly inserted in the dynamics of society, and herein lies the interest and the novelty in relation to the modern conceptualization of the arts. It is now necessary to understand how and in what way all these so different forms of aesthetic expression can fulfil – due to being images – the mission of the graphic arts as stated by Perucho: “The graphic artist carries out a very important mission, utilitarian and cultural at the same time”.²⁷

The art of graphics

Of all the different manifestations of the image, graphics as applied to advertising was for Joan Perucho a focus of interest in itself precisely because the images it creates are always subject to the needs of advertising; they are conditioned by a utilitarian service that they cannot avoid, and their quality depends on this. However, if on one hand the critic totally agrees that graphics can be an art form, and he therefore often points to how closely related to the styles and forms of painting they are, on the other hand he also realizes that, despite being art, it is not a fine art. Where is the difference and on what does it depend?

The Bauhaus legacy once again bursts in on his thoughts. It does so now in all its complexity, as it was based on it that design appeared as a continuation of art in a period driven by technology and industry:

[…] since the days of the Bauhaus, [the graphic artist] has combined and used the most diverse techniques. In the first place, he is an artist totally at one with his period, he has to feel his period and be familiar with its sensibility and its problems. He must also possess a profound knowledge of drawing, printing, page layout, photography, and so on. He will also be familiar with the psychology of the masses and the constant themes of advertising expression. His field of action is immense […].

But his objective diverges completely when it comes to artistic intentions: “What is the graphic artist’s goal? It is not simply beauty, but the effort to provoke the conviction of something”.28

For many years, practically ever since art historians and critics wished to understand the artistic nature of a poster, they saw functionality as an obstacle, a sort of circumstantial accident that only exhausts a poster’s quality as a work of art by transcending it. Although it has been useful for distinguishing between the practices of art and design, art theory tends to see functionality as a limitation of creative freedom, a form of servitude for the artist. This was how Perucho expressed it, but he used some examples of Modernisme posters to show that artistic practices are not always effective for the purposes of advertising.²⁹

For him this meant having to revise what this alleged submission of the designer to the specific communicative function implied, the one that A.M. Cassandre had defined as a technique for translating between two expressive languages. Perucho wished to avoid any idea that might interpret the functional dictates of advertising graphics as the designer giving in to commercial interests: not at all those of a creator, but those of the material world governed exclusively by financial criteria. The question became more complex for him and therefore more interesting. Functionality, obviously, established the general framework in which to understand graphics and design as a whole.

To understand the attributes of graphics as a specific language he had analysed artistic ideas whose graphic nature was strikingly obvious. Op Art or Vasarely’s paintings experiment with the expressive nature of geometry and spot colours, but he did not consider them to be examples of advertising graphics because they did not meet a specific communicative need. It was graphic art, yes, but, “graphic architectures devoid of all utilitarian content”; they could not therefore be considered graphic art, let alone design: “when the concept of the advertising function is added to that of graphic art, the merely graphic is of no use, because then we would be speaking about a force that operates in the void in favour of an aesthetic intention”. Some words by Max Bill that Perucho quotes in various articles led him to define the artistic nature of design: “When art tries to fulfil practical functions it does so to the detriment of its spiritual functions; when graphic art rejects practical functions, it does not acquire a spiritual dimension”. The conclusion was clear and exclusive: “This is the glory and the servitude of advertising graphics and once one knows how to give it content, graphic art attains a veritable social and cultural function, a most effective educator of the tastes of the majority”. Therefore, the art of design and graphics is precisely an art when “it does not betray its essence”.³⁰

Perucho continues his analysis by engaging in a dialogue with Cassandre and testing the validity of the French poster artist’s early hypothesis in the period, the 1930s, when posters were like a punch in the eyes. After the long period of lyrical abstractionism, in which Cassandre had also taken part, the work of graphic artists like Giralt Miracle in Barcelona contributed, according to Perucho, a more nuanced alternative of the poster and of graphic production that clearly showed how far graphic design had evolved since the war:

[…] the poster is no longer a shout on the wall, but a small graphic poem made of allusions and nuances. The melody of posters, if we may call it that, no longer starts with a clarion call but a pleasant harmony, dreamlike at times, disturbing, even having something of the hieroglyphic about it, which captivates and persuades the public to whom it is addressed. […] Today, therefore, we no longer agree with Cassandre’s theory of the graphic artist as telegraphist: it is not the information that makes a product succeed, but the suggestion.³¹

Fig. 1 The logo of Grafistes Agrupació FAD, design by Josep Pla-Narbona, Barcelona, 1961.

Although it is clear that the aesthetic attraction that any poster necessarily contains is always at the service of an idea, it is precisely this servitude that enables it to become a true work of art. To Perucho’s mind it is not, therefore, the poster’s utilitarian servitude that might prevent it from being a work of art, quite the contrary: it can only be so when it manages to respond to and perform this servitude: “The poster is a work of art when it does not betray its essence”. In this case, art and its language clearly become a resource, the process through which suggestion is achieved, because “only art provides the suggestion and it is the equivalent of the world of dreams. In many cases it is even the equivalent of poetry”.

Perucho focused his thoughts on the difficult line between art and design, between art and graphics, but knowledge of the work of many graphic artists enabled him to corroborate the truth contained in the words of Max Bill quoted above. He was now in a position to risk a possible definition of graphic art:

Without the aid of art there can be no good posters. Therefore the graphic artist must above all be an artist; but he has to be one without thinking about it too much, somewhat malgré lui. A graphic artist must never feel a longing for pure creation, and I say this because many feel it and are always ready to show us their works that are not subject to servitudes. This particularly irritates me, because I believe that advertising graphics, which is a creation of our time, has ushered in a new form of creation, in itself valid, and in which much of the capacity for invention and creative imagination has taken refuge. Graphic artists will either be artists on the condition of being faithful to graphics, or they will never be.³²

What clearly inspired Perucho’s thinking throughout these articles was his gradual conviction that graphic art, and industrial design as well, were completely new phenomena in the art world and were perfectly integrated in the reality and the spirit of the period. But he did not stop there. He also wanted to understand what sort of arts they were and what were the attributes that characterized them, and this led him, in the case of graphic art, to “question the essence of graphic art”. The question may seem very theoretical, but it clearly shows how difficult it was in those early years to explain this new thing, graphic art, comprehensibly. It places the Barcelona critic’s thoughts along the lines of what was then being discussed in France when talking about industrial aesthetics, or in Italy about art in the civilization of the machines. There now began what was Joan Perucho’s second great line of thinking about design, probably one of the most interesting contributions of his writings and which may be considered one of the most serious attempts made in Barcelona to conceptualize graphic design.

The essence of graphic art

What, then, are the distinctive features of graphic art within the visual arts as a whole? At the outset, the investigation had been considered in relation to the art scene and it had been made clear that graphic art shared many things with all the other arts of the image: “How to place graphic art within a hierarchy of the arts? Painting, drawing, graphics, where does one end and another start? What technique exclusive to graphic art – if it exists – would make it possible to define for us its whole nature without a shadow of a doubt?”33

The question was based on the supposition that graphic art – graphicness – and, therefore, the criteria that determine its quality, beyond its effectiveness in the achievement of a predetermined communicative objective, are expressively very different to the plastic nature of painting and drawing. To discover what their most distinctive traits might be, Perucho had often considered what a graphic artist had to know and how he worked, what the secrets of his art might be. The techniques and the processes that he had available were many and varied. Indeed, “advertising, as we know it today, uses illustration, typography, photography, colour, sound, and so on. With all these media, the graphic artist has to make himself understood”.

He also had many expressive resources at his disposal: “There are moments when he resorts to illustrative graphic art, based on free and subjective drawing, or on the other hand he resorts to objective graphic art, the basis of which is primarily the photographic image in all its aspects: a realistic, lyrical, surrealist, constructive image … with all this the graphic artist has to be effective”. Therefore, the graphic nature was not, nor could it be reduced to, a style, to a single concept of the image; it rather had to be a characteristic common to all processes depending on how it was used and why. What’s more, Perucho had analysed the lessons that are taken from old books, and from modern printing treatises that were published by the École de Lure and Maximilien Vox; he had also considered the latest trends in graphic art and design, the guidelines that were coming from Basel and the spirit of graphic freedom evident in the work of American designers, such as the typographer Herb Lubalin or the photographer Penn. But when talking about them, the description of graphic values often got no further than a list of technical skills like those typical of professions: a graphic artist “must have intellectual perspicacity, intuition, a sense of shapes and colours, architectural moderation and a very sure talent for composition”.³⁴ But that is not enough: “To be a good graphic artist something else is still required: his productions must be graphic. There are many supposed graphic artists that are no such thing; they believe that a simple knowledge and mastery of painting and drawing is enough. But is it is not […]. Because a photograph or a drawing may be excellent but not graphic, and then they will be of no use for the required function; in other words, they will be of no use for advertising”. Indeed, “to be a graphic artist, the creations must be inspired by a graphic feel”. However, “it is hard to define what is graphic”.³⁵

And this is the crux of the matter, how to explain something as ethereal as graphic quality, that which makes a diagram, an advertisement, a poster fulfil its utilitarian function and at the same time become a creation representative of its time. From that point onwards, the reasoning becomes cautious and rather hesitant, but Perucho continues throwing out hypotheses to gradually get closer to the heart of the matter. Partly, he approaches the investigation as a dialogue between various phenomena, apparently different from one another, in order to capture this essential component so easy to recognize looking at specific works but so hard to put into words. At one end, there are the demands of advertising, which are governed by criteria of effectiveness, they mark the limits within which the work of the graphic artist moves and, what is more important, they impose on him a certain communicative approach – “The image and its suggestion can be understood easily and quickly by everyone. Of all the images, the graphic is the one that most ideally presents these virtues that interest advertising”.³⁶ Graphic art thus becomes the natural means of expression of advertising, a more complex process the more closely it is analysed.

Indeed, one has to count the great deal of information that advertising techniques have made available to graphic artists, data about the public’s psychological motivations, about the type of public it is targeting, about perceptive physiology and the optical reading process, and so on.³⁷ An endless stream of scientifically based technical data. But when the graphic artist gets down to work, he secretly uses all this technological basis “as a trampoline to launch himself towards the suggestion,” because, “rather than the accumulation of data, today the tendency is to metaphor”. Herein lies the graphic artist’s mastery, because one must not forget that, only when graphics is perfectly adapted to the need for communication is it filled with meaning and becomes true graphic art: “This is the glory and the servitude of advertising graphics and once one knows how to give it content, graphic art attains a veritable social and cultural function, a most effective educator of the tastes of the majority”.38

At the other end, there are always the artistic points of reference, especially those that come from the artistic trends that, coinciding with the spread of Pop Art, have chosen graphic art as material on which to experiment visually. There are several important ones, from the Neoplasticism that developed from Swiss concrete art to the geometric constructions and the optical effects of Op Art, kinetic art or Vasarely’s work. From the comparative analysis of these different art forms, Perucho deduces some of the traits that visually best identify this aspect of graphic art, and his conclusion is categorical:

Fig. 2 Advertising poster for an insecticide. Graphic designer: Josep Artigas (1919-1991). Client: Cruz Verde, Barcelona. Work of 1948. Photograph: CRAI Art Library, University of Barcelona, UB Virtual Museum, Artigas Collection.

The fact is that their compositions are eminently graphic in the sense that they constitute optical syntheses of great expressive value. Therefore, in artistic terms, the guided or freehand line, the simple geometric figure, the arrangement of lines and figures in the equilibrium of proportions and values, the play of colours and optical effects, freely arranged according to the inspiration of the person composing it, gives rise to graphic art.39

Fig. 3 Badge for ACESA, the motorway licensee, design by Enric Huguet, 1967.

Let us remember that, despite the fact that they were deliberately graphic works, they cannot be considered graphic art because they are not subordinated to a communicative function. If the artistic examples contribute data about the visual language and the formal characteristics through which graphic art is expressed, only the advertising function, that is, the need to satisfy a specific communicative demand, establishes the validity of the resources used by graphic art and gives them meaning. Therefore, graphic art is graphic if it meets the needs of advertising, or whatever communicative functionality, and then the graphic nature becomes the formal system that guarantees the rapid, direct and effective communication that characterizes the civilization of the image and which, according to Perucho, once again clearly shows the Bauhaus legacy. However, “the Bauhaus spirit effectively influenced the modern concept of what is graphic, but not all graphic art has to be essentially geometric, as is proven by the fact that an oriental calligraphy character, free and sinuous, is also graphic”.40

Perucho put forward what he now calls a provisional definition of the essence of graphic art according to which “it would indicate in its characteristics a visual concentration, expressiveness and synthesis”. He thus sums up many of the commentaries dispersed in numerous articles, sometimes a single sentence, at others a short paragraph: “The essence of the graphic, which many find in the line of intensity and synthesis,” had been defined, “approximately by gestural concision and expression. The graphic artist operates by optical synthesis; rather than explaining, he suggests; rather than analysing, he synthesizes”. Therefore, “the first concern has to be for these media to be graphic, in other words, synthetic and evocative”. Elsewhere he specified, “taking graphics to more or less mean the image of concise and vigorous expression”.

The same wish for synthesis and conciseness is reflected in the way that advertising uses written language: “In fact, it uses language far more expressively than a simple rational exposition. That is to say, it uses it in small concentrated amounts”.⁴¹ The formal synthesis of posters and all kinds of graphic material has probably been one of the most recurrent arguments used by graphic artists and designers when they explain how they work; it was especially used by those in the generation that illustrated posters in which the use of the metaphorical capacity of the image was one of the discursive resources most used.

Some of the traits that characterize graphic art have been outlined: conciseness and succinctness in sentences, synthesis in the construction of the image, evocative capacity of the images depicted and suggestiveness of the whole. But Perucho was looking for something else. The answer could only be found in the artistic intent. Indeed, art and its idiom clearly become a resource, the process through which suggestion is achieved, because “only art provides the suggestion and it is equivalent of the world of dreams. In many cases it is even the equivalent of poetry”.42

The aesthetic dimension of graphics lay in that difficult realm in which the creative imagination connected directly to the emotions and feelings that advertising was searching for in order to achieve direct, clear and immediately understandable communication, without however relinquishing ambiguity, polysemy and the variety of meanings that the image contains in itself. It had been necessary for him to understand what the graphic artist took from art, what made some graphics works of art precisely because they were good posters, in other words, advertisements as beautiful as they were effective. Therefore the specific art of graphic design was a technical element that could only be found in itself, in the use of the determinants that the communicative demands of advertising or the civilization of the image impose on it:

Necessary brevity of the advertising message: Very often there are too many ideas, and it is then when it influences, with great psychological force, the nature, the beauty, the freshness, hitherto unknown, of a particular motivation. We are already at this time in a full, developed aesthetic task: the more powerful and convincing the personality of the one who creates it, the more convincing and powerful it will be.⁴³

Through the arguments dispersed in so many articles appearing in the press I have been able to follow what may be considered an attempt to contribute to the disciplinary understanding of the graphic design created in a period when the points of reference could be found only in the art world and the legacy of the avant-garde, theoretical tools that were not always used to reflect the entire complexity of the phenomenon. They are theoretical instruments that have not always seemed the most suitable for talking about design. However, they provide important elements for understanding from within the conditions of work and of expression that are typical of graphic design in the perspective of the creation of images – hence my interest in Joan Perucho’s thoughts on the process of conceptualizing a new professional practice with regard to understanding it.

The First Signs of Pop Graphic Art in Barcelona in the 1960s

M. Àngels Fortea

Did Pop Graphic Art ever exist in Barcelona?

This article provides an answer to this question: yes. It shows that graphic artwork that can be recognized as Pop Graphic Art did indeed exist in Barcelona, in keeping with the graphic characteristics of the style and in comparison to the American and British versions of this trend, which have been the most disseminated internationally and are thus the best known too. Three different stages can be recognized in the development of Pop Graphic Art and their consolidation in Barcelona.

The first stage began in 1962, coinciding with the beginnings of two innovative cultural projects in the Catalan language: the Edigsa record label and the Noir novel collection La Cua de Palla. The graphic image of both projects, in a style that may be considered one of the forerunners of local Pop Graphic Art, was the responsibility of the Catalan designer Jordi Fornas (1927-2011). Although Fornas’s style was more stylized than what has habitually been identified as Pop Graphic Art, his designs became a sign of modernity of the new Catalan-language cultural industry, as well as a way in for the image of 1960s Europe.

The second stage, that of the full development and consolidation of Pop Graphic Art, began in 1968 with two graphic designers: the Argentinian America Sanchez (1939) and the Catalan Enric Satué (1938). Both did projects for record labels and they also participated in the launching of two publications that, over time, have become reference points in the history of Catalan graphic design: La Mosca (1968) and CAU (1970). In this new period we see a clear American influence with regard to the style used, but while America Sanchez focused on the subjects and techniques of Pop Art, Enric Satué was concerned with American Pop Graphic Art.

Lastly, the third stage began in the mid 1960s, in which Sanchez and Satué, in their development as professional designers, became aware of their relationship with the profession’s past and made use of this history in their designs. In this period America Sanchez focused on the part of popular culture that is universal and which has no local connotations, whereas Enric Satué became interested in local culture, feeling himself obliged to rescue the Catalan tradition, especially the highbrow graphic art of Noucentisme. Satué’s interest in the Catalan graphic tradition led him to develop what may be considered the indigenous version of Pop Graphic Art, which became consolidated at the end of the 1970s as a new local trend known as neo-Noucentisme. It would be developed not only by him, but also by a new generation of graphic designers such as Pilar Villuendas (1945), Josep Maria Mir (1949), Albert Isern (1940), Salvador Saura (1950) and Ramon Torrente (1951).

This article will focus on the 1960s, whereby the graphic ideas of the first two stages of Pop Graphic Art will be analysed. At the same time, and to contextualize this study, themes will be touched on such as pop culture, the characteristics of Pop Art and pop graphic art, and the pop style associated with the cultural industry in Catalan.

The context: the sixties

The arrival of the 1960s represented, for much of the Western world, the beginning of a period of economic development, with the appearance of the consumer society. This situation initially developed after the end of the Second World War and was experienced very differently if we compare the context of post-war Europe with that of the United States of America. While the continent of Europe had to face up to the difficult task of reconstruction, the USA was in a state of economic euphoria that led to the triumph of the consumer society and, therefore, the full development of the “American way of life”.

Nevertheless, once the period of reconstruction was over, at the beginning of the 1960s society and, in particular, the young people of Western Europe, wanted to put the austerity imposed during the post-war years behind them through a change of lifestyle: in fact it was a revolution in the way of living and of doing things. This phenomenon is known as the pop movement, the most significant cultural phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century.

An overview of Pop Art

As far as the art world is concerned, the 1960s is considered a unique period in the history of art thanks to the wide variety of styles that emerged and coexisted (Pop Art, Op Art, Kinetic Art and Conceptual Art, among others). It was a period of intense artistic activity in which, in the words of Hugh Adams, “[a] rise of unorthodox forms of expression”¹ was witnessed, reflecting the important social and cultural changes that were taking place in the Western world. But, of all these styles, perhaps it was Pop Art that best reflected the spirit of the decade and caused the greatest impact.

If until the mid 1950s the international art scene had been dominated by the first wave of American avant-garde art, Abstract Expressionism, considered to be the great post-war art movement (chiefly represented by Jackson Pollock), in the second half of the decade a figurative style began to appear that was the complete opposite of it. It was Pop Art, a new art form through which the world began to be seen differently and in which the production of popular culture became a work of art. Pop Art appeared as iconographical art that worked with materials that had previously been used as signs: all the products designed for mass consumption by industrial societies, besides the messages designed to make people buy them, became part of the work of art through various techniques. Pop Art may therefore be thought of as the art of industrialization and, as a result, it made a greater impact in the more advanced countries and in those where an important consumer society had developed: the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

Pop Graphic Art

In the face of British and American Pop Artists appropriating elements and techniques that up till then had belonged to graphic art, graphic designers decided to react. A new graphic style emerged, recognizable as pop, whose main features were characterized by the expressive nature of the lines. Also, in the 1960s communicative needs were very different to those before the Second World War. The things demanded by the burgeoning consumer society were very different to those in earlier periods and the market knew that it was a time when not only products had to be sold, but feelings and needs as well. Far more subjective and symbolic communicative solutions were therefore required because, in short, it was a question of selling significance. And the pop style, with the aid of the science of semiotics, was able to meet these new needs.

A new variant of modern language came into being, associated with persuasive communication and the world of advertising, far more expressive and based on a new interpretation of illustration and typography. This therefore signalled the end of the hegemony of Modernism, since the proposals of Pop graphic design were the opposite of the rationalist ideas that had been dictating the rules of international graphic design since the 1950s, from Switzerland (via the International Typographic Style) and Germany (via the Ulm School of Design).

This new formal proposal was introduced to the rest of the world in the 1960s by the United States. It was a style inherited from the modern American pioneers, which in turn reviewed and reinterpreted the history of visual communication. It was therefore rebelling against a Modernism that had shown itself to be anti-historical and opposed to tradition. Because if the pop style stood out for any one thing, it was for the revival and the reinterpretation it made of the history of visual communication. Pop graphic designers became historians (identifying the formal features of past styles) and revitalizers. They did not do this, however, by copying stylistic forms and features just to bring them back into fashion, quite the contrary: Pop designers were making a case for the past and they therefore appropriated its iconography as well as interpreting its stylistic values through the creative process.

Pop graphic design showed special interest in Art Nouveau, from which it took the voluptuousness of lines and forms, the use of gestural and calligraphic typography, and the incorporation of details as a form of decoration. It also became interested in some avant-garde forms such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Fauvism, the fantasy and the geometric shapes of Art Deco, and aspects of the traditional art of cultures like ancient Persia, India or Japan. Lastly, and just as Pop Art did, pop graphic design borrowed elements from comics, traditional folk culture and popular culture for its graphics.

All this shaped a style characterized by the use of illustration, and not photography, as the element transmitting ideas and concepts, advocating a renewed form of illustration after it had been ousted by photography in the late 1930s. It used typography as if it were a visual form, and experimented with the shapes of letters, even if, by doing so, they became impossible to read. The text thus became an image and the designer was rebelling against the rules of traditional typography. It also used a wide chromatic range. All these elements combined dynamically, loosely, giving as a result graphic solutions that not only met informative and communicative needs (the principal objective of the Swiss style) but which moreover transmitted feelings and fulfilled the expressive needs of the designers themselves.

The chief representatives of American Pop Graphic Art were Herb Lubalin, the Push Pin Studios (led by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast) and Chermayeff & Geismar. In the late 1960s, in San Francisco psychedelic poster artists like Víctor Moscoso (1936) and Wes Wilson (1937) also contributed a world of voluptuous shapes and hallucinogenic colours, in their attempts to depict the “psychedelic experience”.

In Europe, graphic art with expressive lines opposed to the Swiss style advanced along two different paths: on the one hand, led by the British cultural industry, in the form of record sleeves, magazine covers and posters of pop groups; on the other, and unlike American pop, graphic art of expressive brushstrokes developed not to meet the needs of the consumer society, quite the contrary, associated as it was with the counter-cultural social movements of the 1960s. This was the case in Poland, where after the Second World War graphic art, through which ideas, not goods, were marketed, emerged to serve the state and communist society. At the same time, with the crisis of May 1968, countries like France and the Netherlands followed the Polish tradition and used a similar style in the graphic art of protest.

Pop Graphic Art for the cultural industry in Catalan

After two decades marked by autarky and economic stagnation, to a certain extent there began a period of economic development in Spain in the 1960s. This period is known as that of desarrollismo (development policy), in which the consumer society burst in on the scene and slight changes took place in the way of life and customs of part of Spanish society. However, and despite the economic development, the regime made no attempt whatsoever to introduce political liberalization, just the opposite in fact: its signs of identity continued to include repressive actions and measures. Despite the fact that during this period the Franco regime’s principal goal was to try to eliminate all signs of fascism and show itself to be a democracy on the outside with the aim of obtaining economic considerations, the step was never taken. The political regime did not budge and maintained a repressive attitude to social and political freedoms, to the detriment of the modernization of the country’s customs.

Notwithstanding this, the 1960s was for Barcelona an interesting period in social, professional and cultural fields, in which ideas, trends and customs came in, totally at odds with the prevailing Francoist prudishness. If on an international level London had been the epicentre of Pop movement since the start of the decade, Barcelona shaped up as the Pop enclave of Catalonia in the middle of the decade, despite being conditioned by this political context, wholly unfavourable to any signs of modernity.

One of the factors that encouraged a breath of fresh air in Barcelona life was the revival of a cultural industry in Catalan, which had been silenced by the Franco regime since the Civil War. It began in the late 1950s, with the appearance of the magazine Serra d’Or (1959), writing about general-interest and cultural topics, published by the Abbey of Montserrat. The new cultural initiatives in Catalan included publishing houses, such as Edicions 62 (1961), and record labels, like Edigsa (1961) and Concèntric (1965). They all shared a common goal: the wish to oppose Francoism and its cultural prescriptions.

The year 1961 witnessed the founding of Òmnium Cultural (a Catalan cultural association), the Edicions 62 publishing house, and the Edigsa record label. With them the idea was to achieve the normalization of the use of Catalan as the vehicular language of culture, and to promote Catalan national culture and identity. Edicions 62 published all its books in Catalan (and still does today), while Edigsa was created to release the records of the Nova Cançó singer-songwriters.² However, the first step in the normalization of the use of Catalan, a language prohibited by the state because it undermined the unity of Spain, had been taken in 1959 by the magazine Serra d’Or.³ The reason the state did not oppose its publication in 1961 was to present the regime in a softer light. Notwithstanding that, censorship still existed.

In 1966 the Ministry of Information and Tourism enacted the Press Law, with which it intended to prove that it was opening up. It was an ambiguous law, however, as the proclaimed right to free information was rapidly countered by an increase in press offences. Nevertheless, and despite its limitations, the Catalan publishing business grasped the law with both hands. New publications appeared, like La Mosca (1968) and CAU (1970), and several small publishing houses were created, including Barral Editores (1969), Tusquets Editores (1969) and Anagrama (1969). They were all projects with an innovative editorial line and a modern image.

From the point of view of its graphic image, the renewed cultural industry did not appear initially as a unitary aesthetic project. As it became consolidated, however, its formal language began moving closer and closer to the pop style and away from the lyrical abstractionism so typical of the 1950s. The trend began in about 1962 thanks to the work of Jordi Fornas for Edicions 62, Edigsa and Serra d’Or: Pop imagery and techniques were beginning to be seen in books, record sleeves and magazines. By about 1968 Pop style had become the formal language of Catalan cultural resistance, being driven by the social crisis of May 1968 and by the graphic ideas coming out of the UK (chiefly with The Beatles’ album covers) and the USA (Pop Art, pop graphic art and psychedelia). Graphic designers America Sanchez and Enric Satué used it in publications, book covers and record sleeves, while Carlos Rolando did the same in graphic artwork for advertising.

Stage one: Jordi Fornas, the precursor of Catalan Pop Graphic Art

The first book published by Edicions 62 appeared on the market on 23 April 1962 and with this, a new publishing concept was set in motion created with the aim of achieving the normalization of the educated use of Catalan. With a studied editorial line, directed from 1964 by Josep Maria Castellet, the new publishing house was characterized by the edition of interesting collections, like for example El Balancí or La Cua de Palla; by translating the great international authors into Catalan; and also by having a carefully created graphic image, the responsibility of the designer Jordi Fornas. The launch of the collection La Cua de Palla (the first collection of detective novels published in Catalan) in 1963 captured the arrival of modern ways in the Catalan publishing sector⁴ thanks, chiefly, to the design of its covers, which became “one of the most incendiary examples of graphic modernity to appear in the arid wastes of Francoism during the 1960s”.⁵ Jordi Fornas (Barcelona, 1927-2011) began his professional career as a draughtsman in the advertising department of the Meyba textile company, under the artistic direction of Sandro Bocola.⁶ Later, and together with Bocola and others, Fornas was one of the founders of the Pentágono agency, noted for using Swiss design and encouraging the renewal of black-and-white photography. After his foray in the advertising world, in the early 1960s Fornas became the head of graphic art at Edicions 62, Enciclopèdia Catalana, Edigsa and Serra d’Or. In the words of Dr Anna Calvera, Fornas “defined the concept of the book that was just right for the new publishing industry”,⁷ creating a style of his own that was highly influential in its day.

Fornas’s style, for the Noir novel collection La Cua de Palla, was notable for the perfect visual integration of text and image, whereby he achieved the maximum formal coherence. For the text he chose Helvetica, made available to graphic design studios by Letraset, the maker of transferrable letters that had just come onto the Spanish market. For the image, he always used collages of totally contrasting black-and-white photographs (burnt photographs), which enabled him to run off all the covers in one ink on yellow cardboard. It may thus be said that Fornas did not use graphic elements any different to those of the Swiss style (sans-serif lettering and objective photography with clear visual information); it was the treatment he gave them, however, that distanced him from the strict rationalist aesthetic.

With respect to the lettering of the text, Fornas took several liberties, such as minimum spacing, overlapping letters or shafts, accents placed manually. One of the most characteristic features was the arrangement of the text on the composed page in relation to the image. There was no pre-established place for the book’s title, the author’s name or the collection’s logo. Every cover appeared as a visual game in which the burnt photograph marked the space left for the text. Where Fornas showed great skill was in the combination of the text and the image, a procedure applied previously by László Moholy-Nagy in the Bauhaus period.

With regard to the photographs, his style was innovative in three respects: the technique used, the content, and the image transmitted through them. The subject matter of the photos was directly related to the title, but Fornas chose a setting different to the period in which the story took place; they all reflected the contemporary period, a reality very different to the Spanish one. In this way the designer showed Catalan society European pop culture. In his photos you could see a new way of life, a modern approach that the gauche divine was adopting.⁸ The photographs sometimes seemed to have been taken from the cinema: Hollywood Noir, British free cinema and French nouvelle vague. All this made the collection very contemporary.

For the colour scheme, black and yellow were used. Two-colour covers became a sign of the collection’s identity. Black was used for the text and the image, with yellow as the background colour. The choice of these two colours was no accident. It was a tribute to the two great Noir novel series published in Europe in the twentieth century, which had become a point of reference for readers. These were I Libri Gialli (Yellow Books), published in Italy by Mondadori in 1929, the reason why the word “yellow” was used to refer to the detective genre in Italy, and Série Noire, published in France by Gallimard in 1945, and which has also become the name of the genre in French and Spanish. The launch of La Cua de Palla in black and yellow was a tribute to its European predecessors (and perhaps also to the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, published since 1951 and whose cover was also designed in these colours).

For all these reasons, La Cua de Palla appeared as a collection styled on the most modern international graphic art trends. It would be wrong, however, to call Fornas’s style Pop, in accordance with the characteristics that were mentioned above. It is more correct to consider it as a precedent of Pop, a gateway to the European pop style, and one of the first examples of the new ways in the publishing business.

Stage two: Pop Graphic Art and the record business: Edigsa, Concèntric and Nova Cançó

In Barcelona in the 1960s, at around the time Nova Cançó appeared a new stage began as regards the graphic style used with records: the sleeves became as important as the discs they contained. Up to then, the graphics used in the Spanish record business had been thoroughly traditional in style, basically a colour photograph of the performers and the lettering announcing the title of the record. Nevertheless, from the moment they were created the new Catalan record labels, which had appeared in the 1960s, were interested in offering a modern and innovative graphic image, as was the case in the English-speaking market. British and American sounds set the trend in this period, whereas French chanson had been the reference point of the international intelligentsia in the 1950s. Although the music changed initially with Elvis Presley, when the Beatles burst onto the scene in 1962 it was the graphic concept of record production that changed.

The Edigsa label – Editora General S.A. – was founded on 29 May 1961 as the first label releasing records in Catalan only and the principal platform for the spread of Nova Cançó. The label bosses wished to give it a novel image, so they hired Jordi Fornas as its official designer.⁹ For this work, Fornas went for a style similar to the one he had used on La Cua de Palla. On each record he used a newspaper-style black-and-white photo, taking up the whole area of the composition with it. Just because of this choice, the label’s record sleeves took on a new look that distinguished them from other Spanish ones. It is also important to point out that he had the help of some of the best-known Catalan photographers of the time taking the photos,¹⁰ before subsequently applying resources like cutting the image out, high contrast, and so on. For the composition of the text, Fornas applied a clear dynamism (he composed moving typography, diagonally, vertically, inverted).

However, the characteristic traits of Pop style did not appear until the late 1960s, and not in either Catalan or Spanish records: they arrived thanks to the international hits of British and American pop music. In the words of the journalist and writer Julià Guillamon, “pop represents the entry of foreign models. In some ways it is a form of cultural colonialism, but at the same time it generates a typically local version”.11

In 1964 The Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night. Its design was wholly innovative, graphically speaking,¹² influenced by American Pop Art. In 1967, another Beatles cover, for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in this case by the British Pop Artist Peter Blake, marked a turning point in record sleeve design. The cover, a collage full of all sorts of different personalities in a “floral composition”, became a reference point for the history of graphic design. That same year, but in the United States, another record with a groundbreaking cover arrived, The Velvet Underground & Nico, designed by Andy Warhol. Warhol’s graphic solution was completely different from Blake’s: the silk-screen printed image of a banana dominated the composition on a white background, on which the artist’s signature also appeared. Pop Art had burst into the record business, and it did so in a big way.

Also in 1967, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits was released. Inside the record sleeve there was a poster (of which six million copies were printed) designed by Milton Glaser, which has now become one of the icons of the history of graphic design. Glaser resorted to a drawing of voluptuous forms in a reinterpretation of the organic line, which was a clear revision of Art Nouveau.

Finally, in 1968, once again The Beatles, and their cartoon film Yellow Submarine, confirmed the aesthetic innovation that was taking place internationally. Yellow Submarine became a landmark of film animation and pop culture. Its artistic director, German designer Heinz Edelmann (1934-2009), also used a neo-Art Nouveau style in the creation of a world of voluptuous forms and bright colours, with which he represented the group’s music and spirit.

All these new graphic ideas became a source of inspiration and, occasionally, models to be imitated for international graphic design. The Edigsa label was not oblivious to this and decided to choose Pop style. Some of the covers were by Fornas himself;¹³ others were commissioned to young designers who were beginning to make a name for themselves in the field of Catalan graphic design. Clear evidence of this were the promotional graphics and the covers of the records by the group La Trinca. Tots som pops (1969)¹⁴ was the first of a series of their records whose sleeves were designed in Pop style (also a sign of the group’s identity).

By La Trinca, we should mention the covers for Festa Major (1970) and A collir pebrots (1970). In both we see an important change of style, a clear influence of American graphic art, Pop Art and psychedelia. For Festa Major, Fornas combined the burnt image with the adaptation of the typography to organic Neo-Liberty forms, which dominated the composition as a whole. Due to the style of the drawing and the bright colours used, the result showed clear a psychedelic influence. On the other hand, the cover of A collir pebrots, designed by America Sanchez, was composed of a central illustration on a white background, the drawing of two red peppers and the group’s name in calligraphic lettering. The end composition recalls what Warhol had done for the Velvet Underground cover, not because of the technique used, similar to Push Pin Style drawing, but for the composition and the elements used. In this case America Sanchez replaced the banana with two peppers (in Catalan the pepper has same sexual double meaning as the banana). Other outstanding covers were Trincar i riure (1971), designed by Fornas, with an illustration by the draughtsman Cesc; Xauxa (1972), designed by Estudi Fats with an idea reminiscent of the comic; and Opus 10 (1976), by designer and photographer Francesc Guitart.

Fig. 1 Record sleeves designed for La Trinca by America Sanchez (A collir pebrots), Estudi Fats (Xauxa) and Francesc Guitart (Trempera matinera and És que m’han dit). Private collection.

Edigsa was not the only modernizer of the graphics of Catalan music. In 1965 a new record label, Concèntric, was created. It was the result of the split in Edigsa. Founded by Ermengol Passola and the writer Josep Maria Espinàs, Concèntric was created with the same initial vocation as the former, but showing special interest in reaching a younger, larger audience. It therefore promoted new musicians who were composing music with British and American rhythms – rock, pop, jazz – as well as Nova Cançó groups that had come with Espinas to the new label. At the same time, in 1965 and to help to promote their acts, Concèntric set up the live music venue La Cova del Drac¹⁵ in Carrer Tuset.16

Concèntric wanted to be seen as a modern label. Therefore, its image had to be in keeping with those principles and with the look that was dominating the international record label scene, whether pop, conceptual or psychedelic art. Proof of this was the design of its graphic identity,¹⁷ the same as that of La Cova del Drac, the geometrized image of a dragon (drac in Catalan), one of the symbols of Catalan iconography.

To design it, the company called on musician Pau Riba (Palma de Mallorca, 1948), one of the members of Grup de Folk (on the new label and the best exponent of progressive music), who had studied graphics at the Massana School in Barcelona. A versatile personality, artistically very restless, he was responsible for the company’s graphic image. Ignoring the paucity of financial resources, Riba went for risky aesthetic images, only halted at the production stage. For the cover of Taxista (1967), Riba’s solo LP, he used a photograph of himself playing the guitar lying down. The brightly coloured image was also notable for the angle from which it had been taken. He fitted the text into the space left free by the image, just as Wes Wilson was doing on psychedelic posters, adapting the lettering to wavy organic shapes, and also using bright colours. His ideas became increasingly conceptual at the beginning of the 1970s.¹⁸ Representative of this were his designs for singer Jaume Sisa and his LP Diòptria (1970 and 1972).19

But Pau Riba was not the only person in charge of Concèntric’s design; other designers worked with the label, as had happened at Edigsa. One of them was the Catalan comic artist Enric Sió (1942-1998),²⁰ who designed the cover of the record Visca l’amor (1968) by Guillermina Motta, the heroine and leading character in some of his comics.

Lastly, in the late 1970s a new Catalan record label appeared: Pu-put. Founded in 1977 by the music producer Antoni Parera, it was not as influential or important as the two previous ones, due probably to its short-lived existence, as it folded in 1981. Pu-put released new singer-songwriters from Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, attaching special interest to the revival of folk themes and Catalan musical revue. For the label’s graphic design and all of its output, Parera contacted the Barcelona designer Enric Satué.

The development and consolidation of Pop Graphic Art by America Sanchez

Juan Carlos Pérez Sánchez²¹ (Buenos Aires, 1939) moved to Barcelona from Argentina in 1965. He was one of the Argentinian designers who in the mid 1960s and early 1970s decided to leave their homeland and establish themselves in Barcelona, where over the years they became seminal figures on the design scene in Barcelona. It was a group of whom Oriol Pibernat says, “in this collective endeavour that is Barcelona and Catalan design, the contribution of these designers may be regarded as fundamental”.22

Self-taught, America Sanchez began his professional career working as a draughtsman in two advertising agencies in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Barnum and Agens.²³ He later worked as a free-lance graphic designer. This first stage of his career coincided with a period of intense cultural activity in Argentina. The 1960s were, in the opinion of Rubén Fontana, “years of revolution in the art and the vanguard of design in Argentina”.²⁴ They were years of industrial and cultural modernization, the basis for the transformations necessary for graphic design to become a professional category. Dr Verónica Devalle upholds the hypothesis that two of the fundamental events that helped to professionalize the discipline of graphic design in Argentina were the graphic art produced by the Agens agency and the creation of the Department of Graphic Design at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT). Indeed, the ITDT, a contemporary arts centre founded in 1963 as a showcase and transmitter of the latest international artistic and graphic tendencies, showed particular interest in pop culture. It therefore seems logical to think that when he arrived in Spain America Sanchez brought with him a great deal of cultural baggage and knowledge of the international artistic and graphic scene.

America arrived in Europe dazzled by its modernity, more concerned at that time by formal rather than conceptual considerations. His main interest lay in exploring the possibilities offered by reticulate space. After reading the book The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems, written by the Swiss designer J. Müller-Brockmann in 1961, his passion for the grid pattern began, along with his interest in the Swiss style. In this respect, working with the Swiss-Catalan designer Yves Zimmermann shortly after he arrived in Barcelona was decisive for him. It is no surprise, therefore, that his first graphic proposals in Spain corresponded to a rational style (geometric figures, sans-serif lettering and reticulate space), like for example the graphic symbol designed in 1967 for the Eina school of design.

Eina marked an important stage in the Argentinian’s career. In 1967, Zimmermann asked him to join the school’s group of founders and, in this capacity, he went on to take an active part in the new educational project as head of the Department of Graphics, “where he was to develop a pedagogy of the image open to art, culture and society”.²⁵ He also applied that same pedagogical approach to his work, which not long afterwards was already showing a great diversity of graphic and stylistic ideas. From that moment onwards, America no longer concerned himself only with formal questions but also with conceptual ones: experimenting also with diagramation, drawing, typography, photography and anything that might make effective communication possible. The publication La Mosca was the ideal project with which to begin this new phase.

In 1968, coinciding with the second edition of the Aesthetics Seminar at the Eina school, a new publishing project was created to which the majority of its participants contributed. It was a magazine being launched by publishing houses Edicions 62, Lumen and Seix Barral for the purpose of advertising their new publications, as well as the subjects dealt with in the course of the seminar. Issue number one of La Mosca (The Fly), the name by which this publication came to be known, appeared in November 1968. Writers and journalists such as Josep Maria Castellet, Julio Cortázar, Félix de Azúa and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán contributed to it; the person in charge of the design was America Sanchez.

La Mosca marked a turning point in Catalan graphic design. Not so much a magazine, more an information leaflet, it had an innovative format and was produced in black and white.²⁶ It was perhaps the cover that made the biggest impact. It consisted of an illustration in the middle, the very realistic drawing of a fly in black and white taking up much of the space. The drawing of the fly became the badge that appeared on every cover, so much so that the magazine was named after the insect. On the first cover the fly was alone and very large; on the next one it appeared again, but with a small excrement-like blotch added. The formula “fly and excrement” was repeated with variations on several covers. In issues four and eight considerable changes were introduced. In issue four, the fly became very small and occupied a small space in the top left-hand corner; the main illustration now consisted of a hand working an insecticide spray can. In this case, the illustration was not by America, and as for its meaning, it seems that the editorial team wished to reflect some attempt to annihilate the fly or, what amounts to the same thing, the attempt by the authorities to close the publication down. The fly’s end, however, was not caused by a fly spray but by a razorblade that cut off its head. This was the main illustration that appeared on the cover of the last issue, which came out in May 1970.

Due to its texture and the lack of definition of the outlines, the technique used for the drawing of the fly seems to have been the reuse of material from a printed medium that was then photocopied (a technique very common among pop artists). Its approximation to pop style could be seen even more on the covers of issues four and eight with the use of a paintbrush and Chinese ink, which gave as a result a gestural-looking drawing with quite thick outlines. Other resources typical of Pop Art used and worth mentioning were the use of spot colours, without shading or gradations; the use of stippling to fill in some parts and texture them, and the incorporation of onomatopoeia in reference to the graphic language of the comic. On the other hand, as far as the designer’s communicative intentions were concerned when he chose a fly as the magazine’s badge, and the changes that it underwent during the course of publication, these seem to be due rather to the influence of conceptual art. The fly has always been an annoying insect.

Fig. 2 Covers of the magazine La Mosca, issues 1, 4 and the last one, designed by America Sanchez.

In May 1970, money problems forced the magazine to cease publication. However, despite its short life and few issues, La Mosca has become a point of reference in the history of Catalan graphic design and a bibliographical rarity hard to find.

After the period of La Mosca, America Sanchez’s style moved farther away from Swiss rigour (although he did not dispense with it completely), opting for a far more expressive style in which he showed a clear influence of Pop Art (techniques and subject matter) and popular culture (the production of mass culture). As a graphic designer, from that moment onwards America Sanchez’s profile was very close to that of the Pop Artist, but applied in his case to the creation of graphic projects. Like the Pop artists, the Argentine designer became interested in the iconography of popular culture, that is, material originating in mass culture, which had been used previously as a sign and which he reused in a new discourse and with an innovative formal style – a series of images that had been part of his life in Argentina (children’s books, his mother’s magazines, Argentinian comics), along with material newly incorporated after his arrival in Barcelona. And so he also made use of the same mass media that Pop Art raided for the material, the subjects and, very often too, the ways of depicting them.

One of the main themes of Pop Art was popular personalities per se (film actors, singers, musicians, politicians), people who became popular through the mass media (films, television and magazines) and who went on to become part of the popular imagination, more often than not becoming legends (pop culture may be seen as a myth-maker).

And all pop personalities are nothing more than the capitalist exploitation of a false dream of civilization that is collapsing.27

In the 1960s and 1970s, America Sanchez also resorted to iconic personalities of popular culture, featuring them on some of his posters; they could be international figures, like for example John F. Kennedy (also present in some works by Pop Artists such as J. Rosenquist, R. Hamilton and R. Rauschenberg),²⁸ or from Argentinian popular culture, for example Perón, Evita or Carlos Gardel.²⁹ Furthermore, both for their choice and their arrangement, establishing curious relationships and analogies between the personalities, America showed himself to be very close to the attitude of Pop artists, who mixed up all kinds of popular figures and treated them equally, regardless of their origins or social class. For example, Sanchez did not hesitate to place together in the same composition Jesus Christ, Prince Charles of England, the actress Gloria Swanson and El Lute (a famous Spanish criminal from the 1970s).³⁰ This was very similar to what Peter Blake had done in 1967 in the design of the cover for The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, putting together over 70 personalities from very diverse fields (mixing highbrow ones with figures of popular culture).

Later, America Sanchez focused his attention on the icons and symbols of the city of Barcelona. One of the clearest examples is that of the mural that in 1971 he dedicated to Copito de Nieve, the albino gorilla in Barcelona Zoo, composed of 240 identical postcards (179 cm x 174 cm) with the image of the gorilla that symbolized the zoo and was at the same time one of the icons of the city. For many citizens Barcelona’s taxis have iconic value similar to that of Copito de Nieve. America devoted more than one work to this form of public transport.³¹ We should mention here that the Argentinian designer has had close connections with taxis ever since he was a boy. His father was a taxi driver and he still remembers the stories that he told after finishing his daily shift. This is where his interest in taxis in general, and in those of Barcelona in particular, comes from. Because just like some Pop artists, Peter Blake for example, in much of his work America Sanchez uses material from his collections (objects that he incorporates in graphic projects using the collage technique); and also material that comes from his personal imagination and which has great sentimental and nostalgic value. For him family origins and roots are very important and they are therefore present in much of his graphic work, whether professional projects or self-commissions. America Sanchez thus offers us a profile as a graphic designer that in actual fact has many similarities with that of a Pop artist.

Regarding the techniques, as was mentioned in the previous paragraph America Sanchez has used collage in many of his projects and self-commissions, just as in their day Pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg or the British Eduardo Paolozzi did. This technique was invented in 1909 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Later, German Dadaist artists used it in many of their graphic projects (as in the case of Kurt Schwitters and John Heartfield, the latter considered the father of the photo-montage). In fact photo-montage is one of the techniques that the Argentine designer still enjoys the most today; he shows great skill in the creation of collages, incorporating a large repertoire of images (the majority of them are photographs taken by him, others are from the family album and, occasionally, they are photos found in the rubbish, by unknown photographers)³² before working on them graphically, achieving surprising results.

Lastly, once the period of Pop Art influence had passed, or precisely due to its influence, America Sanchez turned his attention to traditional folk culture (which comes from the people’s customs and is in the process of forming their traditions), especially that addressed to the working class. In America’s case, this change of interest coincided with the moment when Pop Art went out of fashion everywhere, the mid 1970s. It was then when, in his role as a pop designer and, therefore, in his reading of history, he became interested in what was universal, without local connotations, popular art without frontiers and hard to identify, precisely because it is the product of an industry that standardizes people and their tastes by modernizing them. At that moment America Sanchez, a designer who cared about the profession’s past, made a reading of history in terms of universality and timelessness, not based on localisms. It may be said that what truly interests America is the expression emerging in the industrial context without highbrow mediation, and without him worrying too much about whether these art forms have to be created by an industry or by the people. America adopted the role of the designer who values the graphic work of his predecessors for the strictly graphic, technical elements (such as drawing, calligraphy, colour processing) or for the tools used, and for the conceptualization of each piece, leaving aside all other considerations that are not technical or conceptual. All this coincides with the third stage of the development of Catalan Pop Graphic Art, in the mid 1970s, when an indigenous version of this style emerged, based on Enric Satué’s interpretation of the history of the Catalan graphic tradition.

Enric Satué: from the influence of American Pop Graphic Art to the creation of an indigenous version of Pop

Enric Satué (Barcelona, 1938) is one of the most prestigious Catalan graphic designers, nationally and internationally. His professional career began after he finished his college education. He graduated with a qualification to be a Teacher of Drawing from the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de Sant Jordi (now the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona) in 1968. Since then he has done projects that cover all the specialities of the graphic discipline, in particular editorial design, poster art and corporate identity (editorial design being the speciality that has given him most satisfaction). He has designed over 5,000 book covers throughout his career.

In 1970, after working for two years as a draughtsman in a couple of advertising agencies, Satué opened his own studio, thanks in part to the project commissioned to him by the Quantity Surveyors’ and Technical Architects’ Association of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. It was to redesign the association’s publication, the journal CAU, in its new period (“the design project of my life”),³³ whose importance gave him the opportunity to establish himself on his own and create his own design studio.

One of the characteristics of Satué’s work in this early professional period is the influence that modern American graphic art had on his style, particularly Pop. Satué came into contact with American graphic design through the few design journals that reached Spain in those years, but mainly thanks to the trips he made to the USA. This enabled him to get experience in the field of the work of the Push Pin Studios, whose style, known as Push Pin Style, exerted a clear influence on Satué’s, from both a formal point of view and due to the resources used. This led him to eventually formulate a new graphic language based on the re-adaptation of some local past styles, which in time became an indigenous version of Pop.

The first of the major projects done by Satué in which one can clearly see the influence of American pop graphic art, Push Pin Style and also Pop Art, was the design of CAU (Construcción. Arquitectura. Urbanismo), a technical journal published by the Quantity Surveyors’ and Technical Architects’ Association of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. This publication may be considered, along with La Mosca, one of the most innovative of the time from the formal and editorial points of view. Indeed, from the first issue, which appeared in April 1970, the journal became one of the most outstanding publications of the decade, not just for the treatment of its contents but also for its layout. CAU was a field laboratory for Satué, in which he showed his great skill in drawing, great ingenuity for visual games and a good mastery of typographic composition and mise-en-page. Satué was responsible for its design from 1970 to 1974, the moment the journal entered a new period.

Coming out every two months, “CAU was a publication that went a lot further than an association journal, a journal of quantity surveyors, technical architects, urban planners, designers”.³⁴ Edited by the president of the association, from the start it had an important editorial team and a large number of contributors. Apart from the sections related to the association’s professional field, from the start the journal had a series of regular sections devoted to many other disciplines unconnected with it.

In the 12 years it was published, CAU went through three different phases according to the political leanings of the elected president of the association, which caused changes in both the management and in the orientation and the editorial team. The first phase, from 1970 to 1974, stood out for the criticism of the state of the profession and, very especially, for the reflection on the country’s socio-political situation. Satué took an active part in this phase, although his design remained almost until the end.³⁵ With an editorial line that was combative and critical of the official authorities, the aim was not just to promote the profession and criticize architecture and building, but the growth model based on urban planning speculation as well. The use of the journal as a political tool was one of the barbs aimed at CAU from a sector of the profession that considered it too culture-based and not professional enough. And they were right, as the project was created with this objective in mind. In the words of Romà Gubern, “access to the association and the publication of the journal was a strategy of the PSUC to go about monopolizing cultural fronts”.³⁶ At the end of the 1970s, one of the avenues of political action initiated by the PSUC was to manage to place party intellectuals in the professional associations.37

Thinking about the design, Satué understood that he had to design a journal that accorded visually with the editors’ protesting stance. Of the two possible options, Swiss style and Pop style, he went for the latter. CAU became the ideal medium in which to experiment and apply the Pop Art idiom. The journal was laid out in a two-column grid, with a mostly white page and very little presence of colour. The interior was in one ink, although on a few occasions it did include a second one, which could be metallized. But Satué’s most important contribution was the treatment of the typography, the illustration and the combination of both (perfectly integrated, à la Push Pin Style). When devising the headline lettering, Satué explored the possibilities of typography as an element of graphic expressiveness (as Herb Lubalin had been doing since the late 1950s), occasionally resorting to fantasy lettering from the Letraset catalogue, or doing the text himself. The expressive power of his shapes was increased by the application of large-size lettering, with which he took up much of the page.

With regard to his treatment of the illustration, in the different issues of CAU there are collages, photomontages, comic strips and outline drawings (techniques and resources much used in the magazine Push Pin Graphic). Satué liked the same technique used by Fornas in the photos on the covers of La Cua de Palla, so he used it too. But his most notable contribution was the composition of the photomontages, where he clearly showed the influence that Pop Art exerted over him at that time. In the same image it was possible to see Hollywood film stars interacting with icons of Catalan culture, combinations of personalities and symbols that were a good example of Satué’s sense of humour, very much in keeping with the Push Pin Style and Pop Art.

Of all the issues of the journal we have to mention issue 2-3, in September 1970, a monographic dedicated to industrial design. Satué took the liberty of inventing a new³⁸ version of snakes and ladders, which he renamed “Design in the capitalist field”. With it he aimed to criticize the capitalist system and industrial design because, in the words of the critic Alexandre Cirici, “the current purpose of design in the capitalist field is to increase the consumer’s entropy, dependence and servitude, stimulated and flattered in the most intimate hungers”.³⁹ Satué surprised people with this game, not only because of its graphic resolution, but also for the irony contained in the different moves of the game. He managed to combine ideological criticism with his great visual culture and his more worldly side, a way of doing things that had characterized the entire gauche divine.

Drawing was present on the covers and inside the journal, where it was used to illustrate the contents. It was generally synthetic drawing, of stylized forms outlined by a thin black line. Like the photos, the drawings were done in black and white (except on the covers), with the use of spot colours (black or greys, but without gradations). He occasionally resorted to stippling for texture, with which he filled in some of the areas of the drawing. All of these were procedures typical of both pop graphic art and international Pop Art.

Fig. 3 Covers and inside pages of the journal CAU, designed by Enric Satué, 1970-1974. In order, covers of the issues devoted to industrial design, graphic design and tourism. Part of the inside page with the photo-novel about Joan Miró. Private collection.

Lastly, the controversial issue number nine, published in October 1971, deserves a special mention. It was a monographic issue dedicated to the state of graphic design in Barcelona. To begin with, the presentation was in itself intriguing: the drawing of a heart shot through by Cupid’s arrow (as the bark of tree trunks was marked in years gone by), adorned with a ribbon that featured the slogan “diseño gráfico I love you”. The issue created a stir because of the articles that Joaquim Capellades, Ferran Cartes and Satué himself wrote in which they analysed the Spanish graphic design scene, pointing out the virtues but above all the defects. With them, the debate existing at the heart of the profession became evident, and this blew up in a crisis between the different opposing groups of designers. This led to the relaunching of the Grafistes FAD association.

Besides being one of the works that Satué feels most proud of, CAU has become one of the most interesting projects of Catalan and Spanish graphic design, innovative in the purest American influenced pop style. The project contributed, moreover, to achieving the PSUC’s objective, that of expressing its opposition to the Franco regime through the journals of the professional associations.

In 1971, Satué once again showed his ingenuity with the collage technique in the design for the poster promoting the Los Heterodoxos collection by Tusquets Editores. For this occasion, Satué opted for a fresh, new design, different to what had been seen up to then on the Catalan and Spanish graphic art scene. He designed an overtly pop-style poster, a highly Surrealist collage, in which the heads of some of the icons of international pop culture of the time could be seen planted like cabbages: Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx, Marlon Brando, Jimi Hendrix, and others, all mixed up with historical figures of the stature of Goya or Cervantes, as well as left-wing political thinkers like Karl Marx. The designer thus used a concept very similar to the one Peter Blake had used on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s, although resolved differently. The Push Pin Studios were doing something similar on some of the pages of the Push Pin Graphic, and so was America Sanchez (as I mentioned in the previous paragraphs). Lastly, Satué completed this composition with a photomontage based on the ukiyo-e entitled Behind the Waves at Kanagawa Bay, by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), placing it on the horizon of this imaginary field full of popular faces.

In the mid 1970s, in part due to the influence exerted on him by the Push Pin Studios, especially Milton Glaser (1928) and his way of reading and interpreting the history of visual communication, Satué developed a new graphic language based on the re-adaptation of the Catalan graphic tradition, from the most popular expressions of Modernisme to the most highbrow expressions of Noucentisme. Indeed, it may be considered that Satué has been one of the great protectors and disseminators of the graphic art associated with the Noucentisme cultural movement; from his revision and pop-style reinterpretation came what can be considered the indigenous version of Pop, which has been called Neo-Noucentisme.⁴⁰ Projects like the design of the covers of the Biblioteca de Divulgación Política collection (1976) by the publishing house La Gaya Ciencia or the design of the graphic identity and the covers of the records released by the Pu-Put label (1977) are good examples of it.

Enric Satué worked for the publishing house La Gaya Ciencia on several of the publications that this company launched. Founded in 1970 by Rosa Regás (a member of the gauche divine), from 1974 to 1985 he was in charge of the design of Arquitecturas Bis, an architectural journal for architects, in which he used a slightly exaggerated rationalist design, avoiding graphic experimentation. As was usual in the period, in this case the design set out to find the way of showing contempt for the inevitable advertising. In 1976 he was in charge of designing the Biblioteca de Divulgación Política, a collection of pocket books in which important personalities in Spanish political life analysed and discussed a range of subjects, from the different kinds of state to the various political ideologies. The collection was a best-seller in a society eager for political education and democracy, just after the death of the dictator and before the political transition began. The design that Satué came up with for the covers contributed to its success especially. In them he managed to translate the contents of the different articles into iconic language, through a brightly coloured synthetic drawing, once more along the lines of the Push Pin Style. As he had done in the photomontages and collages in CAU, he showed great skill and a sense of humour when composing the illustrations, on this occasion using graphic elements from local tradition, but in an updated version.⁴¹ An example of his irony is the cover of the book Cuáles son los partidos políticos de Cataluña (The Political Parties in Catalonia), in which the main figure in the illustration is a caricature of Francesc Macià, the first president of the autonomous government during the Second Republic. He is dressed in a tailcoat, the suit worn by gentlemen, and espadrilles, the footwear of the common people.

These covers signalled a change in Satué’s way of reading the history of design and with this the third stage of Catalan Pop Graphic Art began. From then on, as I said above, he undertook a task of rediscovering the indigenous graphic tradition. He began by focusing on Modernisme, gradually moving towards the graphic expressions of the draughtsmen associated with Noucentisme, before finally concentrating on highbrow Noucentista graphic art. From being interested in the graphic art of magazines, caricatures, labels and old popular advertisements, as the Pop artist he was, Satué increasingly leant towards the more highbrow expressions of local graphic art, created according to the aesthetic postulates of the cultural movement promoted by the civilized Catalan political right at the beginning of the century. Neoclassical and Latinate, Noucentisme advocated expressive sobriety, precision, serenity, order and clarity, in other words, a central box and humanist roman lettering. This interest of Satué’s in Noucentisme and its rediscovery in the design world drove him to develop what may be considered the home-grown version of Pop. His was an important commitment that, at the end of the 1970s, consolidated itself as a new local trend, Neo-Noucentisme, which would later be developed by other designers like Pilar Villuendas (1945), Josep M. Mir (1949), Salvador Saura (1950) and Ramon Torrente (1951).

Besides representing the recovery of cultured Catalan graphic art in books and also representing the revival of popular graphic art applied to the poster, by the end of the 1970s this new Catalan Pop after Satué was also at the service of the political discourse and the demands of a society that was advancing towards democracy, providing the new local and regional democratic institutions with an image.

By way of conclusion

The third stage of Catalan pop graphic art developed in the middle of the 1970s, when America Sanchez and Enric Satué became aware of their relationship with design’s past and began to use history as an approach for the practice of design and the construction of the discipline. And it is precisely in this way of reading and addressing the history of the profession where important differences emerge between them. America focused on the part of popular culture that is universal and has no local connotations, and he often resorted to using this image, familiar (ancient or modern) but hard to identify. Satué, on the other hand, always went for an image originating in local culture, feeling himself obliged to rescue his own tradition and to give it its rightful place in general history.

This was the time when the collections that both designers had created over the years played an important role (as did the above-mentioned Peter Blake and Milton Glaser). But if obvious differences exist between them in their approach, reading and interpretation of history, in their facet as collectors these differences become even more evident. Whereas in America Sanchez’s collection the sentimental aspect has prevailed, a certain nostalgia in both the tone and in the choice of material, in the case of Satué what predominates are the roots of identity and a clear ideological intent, that of a cultural activist interested in the revival of Catalan cultural heritage. In Satué’s collection one sees both the value of rediscovering an unknown past and the intention to publicize and highlight it. He therefore preferred to organize it with a more science-based system, not nostalgic or romantic, as would be the case with America Sanchez. With regard to their work as designers and the way of using the historical information included in both collections, one also detects between them clear differences when tackling similar professional projects, a question that will be analysed in forthcoming articles.

Biographical notes on the authors

ANNA CALVERA (GRACMON, Contemporary Art History and Design Research Group). She took a degree in Graphic Design (Elisava) and has a degree and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona (UB), where she lectures on Design degree, Master’s and PhD courses in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She has been the promoter of the ICDHS congresses and a member of this committee since 1999. She is also a member of the European Academy of Design (EAD), the Board of Trustees of the Design History Foundation (FHD) and the Board of the Association of Professional Designers (ADP). She has written several articles and is the editor of books on the discourse of design, and she has given courses and seminars at different universities in Barcelona, Spain, Latin America, Europe, Japan and Taipei. Lines of research: the history of local and international design; the aesthetics of design; general theoretical subjects and research in design, subjects on which she has published various studies and articles.

ISABEL CAMPI (GRACMON). She has a degree in Industrial Design (EINA, Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona); a Master’s in Design from the London School of Furniture, and a degree and a PhD in Art History from the UB’s Faculty of Fine Arts. She has taught the History of Industrial Design at the schools of design in Barcelona: Massana, Eina, IED and ESDI (Sabadell). She has made academic stays in Berlin as a lecturer and researcher. She is the author of books about the history of industrial design and she has curated exhibitions at the Museu de la Ciència i la Tècnica in Terrassa. She chairs the Design History Foundation (FHD), which she herself created, and is currently a member of the Sant Jordi Academy of Fine Arts. Lines of research: the historiography of design, and the history of the design of products and household appliances, especially electrical ones.

M. ÀNGELS FORTEA (GRACMON). She has a degree in Advertising and Public Relations from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) (1986) and a PhD from the UB’s Faculty of Fine Arts (2015). She has worked as an associate lecturer at the UAB and she has also been a lecturer at the Escola Superior d’Imatge i Disseny (IDEP) and the Escola Antoni Algueró, of the Gremi d’Indústries Gràfiques de Catalunya. She currently lectures on the History of Design at BAU, School of Design (University of Vic). Lines of research: the history of design, especially graphic design and contemporary graphics, and new technologies. Her current speciality is the study of Pop Art in design.

PAU MEDRANO (GRACMON). He has a degree in Fine Arts, in the speciality of Design, and a PhD from the UB’s Faculty of Fine Arts. He has worked for 20 years as a graphic designer and as the artistic director in design studios, advertising agencies and publishing houses such as Edicions 62, Grup Cultura 03, Sàpiens Publicacions, Oasis/Integral and RBA-Edipresse. He is currently a lecturer in Design on the Design degree course at the UB’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Lines of research: the history of graphic design; advertising poster art; European and American art directors, designers, illustrators and caricaturists in the period of Modernisme (1880-1920).

RAQUEL PELTA (GRACMON). She is a design historian, with degrees in Geography and History and Audio-visual Communication and a PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts (with honours). She is a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts. She has been the editor of Visual (Madrid) and has worked as an author on design periodicals in Spain and Latin America. She is the author of several publications on contemporary design. She currently edits the online journal Monographica, which has won the City of Barcelona Prize. Lines of research: design, particularly graphic design in the post-modern age, and the latest trends.

ESTHER SOLÉ She took a degree in Art History at the University of Lleida (2006, with honours) and was awarded a PhD in 2015. She has worked on the publication of monographic studies and has participated as a researcher in exhibitions and in the revision of the list of buildings of historical and artistic interest in the city of Lleida, and also in writing Wikipedia in Catalan. Lines of research: European art at the end of the nineteenth century and the art of the early avant-garde; the reality of the situation in the periphery. The arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and peripheral and marginal realities are her principal interests.

MÍRIAM SORIANO (GRACMON). She has a degree in Geography and History, in the speciality of Art History, from the UB (1983), and a Master’s in Cultural Management (1993). She has the certificate of research proficiency (2001). She has been the coordinator and manager of the GRACMON research group since it was created in 1987. She has worked as a researcher on publications and exhibitions and has helped to organize courses, seminars and congresses. She has taken part in Ministry of Education and Science R+D projects since 1987 and has worked as a higher specialist in projects by research groups established by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Lines of research: the history of art and design.

ALÍCIA SUÁREZ (GRACMON). She has a PhD in Art History (1987) from the UB. She has been a lecturer in Art History at the UB’s Faculties of Fine Arts and Geography and History. She has curated exhibitions such as “Art and Modernity in the Catalan-speaking Countries” (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Berlin, 1978), among others, and the landmark exhibition on Noucentisme. Notable among her publications is A Study of Rafael Benet. She is the co-author of The Architects Antoni and Ramon Puig Giralt: Noucentisme and Modernity; Noucentisme: A Project of Modernity, and Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí (Yale University Press, 2006). Lines of research: the history of Catalan art in the first third of the twentieth century.

MARIA DOLORS TAPIAS (GRACMON). She has a PhD in Fine Arts from the UB and is a tenured lecturer in Photography and Film and the dean of the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Fine Arts, holding this last post since 2016. She has published studies on photography and has worked on exhibitions on that subject. Lines of research: the history of photography; cultural strategies for the dissemination of photography; the electronic arts in Catalonia, and research into the processes of creation.

MERCÈ VIDAL (GRACMON). She has a PhD from the University of Barcelona (1989) and won the IEC’s Josep Puig i Cadafalch Prize, and the Generalitat de Catalunya’s National Prize for the Plastic Arts (1991). She has been a lecturer at the UB and at universities and schools of design in Barcelona and France and has made research stays at the Fondation Le Corbusier. She has curated exhibitions and has advised and carried out studies on the heritage of some municipalities in El Baix Llobregat. She has publications and papers at several congresses (Brighton, Havana, Istanbul, Paris, Osaka, among others). Lines of research: production in art; architecture and the arrangement of interiors; museology, and historiography.

Notes

The End of History: the Barcelona Design System Handed Down to the Twenty-first Century

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 This chapter is based on the research that I developed together with Professor Josep M. Monguet in the study “Disseny_cat: elements per a una política de disseny a Catalunya. Barcelona”: ACCIÓ CIDEM COPCA, 2007. It is a digital publication access to which varies constantly. It can currently be downloaded from the website: http://i-cell.net/2007/01/01/disseny_cat-elements- per-a-una-politica-de-disseny-a-catalunya/. The aim of that research was to diagnose the existing state of opinion in Barcelona about the present and the future of design. The concept Design System was used to modelize the situation in Barcelona as a step prior to beginning the research into the state of opinion. Here I resume the chapter “Modelització del Sistema Disseny” done using as a point of reference the Milanese methodology applied to the research “Progetto Paralleli Lombardia-Catalunya” promoted by the Reggione Lombardia and done by the Politecnico di Milano during 2005. Taking part on the Catalan side were Josep M. Monguet for the UPC and a team from the UB coordinated by Josep M. Martí. I presented a summarized version of the chapter at the sixth ICDHS (International Committee of Design History and Design Studies) congress that was held in Osaka in the autumn of 2008 (Book of Proceedings).

3 With regard to the reference theoretical model, see Politecnico di Milano. Corso di Laurea in Disegno Industriale: Sistema Design Milano/Milan Design System, Milan, Abitare Segesta, 1999, and Paola Bertola, Daniela Sangiorgi, Giuliano Simonelli (eds.), Milano distretto del design: Un sistema di luoghi, attori e relazioni al servizio dell’innovazione, Milan, Il Sole 24 ore, 2002. The interest in these studies, besides proposing a methodology for understanding the situation of the design sector in Milan and its impact on the city’s economy, lies precisely in the fact it takes into account the multiple reality of the design sector without leaving its traditionally defined professional and disciplinary sphere, but it also incorporates new occupations that the practice of the profession currently demands.

4 “A National Innovation System can be defined as the system of organisations and actors whose activities and interactions determines the innovativeness of the national economy and society”. Hanna Heikkinen, Innovation network of art and design universities in Nordic and Baltic countries. Preliminary survey, Helsinki, Designium, 2004, p. 11. See also the comparative study of national design policies in effect in 2005 in Anna Calvera and Josep M. Monguet, Disseny_cat: elements per a una política de disseny a Catalunya, ACCIÓ CIDEM COPCA, 2007, ch. I.2, and in Anna Calvera, Fabian Taranto and Stella Veciana, Políticas públicas nacionales para el aprovechamiento estratégico del diseño, Barcelona, ADP, 2008, www.adp-barcelona.com/ca/publicacions_detall.php?idn=13489.

5 “Design district: a system that flexibly integrates an extensive and multiform variety of productive activities and services”. Ezio Manzini, “La formula del successo”, in Politecnico di Milano, op. cit., 1999, p. 28. Moreover, understanding the possible links to be established between the regional design sector and the research and technological innovation system was the objective of the above-mentioned “Progetto Paralleli” research.

6 The reference points here are, on the one hand, the network of technological innovation centres coordinated by the Generalitat de Catalunya’s ACCIÓ agency, and, on the other, the facilities offered by universities, city councils and the Generalitat in the form of incubators, consultancy and entrepreneurship agencies or documentation centres, such as Barcelona Activa, for example. Highly focused on technological innovation, the Catalan research and innovation system still has close links with the academic world, but many other bodies can join.

7 An analysis of that paradigm can be found in Guy Julier, The Culture of Design. London / New Delhi, Sage, 2000 (Spanish translation: Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2010). For an analysis of the policy that inspired the City Council in the transformation of the city during the 1980s, see Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells, Local y global: la gestión de las ciudades en la era de la información, Madrid, Taurus, 1997.

8 Generalitat de Catalunya, Llibre blanc del disseny a Catalunya, Vol. I, Disseny industrial; Vol. II, Disseny gràfic, and Vol. III, Disseny artesà, Barcelona, Generalitat de Catalunya, 1984, 1984 and 1985.

9 Previous research work was also used in this case, such as, in the case of education, the Llibre blanc de la titulació de grau en disseny published by ANECA in 2004. It had been drafted by a working party formed by the 12 Spanish public Fine Art faculties and the seven Catalan schools with a BA recognized by universities. The Llibre blanc per a la titulació d’Enginyeria en disseny industrial was also used, coordinated by the UP of Valencia and published the same year.

10 These two research projects correspond to the two projects carried out by the researchers in the group GRACMON UB in the periods 2006-2009 and 2013-2015 funded by Spanish government ministries in separate R&D programmes. The respective references appear on the credits page of this e-book.

11 In Spain, in 2001 the Federació Espanyola d’Entitats per a la Promoció del Disseny (FEEPD) considered design to be an economic sector and so it studied it. It defined it as the supply of professional design services to businesses, the authorities and private individuals. However, the study only considered the supply of services, which is what it considers to be a sector, organized according to the traditional specialities of graphic design, product design, interior design and fashion design. FEEPD, El diseño en España. Estudio estratégico, Madrid, 2001, pp. 17-19.

12 Aleix Carrió, “Impacte econòmic del disseny a Catalunya”, Temes de Disseny, 2004, No. 21, Barcelona, p. 62; Josep Tresserras, Narcís Verdaguer and Xavier Espinach, Èxit de mercat i disseny, Barcelona, CIDEM, 2005. For sectors, see Xavier Ferràs, “El sector del packaging a Catalunya”, Temes de Disseny, No. 22: Disseny i Economia, Barcelona, October 2005, pp. 56-64, and DDI, Estudio del impacto económico del diseño en España, Madrid, 2006. Since then, the FAD has produced two publications devoted to “observing” the design sector in Catalonia: Propostes de futur: Emergències per al disseny, Barcelona 2005, and Realitats i oportunitats. El disseny i l’empresa a Catalunya, Barcelona, FAD, Programme El disseny en dades, 2009.

13 DDI, op. cit., 2006.

14 Seeing as this book focuses on the situation in Barcelona, the general data supplied by the two studies are ignored except in the cases that supply relative data for exclusive application to the city. Needless to say, many of the points that were then affirmed may have changed radically as a result of the serious crisis and economic recession declared in 2008.

15 Tresserras, Verdaguer and Espinach, op. cit, 2005, pp. 43-51.

16 They are the businesses promoted by the BCD as an example of successful design-based cases through its EXID programme, of which two editions were made, 2007 and 2008. There is a catalogue published, www.bcd.es/ca/page.asp?id=8.

17 This study was not yet talking about intellectual protection of industrial design in accordance with the laws passed at the beginning of the century. On the other hand, it does analyse the dynamics of patents, a factor considered to be the one that best gauges business innovation, but this refers inevitably to industrial property rights, not to intellectual property rights.

18 Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología: Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica 20042007, Vol. II, Áreas prioritarias, Madrid, 2003. “Programa Nacional de Diseño y producción industrial”, pp. 281-303. The industrial design sub-programme was part of the national R&D plans of 2000-2003 and 2004-2007, and continued to be part of them in the years 2008-2011. In Catalonia, design participated in the programme promoting innovation based on the Pla Recerca de Catalunya 2010-2013. As to other data about the impact of funding, see the periodic reports produced by the Ministry. I consulted: Luis Sanz Menéndez, Rebeca Meza, Pilar Barrios, Identificación de los centros de I+D con mayores capacidades científicotécnicas en las diversas Comunidades Autónomas, a partir de la obtención de ayudas para la ejecución de proyectos de I+D otorgadas por la Dirección General de Investigación mediante convocatoria pública por concurrencia competitiva. Análisis de las convocatorias desde 1996 hasta 2001, Madrid, Ministry of Science and Technology, September 2002, and Néboa Zozaya, La innovación empresarial en España, Madrid, Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, 2005.

19 DDI, op. cit., 2006, p. 11.

20 Proposed by the study Tresserras, Verdaguer and Espinach, op. cit., 2005, pp. 31-36; mentioned by Calvera and Monguet, op. cit., 2007, pp. 172-180.

21 RED, Red de Empresas de Diseño, formed in Barcelona in 2008 by eight leading companies in the “habitat-design” sector: Nanimarquina, BD, Escofet, Tramo, Mobles 114, Santa & Cole, Oken... It was relaunched as Reunión de Empresas de Diseño in 2011. It is currently made up of 40 companies from all over Spain: “RED is an association established as the representative of the interests of the most internationally prestigious Spanish businesses in the habitat design sector”, www.red-aede.es/es/asociacion (consulted: 8/VI/2013).

22 Several companies of this kind win the European Design Management Award granted by European Design Centres and Councils associated and networking

23 Tresserras, Verdaguer and Espinach, 2005, p. 62.

24 The DDI disappeared in 2010, but its functions and its team were partly integrated in ENISA, an agency promoting innovation in businesses. ENISA supported the publication of the Spanish Design Observatory, ESNE, Escuela Universitaria de Diseño e Innovación: Estudio. El valor económico del diseño, Madrid, ENISA, 2012. It is a shame that the graphic design in this book is very trivial, culturally and graphically speaking; it does not help in nay way to conferring seriousness and rigour on design as an economic activity, profession and discipline. See www.edicionessibila.com/eniusimg/enius199/2012/05/adj_4fc0eee6f143d.pdf (consulted: May 2013).

25 “We wish to make clear that we cannot establish exactly and concretely what percentage the Design Industry has of the Spanish GDP. Firstly, due to the different way the NCEA classifies activities, and secondly because of the different names for these activities. Not all the activities condensed by code numbers 72, 74 and 73 (to two digits) correspond to Specialized Design activities.” ENISA and ESNE, op. cit., 2012, p. 14.

26 Aleix Carrió (coord.), art. cit., 2004, pp. 62-67. BCD: Estudi de l’oferta de serveis de disseny gràfic i de comunicació de Catalunya, Barcelona, May 2005, www.bcd.es/gimmaster/comun/scripts/items/noticias/imatges/bcd/7722_6_Estudi_disseny_grafic.pdf, and BCD: Estudi de l’oferta de serveis de disseny de producte a Catalunya, Barcelona, June 2003, www.bcd.es/gimmaster/comun/scripts/items/noticias/imatges/bcd/5420_7_Presentacio_estudi.pdf.

27 BCD’s web site: www.bcd.es/ca/page.asp?id=17. The list, which was not made thinking of the structure and organization of the sector but of the supply of services that businesses could look for when they consulted the directory, also included the entry “Advertising: Campaigns, Direct marketing, Audio-visual media, Promotions”. All these activities are part of economic sectors and activities with their own characteristics that are not design but which, rather, act as designers’ clients or as suppliers depending on the case.

28 www.bcd.es/es/bcdp.asp (consulted: 10/VI/2013). The BCD was also asked about the new organization of the directory and the reason for the changes.

29 Consultation of the directory made by the author of the article in 2009 when she was concluding the research presented in this book. The data were then updated in relation to the study published in 2006 (disseny_cat), and they have been consulted again now when preparing the publication of the book.

30 Although the matter has begun to merit the attention of researchers, at the moment only initial approaches are available and there are still no statistical data about the importance of women in the supply of design services. In 2004, the Escola ESDI promoted a show and an agreement on the matter curated by Maia Creus (Woman Made). In 2005, the ADP coordinated an issue of the magazine Dones published by the Col·legi de Periodistes de Catalunya devoted to women designers.

31 I am not referring here to the work that graphic designers, or advertising draughtsmen or commercial artists as they were called in those days, did when they worked in printing houses’ graphic studios because these were jobs for the customers of the printing house; here we are looking jobs like calendars, magazines and the printing house’s image. Perhaps the example of reference is the magazine Documentos de Comunicación Visual that Yves Zimmermann designed in 1970 for the then printer of reference in Barcelona, Paco Casamajó.

32 For a study of design business in Barcelona, see Viviana Narotzky, La Barcelona del diseño, Barcelona, Santa & Cole, 2007.

33 For the network of shops specializing in this kind of product, see the 060 map corresponding to the design business in Carles Carreras (dir.), Atles comercial de Barcelona, Barcelona, Barcelona City Council / Barcelona Official Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Navigation / University of Barcelona, 2003. It can be consulted at www.ub.edu/observatoricomerc/atcob/.

34 It goes without saying that, especially in the reports and texts published for the enactment of public design policies in the countries of the Far East, when speaking about design infrastructure it refers to the putting together and and starting up of organizations whose functioning involves high costs, from the construction of buildings – the case of the Design Centre in Seoul in South Korea – to the hiring of personnel. Some of these bodies are important when they involve the participation of governments and states.

35 This second meaning includes the definition established in New Zealand in 2003: “Culture of Design: the inherited and shared ideas, beliefs, values and knowledge expressed via design in a distinct manner”.,NZ Design Taskforce: Success by Design. Design Makes First World Economies. A Report and Strategic Plan. From the Design Taskforce, New Zealand Government & Growth and Innovation Framework (GIF), 2003, Glossary.

36 The establishment of design centres has been considered by many historians to be a significant moment in each country’s design history but also as the best sign of the importation of the British management model (Bonsiepe, Julier, Woodham). With regard to the experience in Barcelona, see several Viviana Narotzky publications about this version of local history; about the specific experience of BCD and the work done by this body, see the chapter by Fabián Taranto “BCD (Barcelona Centre de Disseny) y las políticas de promoción del diseño” published in the paper version of that research (Barcelona, Ube 2014, pp. 451-464). I classed the establishment of either a Design Center or a Design Council as the third origin in Anna Calvera, “Cuestiones de fondo. La hipótesis de los tres orígenes del diseño”, in Diseño e Historia, Mexico City, Designio and FHD, 2010, pp. 63-85.

37 Mai Felip presided the ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) from 1993 to 1995; Isabel Roig was the president of BEDA (Bureau of European Design Associations) from 2013 to 2015. Both had previously been members of the respective boards of directors.

38 The awards official website explains the motives in these terms: “In 2010 the Ministry of Science and Innovation brought these awards into line with the rest of the national prizes that exist in other disciplines at state level (http://premiosnacionalesdediseno.micinn.es/es/page.asp?id=29, consulted: 12/VI/2013).

39 In a way they were the continuation of the Salones del Hogar Moderno organized by the FAD of the “decorators”, before the war and in the early post-war years headed by Santiago Marco. The first one was held in 1936 when the FAD moved its headquarters to the Dome of the Coliseum. See www.ub.edu/gracmon/docs/cronofad.

40 Josep Capsir i Maiz, El museu de les arts decoratives de Barcelona: 75 anys.19322007, Barcelona, Barcelona City Council, Institute of Culture, 2007.

41 About the Virtual Museum of Graphic Design, Albert Isern Collection, see www.museovirtual.info/ca/; concerning the UB’s one, the Josep Artigas Poster Collection, see www.ub.edu.

42 See www.historiadeldisseny.org.

43 Acronyms after proper names refer to the Universities were every school is attached. In Barcelona almost five universities are public and two more are private.

44 Calvera and Monguet, op. cit., 2007.

45 See www.bcd.es/ca/page.asp?id=200.

Klein Tyres: Advertising and Modernisme in Early Twentieth-century Barcelona

1 The advertising pages of the magazines Los Deportes (1897-1910) and Stadium (1911-1930), both published in Barcelona, are revealing on this point. The brands with greatest presence in Barcelona were the French ones Michelin, Hutchinson, Samson and Bergougnan; the British Dunlop and Palmer; the Germans Continental, Peters Union and Polak, and the Belgian Jenatzy. In the middle of the next decade the Italian Pirelli, Goodrich with its American technology, and Prowodnik with Russian technology, all burst in on the scene, the last two brands being manufactured in the town of Colombes, France.

2 The business and corporate history of Klein has been produced by compiling the scattered information in numerous articles and news items and in the texts of some advertisements. It appeared mainly in the sports newspapers, such as Los Deportes, Stadium, Mundo Deportivo and Heraldo Deportivo, and in the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia and the Madrid ones, La Época, El Sol, La Correspondencia de España and El Heraldo de Madrid.

3 Advertisement published repeatedly in the pages of the magazine Mercurio throughout 1906.

4 This prolific illustrator of books, novels and stories was in those years in charge of the graphic artwork in the magazine Progreso: the design of its masthead and the headings of the different sections, and the illustrations accompanying the articles and many of the large number of advertisements it carried.

5 This poster, which originally hung on the wall of the offices of a Michelin representative in Barcelona, is today in the private collection of an American collector to which I have had access.

6 “Automóvil Club de Barcelona”, Mundo Deportivo, 22 February 1906, p. 2.

7 The details of Carles Barral i Nualart’s life were virtually unknown before this article. Thanks to direct contact with his descendants and to their kind, disinterested collaboration, I have been able to gain access to part of the family archive in order to make a brief summary of it. At the same time, a few fragments of the story of this early phase as a poster artist appear in the memoirs of his son Carlos Barral i Agesta, the well-known writer. Carlos BARRAL, Años de penitencia, Barcelona, Tusquets, 1990.

8 “Constitución de Junta”, Mundo Deportivo, 20 March 1913, p. 3.

9 This recumbent pose and the eyes looking straight ahead are especially recognizable in other female portraits by Casas, for example in the advertisement for the Barcelona Coffee Roaster Tupinamba (1899), in the second prize won in the competition for Cigarrillos París cigarettes (1901), in various illustrations reproduced in his magazine Pèl & Ploma and in the poster for La Rioja wine Fino-Rubí by the Félix Murga Bodegas (1910).

10 “La acreditada casa “Pneu Klein” ha convocado un importante concurso que seguramente interesará a los dibujantes de dentro y de fuera de Cataluña [...]. Vamos, dibujantes, ¡no hay que perder la ocasión!”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 19 October 1917.

11 The rules were set out in “Concurso de carteles Klein”, Stadium, 22 September 1917.

12 “Concurso de carteles Klein”, op. cit.

13 La Vanguardia, 23 December 1917, p. 3.

14 Els concursos de cartells dels Cigarrillos París, 1900-1901 (exhibition catalogue, 1995), Olot, Museu Comarcal de la Garrotxa, 1995. Eva QUINTAS FROUFE, “Origen y proliferación de los concursos de carteles a principios del siglo XX: El concurso de la Perfumería Gal (1916)”, Área Abierta, Madrid, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, November 2008.

15 “Exposición de proyectos y concurso de carteles”, Mundo Deportivo, 25 December 1917.

16 The five works were reproduced – in small format, in monochrome and with a poor print quality – as part of a Klein advertisement placed inside the publication Heraldo Deportivo, in January 1918. The winner was rewarded with full-colour reproduction on the front page.

17 Raúl EGUIZÁBAL, “El arte al servicio de la técnica”, Publifilia, No. 6, Segovia, Colegio Universitario de Segovia, 2002. Lois PÉREZ Leira, “Federico Ribas: un artista xenial”, accessible at Confederación Intersindical Galega, www.galizacig.com, 2004.

18 Montanya’s name appears written in different sources in different ways: as it would be in Castilian (Pedro Montaña) or confused variations in Catalan (Pere Muntanyà). He is also wrongly identified as J. Montanyà or Josep Montanyà; at other times he is confused with the landscape painter, from a different generation, Pere Montanya Saumell (1896-?).

19 Enciclopedia del Museo del Prado, Madrid, Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, 2006.

20 Enciclopedia del Museo del Prado, Madrid, Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, 2006.

21 “Cartel anunciador de ‘Barcelona, ciudad de invierno’”, La Publicidad, 2 July 1909.

Things for the Home in Women’s Magazines: Feminal, El Hogar y la Moda and La Dona Catalana. The Construction of a Women’s Market Through New Products (1900-1936)

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 Carme Karr (1865-1943) wrote newspaper articles, fiction, novels, plays and children’s stories; she gave speeches and composed music. She was one of the driving forces behind Catalan feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. She belonged to the generation of middle-class feminists who postulated a change in women’s gender roles, focusing principally on education and public presence with the aim of balancing cultural levels between genders.

3 Carme Karr, “La nostra finalitat”, Feminal, 28 April 1907, No. 1, p. 2.

4 Adolfo Perinat and María Isabel Marrades, Mujer, prensa y sociedad en España, 18001939, Madrid, Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1980, p. 56.

5 Narcís Monturiol (1819-1885). Known for being the inventor of Ictíneo, the first submarine in Spain, he was also a journalist and politician. He published La Madre de Familia (1848) and La Fraternidad (1847-1848), the first newspaper with a communist ideology in Spain. In 1858 he presented the design for a submarine that made 54 submersions until 1862. He also was a politician, as a parliamentary deputy in the First Spanish Republic.

6 Isabel Segura and Marta Selva, Revistes de dones 18461935, Barcelona, Edhasa, 1984, pp. 15-16.

7 Dolors Monserdà (1845-1919), writer and feminist. She took part in the Jocs Florals, a poetry competition in Catalan, highly medievalist in spirit, and won several prizes in it. She was the first woman to be its president (1909). She contributed to the magazines La Renaixença and Feminal. A promoter of social and feminist works, she believed that the role of middle-class women was to improve the conditions of working-class women. She created the Patronat d’Obreres de l’Agulla.

8 Segura and Selva, op. cit., 1984, p. 54-55.

9 Maria Josepa Massanés (1811-1887), writer and feminist. She took part in the first Jocs Florals (1859) and worked actively to revive Catalan culture and language in the Renaixença. She advocated women’s access to education and that led her to found a school for women in 1869.

10 Segura and Selva, op. cit., 1984, pp. 38-43.

11 Perinat and Marrades, op. cit., 1980, pp. 297 and 300.

12 Joan Manuel Tresserras, D’ací i d’Allà. Aparador de la modernitat (19181936), Barcelona, Llibres de l’Índex, 1993, pp. 11-13.

13 Tresserras, op. cit., 1993, p. 11.

14 An “artistic, literary and scientific” newspaper, a great defender of the Catalanist spirit. The most outstanding artists from both Catalonia and elsewhere contributed as illustrators, and renowned Catalan writers were responsible for the literary part. Joan Torrent and Rafael Tasis, Història de la premsa catalana, Barcelona, Bruguera, 1966, pp. 192-198.

15 Karr, op. cit., 1907, p. 2.

16 It was subtitled “An autonomist women’s weekly. Promoting a Patriotic Ladies’ League”. It was patriotic and romantic in nature. The first issue, on 6 October 1906, sets out its goals: “that each house, due to women’s love, should be a refuge of the Catalan cause… Women of Catalonia: by working for the Fatherland, we build a Family, by making a Home, we make Love …”.

17 The pseudonym of Caterina Albert (1869-1966). She introduced herself as Caterina Albert at the Jocs Florals in Olot in 1898, winning prizes for the poem El llibre nou and the monologue La Infanticida. The latter caused a scandal due to the subject matter and the tone in which it was written, and when the jury found out that the author was a woman, the scandal was even greater. From that time on she signed as Víctor Català. Outstanding among her works is Solitude, a novel in which she describes, through a female character, the quest for individuality and women’s struggle in society. She won the Fastenrath Prize in 1909 and she was translated into other languages.

18 When Catalan women got married, they legally kept their surname, but many of them added their husband’s when he was from a well-to-do or prestigious family. It is the option chosen by those who include “de” between the two surnames. The second one is the husband’s.

19 Perinat and Marrades, op. cit., 1980, p. 227.

20 This observation corroborates the notes made by Isabel Campi in her studies of the history of radio, and also those supplied in this book when speaking about the electrification of the country and the consumption of electrical household appliances (Coordinator’s note)

21 Magí Murià (1881-1958), a journalist and film director, was one of the pioneers of Catalan cinema. In 1915 he took over the Barcelona film company Barcinògrafa. He directed and produced several films. In 1931 he took part in the first dubbing of a sound film in Catalan.

22 Torrent and Tasis, op. cit., 1966, p. 695.

23 Francesca Bonnemaison (1872-1949) created the Women’s Popular Library in 1909 with the Board of Lady Cooperators, the first in Europe. It was open on holidays and took in women of all social classes. In 1911 it changed its name to the Women’s Institute of Culture and Library, offering training courses and an employment exchange. Secondary school, professional and domestic classes were given there, and later, foreign languages.

24 All of them, poets, playwrights and novelists, are the authors of reference in the defence of Catalan language and culture in this period of the twentieth century.

25 Anna Murià (1904-2002) was a novelist, translator and journalist. She studied at the Women’s Institute of Culture and Library. Politically, she was a member of left-wing and nationalist parties. During the Civil War she was the secretary of the Institute of Catalan Letters. After the war she went into exile in France and Mexico. She returned in 1970.

26 Pau Sabaté (1872-1957), a watercolourist and fashion sketch artist, or Josep Longoria, a well-known draughtsman and children’s story illustrator.

27 Several studies have been made of the transformation of the press to announce the irruption of the mass media and culture. As regards the journal D’Ací i d’Allà, the benchmark study is the above-mentioned one by Joan Manuel Tresserras (Barcelona, 1993). In relation to the changes in newspapers like La Vanguardia, see the studies by Josep Lluís Gómez Mompart. There are other studies on the changes in the satirical press, the illustrated press and caricaturists, and also by gender. Many of them have already been cited. With regard to El Hogar y la Moda, the magazine gave rise to the formation of HYMSA, a major publishing group of magazines addressed to the general public, which still exists.

28 Concepción P. Mariné, “Revista de la Moda”, El Hogar y la Moda, 23 November 1914, No. 263, p. 3.

29 The Centre Excursionista de Catalunya was a fundamental element in the spread of mountaineering and knowledge of Catalan territory. It was one of the first clubs to organize skiing trips in Catalonia.

30 “Escuelas de belleza”, El Hogar y la Moda, 15 February 1914, No. 226, p. 5.

31 Gilles Lipovetsky, El imperio de lo efímero: la moda y su destino en las sociedades modernas, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1990, p. 85. Many of the statements relative to the social significance of Parisian haute couture and changes in taste come from this author’s ideas.

32 Elvira Augusta Lewi, “De l’exposició monogràfica de la taula parada”, La Dona Catalana, 26 January 1934, p. 434.

33 A. Félix, “La vostra llar”, La Dona Catalana, 9 October 1925, No. 1.

34 Isabel Campi Valls, “Intrusos tecnològics en el saló. El cas del gramòfon, la ràdio i la televisió”, in Rosa Creixell and Teresa-M. Sala (eds.), Espais interiors. Casa i art, Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2007, pp. 599-605.

35 Lipovetsky, op. cit., 1990, p. 206.

In Search of Product Identity. Noucentisme and Cultural Policy

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 Jeroni Martorell i Terrats, ‘L’arquitectura moderna’, Catalunya, 30 October 1903, No. 18, and 30 December 1903, No. 24. See also these aspects dealt with more amply in Alícia Suàrez and Mercè Vidal, ‘Jeroni Martorell una figura oblidada, el ressò de la Secessió vienesa’, Serra d’Or, March 1981, pp. 175-179.

3 Joaquim Folch i Torres, speech given at the headquarters of the Cabinetmakers’ Association, 29 August 1913.

4 Joan Tarrús and Narcís Comadira, Rafael Masó. Arquitecte i noucentista, Figueres, Brau, 2007 (1996), pp. 63-71; Raquel Lacuesta and Lluís Cuspinera (curators), Rafael Masó. Arquitecte (18801935), Barcelona, Fundació ‘La Caixa’, 2006; Jordi Falgàs (ed.), Casa Masó. Vida i arquitectura noucentista, Girona, Fundació Rafael Masó, 2012.

5 Various Authors, L’Escola Industrial de Barcelona (19042004). Cent anys d’ensenyament tècnic i d’arquitectura, Barcelona, Diputació de Barcelona / Barcelona City Council, 2008, p. 44.

6 It was published with the title ‘Necesidad y carácter del Nuevo Centro General de Enseñanza Técnica’, El Trabajo Nacional, Vol. XI, 15 December 1902, pp. 182-188, partly included in Various Authors, L’Escola Industrial de Barcelona (19042004), op. cit., 2008, pp. 27-29.

7 Enric Prat de la Riba, Mancomunitats, Barcelona, 1912.

8 Joaquim Folch i Torres, ‘L’Universitat Industrial. El treball col·lectiu i els productes d’art en les grans indústries’, La Veu de Catalunya, ‘Pàgina Artística’, 15 December 1910.

9 With all the reservations that the word implies nowadays.

10 Alexandre Galí, Història de les institucions i del moviment cultural a Catalunya, 1900 a 1936. Ensenyament TècnicoIndustrial i TècnicoManual o d’Arts i Oficis. I Catalunya en funció d’Estat. La Universitat Industrial, Barcelona, Alexandre Galí Foundation, 1981, book IV, p. 123.

11 Ricard Mas i Peinado, Els artistes catalans i la publicitat (18881929), Barcelona, Parsifal, 2002, p. 163.

12 Francesc Canyellas, ‘La decoració dels teixits industrials’, La Veu de Catalunya, ‘Pàgina Artística’, 1 September 1910; ‘Els teixits a l’Escola Industrial’, La Veu de Catalunya, ‘Pàgina Artística’, 17 July 1913.

13 Mercè Vidal i Jansà, Teoria i crítica en el Noucentisme: Joaquim Folch i Torres, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1991.

14 Joan Esteva (1874-1957) founded, with his son-in-law, the company Hoyos, Esteva i Companyia, making furniture and artistic reproductions.

15 Teresa-M. Sala, ‘La Casa Busquets. Una història del moble i la decoració del modernisme al déco a Barcelona’, Memoria Artium, No. 4, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Girona and Lleida, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions / Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona / Universitat de Girona / Edicions i Publicacions de la Universitat de Lleida / Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, 2006.

16 See in this same book the subject of the 1923 exhibition by Alícia Suàrez.

17 Joan Busquets i Jané, ‘Més sobre l’Exposició del Moble’, La Veu de Catalunya, ‘Pàgina Artística’, 1 August 1912.

18 Antoni Saló, ‘De Art Decoratiu’, La Veu de Catalunya, ‘Pàgina Artística’, 22 August 1912.

19 Joaquim Folch i Torres, ‘Una Exposició Internacional del Moble a Barcelona’, La Veu de Catalunya, ‘Pàgina Artística’, 25 July 1912.

20 Joaquim Folch i Torres, ‘Una Exposició Internacional del Moble a Barcelona II’, La Veu de Catalunya, ‘Pàgina Artística’, 1 August 1912.

21 Joaquim Folch i Torres, Sobre l’art del moble a Catalunya, Barcelona, Imp. Elzeviriana, 1913.

22 See the article by Alícia Suàrez in this same publication.

23 Josep Casamartina (ed.), Palau Oller polièdric, Barcelona, Fundació Palau / Ajuntament Caldes d’Estrac / Caixa Catalunya / Diputació, 2010.

24 Joaquim Folch i Torres, Santiago Marco, Barcelona, Quatre Coses, 1926.

25 La Veu de Catalunya, 2 June 1914.

26 Mercè Vidal i Jansà, ‘Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí i l’art del jardí en el Noucentisme’, in Various Authors, Els Rubió. Una nissaga d’intel·lectuals, Barcelona, Angle, NMART, 2003, pp. 99-102.

27 Marc Cuixart Goday and Albert Cubeles Bonet (eds.), Josep Goday Casals. Arquitectura escolar a Barcelona de la Mancomunitat a la República, Barcelona, Barcelona City Council, 2008.

28 Eva Pascual, ‘El mobilari i la decoració interior de les escoles’, in Marc Cuixart i Goday and Albert Cubeles Bonet (eds.), op. cit., pp. 337-353.

29 Mercè Vidal i Jansà (edition and introductory study), Llibre de viatge (19131914). Joaquim Folch i Torres, Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona / GRACMON / Barcelona City Council, 2013 (Singularitats Collection).

30 Diputació de Barcelona, Escola Superior dels Bells Oficis, Barcelona, 1915.

31 Galí, op.cit., 1981, book V, p. 51.

The Barcelona International Exhibition of Furniture (1923) and the Beauty of the Modest Home

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 The reason being the preparation of a series of books, entitled “Cròniques d’Art”, compiling the articles that Rafael Benet published in La Veu de Catalunya, the largest selling newspaper of the time. Three volumes of the series have already been published: 1930-1931, 1932-1933 and 1934-1936.

3 Rafael Benet, “Entorn de l’Exposició del Moble”, La Veu de Catalunya, 20 October 1923, 9 November 1923 and 23 November 1923.

4 Enric Bricall, “La tensió necessària en l’ensenyament del disseny. L’opció diversificada de l’escola Elisava”, Temes de Disseny, Barcelona, Elisava, 1991, No. 6.

5 For example, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Design Museum of London or the Museu de les Arts Decoratives in Barcelona that, since 1995, has incorporated industrial design into its collections.

6 Various Authors, Le livre des expositions universelles 18511989, Paris, Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, 1983, p. 8.

7 See Ignasi de Solà-Morales, L’Exposició Internacional de Barcelona 19141929. Arquitectura i Ciutat. Barcelona, Fira de Barcelona, 1985, p. 54.

8 Joaquim Folch i Torres, “Una Exposició Internacional del Moble a Barcelona”, La Veu de Catalunya, 11 July, 25 July and 1 August 1912, and 28 August 1913.

9 Folch, historian, art critic and museologist, was highly influential in Noucentista cultural policies. See Mercè Vidal i Jansà, Teoria i crítica en el Noucentisme. Joaquim Folch i Torres, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat / Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1991.

10 Exposició Internacional del Moble i Decoració d’Interiors. Guia del visitant, Barcelona, 1923.

11 Pere Bohigas i Tarragó, La Exposició Internacional del Moble i Decoració d’Interiors de 1923, Barcelona, Catalònia Bookshop, 1930.

12 Which, logically, caused a major upheaval: resignations, dismissals and new appointments. Bohigas, op. cit., 1930.

13 Bohigas, op. cit., 1930.

14 Puck, “Les cases per tals mobles”, D’Ací i d’Allà, October 1923, No. 70, pp. 735 et seq. As for the reference to “artistic Viennese” furniture, see Teresa M. Sala and Julio Vives, “The Artistic Woodworking Sector in Barcelona at the turn of the Twentieth Century: Developments, Commerce and Enterprise”, in From Industry to Art: Shaping a Design Market through Luxury and Fine Crafts (Barcelona 17141914). Essays on Local History, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2013, dedicated precisely to showing the importance of the Viennese furniture market, original or made in Valencia, in Barcelona in the early decades of the twentieth century.

15 Santiago Marco (1885-1949) was a notable interior decorator and furniture maker, and president of the FAD (Foment de les Arts Decoratives) from virtually 1922 to 1949. His presidency is remembered as one of the body’s most active and innovative. On his work and ideas, see Mariàngels Fondevila, “Art Deco in Catalonia”, in From Industry to Art. Shaping a Design Market through Luxury and Fine Crafts (Barcelona 17141914). Essays on Local History, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2013, which places him in the general context of Art Déco in Barcelona, and, in this same book, the article by Mercè Vidal in relation to the debate that he maintained with rationalist architects.

16 La Veu de Catalunya, op.cit., 9 November 1923.

17 Sebastià Gasch, L’expansió de l’art català al món, Barcelona, 1953, p. 139.

18 Per la bellesa de la llar humil. Recull d’orientacions, Barcelona, Foment de les Arts Decoratives, 1923.

19 Benet, op. cit., 1923, p. 37.

20 See the catalogue of the same name. Barcelona, Barcelona City Council, 1994, p. 162.

21 A good selection of this school furniture can be found in A. Cubeles and M. Cuixart, Josep Goday Casals. Arquitectura escolar a Barcelona, de la Mancomunitat a la República, Barcelona, Barcelona City Council, 2008, pp. 337 et seq.

22 See in this respect Mercè Vidal i Jansà, op. cit, 1991.

23 AC magazine, 1935, No. 19, p. 18.

Carles Barral i Nualart (1879-1936): Poster Artist, Printer and Editorial Designer

1 Although in the documents of the time we can find it written in different ways —Carlos Barral y Nualart; C. B. Nualart or Carlos Barral Nualar (without the characteristic final “t”)—, the artist’s name has been kept in Catalan in this article. In his published memoirs his son Carlos Barral Agesta says that the Barral and Nualart families were Catalan and the language used between his father and his brother Lluís was always Catalan.

2 The School of Fine Arts in Valladolid was then directed by the painter from Valencia Josep Martí i Monsó. Carles excelled in the figure drawing class in the years 1895-1896 and 1896-1897, when he was awarded full marks in “copying ancient statues” (drawn from the plaster cast) and “copying from life” (live model) and two prizes: that of Special Prize in the first year and a consideration for the same prize in the following one. This is ratified on the school certificate, No. 0.405.487, issued on 18 September 1898.

3 We find references to the activity of the workshops of Litografía Gual de Barcelona in: La Renaixensa, 15 March 1873, p. 52; Diari Català, 11 January 1880, p. 79; La Publicidad, 26 September 1881; La Vanguardia, 4 January 1883; “Impresión de marcas por medio del Calco-Güal”, Industria é Invenciones, 15 November 1884, pp. 180-181.

4 “Bancos y Sociedades”, La Vanguardia, 10 October 1899.

5 This critical view of Adrià Gual’s attitude appears in Avelí Artís (1946). Adrià Gual i la seva obra. Mexico City: Col·lecció Catalònia, pp. 26-31.

6 Although with exceptions. The stationery heading used between 1909-1910, for example, included the sketched drawing of a male figure surrounded by a decorative border; it was a design signed by Lluís Garcia Falgàs (1881-1954), from Valencia, as Santi Barjau discovered (1997) “Lluís Garcia Falgàs, gravador i dissenyador gràfic entre l’art elitista i l’art massiu” in Locvus Amoenvs, March 1997, pp. 177-193.

7 Appearing, respectively, in the magazine Mercurio in August and November 1904 and in January 1905.

8 A copy of this oblong-shaped poster, measuring 100 x 80 cm, is in the collection of the Centre d’Estudis Comarcals de Banyoles (CECB) and since 1995 it has been on display in the Museu Darder in that town.

9 Eliseu TRENC BALLESTER (1994). “El cartell català dins el context del cartellisme europeu” in Catalunya en 1000 cartells: des dels orígens fins a la Guerra Civil. Barcelona: Postermil, p. 33.

10 The owner of the building in Passeig de Gràcia and landlady of the Barral family apartment seems to have been Elisa Casas i Carbó, the painter’s sister.

11 As an example of his keenness and participation, Carles Barral’s motoring adventures took up two covers of the Barcelona magazine Los Deportes, the issues published on 1 September and 3 November 1906. See the article: Pau Medrano-Bigas, “Neumáticos Klein: Advertising and Modernisme in Early Twentieth-century Barcelona”, in this same volume.

12 For this poster, Carles Barral i Nualart did a complete photographic session in search of a compositional solution, dressing up as a chauffeur and adopting different poses as he interacted with a tyre. The photographs are kept in the family archive.

13 We can trace his activity through the mentions appearing in the Barcelona magazines La Imprenta, 2 May 1873 and 16 June 1878; El Correo Militar, 29 October 1886, p. 3; La Dinastía, 1 October 1886, p. 4.

14 The news of his death was published on the front page of the morning edition of La Publicidad, Friday 11 June 1897.

15 It should also be pointed out that the department directed by Carles Barral was a school for the 15-year-old Ricard Giralt Miracle. As he himself says, and as it appears in Zeneida Sardà (1994), “Ricard Giralt Miracle: l’art dels signes” in Serra d’Or, No. 418 (Oct. 1994), pp. 8-15. Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat. Ricard Giralt Miracle (1911-1994) started working in Seix & Barral Herms. in about 1926, learning the trade along with his father Francesc Giralt III (1873-1947), a renowned lithographic engraver employed there who transmitted to him his love for typography and printing. He later joined, as an apprentice and a sign painter, the company’s in-house graphic studio, directed by Carles Barral i Nualart, where, among others, the Alsatian graphic artist Franz Schuwer (remembered for renewing the logo of the masthead of the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia in 1929), the illustrator and draughtsman Josep Narro i Celorrio, and the poster artist Joan Seix i Miralta “Jan” worked. The Spanish Civil War brought this period to an end. After the war, Ricard Giralt Miracle re-entered Seix & Barral’s graphic studio – known colloquially as “Can Seix”, then directed by Joan Seix i Miralta – where he worked for a few more years before founding Filograf, his own graphic workshop, in 1947.

16 Carles Barral was also a keen weapons collector, especially swords, sabres and fencing foils, as well as all kinds of hats and strange clothes that he dressed up in to pose as a model for his photographic and drawing sessions.

17 Lluís Barral was the president of the Associació de Pescadors Esportius de Barcelona (Sea Anglers’ Association) in 1931 and he was behind the creation of the Federació Regional de Piscicultura i Pesca Esportiva, which became the Federació Catalana de Pesca Esportiva i Càsting, a body he presided over until 1935.

18 See Carlos Barral Agesta (1990). Años de penitencia. Precedido de dos capítulos inéditos de Memorias de Infancia. Barcelona: Tusquets, p. 116.

19 Lucía Contreras Flores (2008). “Industrias gráficas Seix i Barral”, Colección de Teatros de Papel de Lucía Contreras Flores, consultable at http://www.teatritos.com/es/c3spain.html

20 As reported in the newspaper La Publicidad on 20 June and 30 July 1917.

21 According to Josep Maria Castellet Carlos Barral Agesta said this to him, and as Carles Geli writes in “El arquero del siglo. Seix Barral refleja en sus 100 años de vida la evolución del sector editorial”, El País, Tuesday 5 July 2011.

22 This subject is the basis of the introductory chapter by Anna Calvera (2007) “Pioneros. Notas en torno al nacimiento de una profesión” in the book by Gil, Emilio, Pioneros del diseño gráfico en España. Barcelona: Index Book. On the links between the different actors participating in the market of supply, demand and hiring of design services, which include the historical origins of graphic design in Catalonia, see Calvera (2014, coord.) “El final de la història: El Sistema Disseny Barcelona llegat al segle XXI” in La formación del sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat. Assaigs d’Historia local. Barcelona: GRACMON - Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona.

Art Deco in Spain: Mass Culture and Style

1 Paul MAENZ, Art Déco, 1920-1940, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1976.

2 Manuel ARENAS and Pedro AZARA, “L’Art Déco a Catalunya, 1919-1936”, Grans Temes L’Avenç, Barcelona, 1980, pp. 69-80.

3 Javier PÉREZ ROJAS, Art Déco en España, Madrid, Cátedra, 1990.

4 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, La incidència de l’Art Déco a Catalunya. Les arts decoratives, doctoral thesis, Barcelona, Department of Art History, University of Barcelona, 2001.

5 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, “Art Deco in Catalonia”, in: Anna CALVERA (ed.), From Industry to Art, Shaping a Design Market through Luxury and Fine Crafts (Barcelona, 1714-1914), Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2011. Fondevila has recently had published: L’Art déco català (1909-1936), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2016.

6 Lluís PERMANYER, “Magnificencia en Can Jorba”, La Vanguardia, Thursday 13 January 2011, Supplement Vivir, p. 10.

7 Charlotte BENTON, Tim BENTON and Gislaine WOOD (eds.), Art Deco 1910-1939, Boston-New York-London, Bulfinch Press – AOL Time Warner Book Group, 2003.

8 This evolution can be observed in the rich filmography of Ernst Lubitsch. For example, in the comedy One Hour With You (1932) some luxury apartments in Paris appear profusely decorated with furniture in a style that very clearly evokes the decorative arts exhibition in Paris in 1925. In the props of this film, whose narrative pace still owes a lot to silent cinema, there is an abundance of furniture in syncopated shapes and, exaggeratedly, they have shiny fabrics like satin and lamé. On the other hand, Trouble in Paradise (almost the same year) is a comedy that corresponds to a film language far more dynamic, agile and modern, and to much brighter photography. Likewise, in it we see luxurious Parisian interiors but decorated in a colder and more refined style, in which white is predominant on walls and furniture, and various chrome-plated objects in a typically Streamline style. Both films were produced by Paramount Studios in Hollywood, which in the 1930s adopted a very modern style in the props and the wardrobes of its popular films and which undoubtedly acted as a model for decorators all over the world. Donald ALBRECHT, Designed Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies, Santa Monica, Hennessey + Ingalls, 2000.

9 In any case, automobile design was still far removed from Art Deco, although not its advertising, which was always up to date with graphic art trends. In the 1920s bodywork design was in the hands of engineers who were openly opposed to entering the process of change in styles and fashions. The box saloon cars of that decade, like for example those of the luxurious Spanish make Hispano-Suiza, mostly handmade, were still emulating the prosaic elegance and the concept of comfort of the carriage. The change of thinking came about in the USA at General Motors, whose chairman, appointed in 1923, was convinced that the future of his company was at stake in the field of style and not mechanics. Thus, in 1927 he managed to hire the coachbuilder from Hollywood Alfred Sloan to organize and direct the Art and Color Section, whose objective would be to convert a means of transport into the vehicle of one’s dreams. The style developed by GM and the American automobile industry during the 1930s would not be based on the schematic simplicity and the abstraction of the European avant-garde, but on the idea of efficiency and the reduction of the coefficient of friction of the aerodynamic line experimented with in the world of aeronautics. The resulting style, the Streamline, was so successful as a consumer style in the industrial product that it has been considered the American version of Art Deco. See David GARTMAN, “Harley Earl and the Art and Color Section: the Birth of Style at General Motors”, in: Dennis P. DOORDAN (ed.), Design History. An Anthology, Cambridge-London, MIT Press, 2000, pp. 122-144.

10 See Francesc ESPINET and Joan Manuel TRESSERRAS, La gènesi de la societat de masses a Catalunya, 1888-1939, Barcelona, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Publications Service, 1999.

11 The range of radio receivers imported into Spain was very large and they were for all tastes and all styles. Not just Art Deco. See Isabel CAMPI, “Les indústries de la ràdio i els electrodomèstics abans de la Guerra Civil (1929-1936)”, in: Anna CALVERA (coord.), La formació del sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat. Assaigs d’història local, Barcelona, GRACMON – Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014, pp. 158-185.

12 Isabel CAMPI, “El objeto industrial como lugar de mediación: algunas reflexiones sobre la colección de radios del MNACTEC”, in: Miguel Ángel ÁLVAREZ ARECES (ed.), Diseño + imagen + creatividad en el patrimonio industrial, Gijón, INCUNA Asociación de Arqueología Industrial, 2011, pp. 117-126.

13 Gilles LIPOVETSKY, El imperio de lo efímero. La moda y su destino en las sociedades modernas, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1991.

14 This pattern was also applied to objects, in which excessive and over-elaborate ornamentation had ceased to be aesthetically valued.

15 Míriam SORIANO, “Les coses de casa en les revistes femenines Feminal, El Hogar y la Moda i La Dona Catalana. La construcció d’un mercat femení a través de nous productes (1900-1936)”, in: Anna CALVERA (coord.), La formació del sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat. Assaigs d’història local, Barcelona, GRACMON – Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014, pp. 130-155.

16 Donald ALBRECHT, Designed Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies, Santa Monica, Hennessey + Ingalls, 2000.

17 Howard MANDELBAU and Erik MYERS, Screen Deco: a Celebration of High Style in Architecture and Film, New York, St. Martins Press Coop., 1985.

18 Some of the films that should be researched are: Swing Time, Shall We Dance, Safety in Numbers, Flying Down to Rio, The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Metropolis, Pleasure Crazed, Night Owls, Five and Ten, Wake Up and Live, With Love and Kisses, Things to Come, and Reaching for the Moon.

19 Javier PÉREZ ROJAS, “Los cines modernos y el art déco cosmopolita”, in: Art déco en España, Madrid, Cátedra, Cuadernos de Arte, 1990, pp. 508-520. Ana Cristina LAVILLA IRIBAREN, Proyectando la modernidad. Las salas de proyección cinematográfica en España, 1896-1960, doctoral thesis read in the Department of Projects at the University of Navarra, 29-12-2013.

20 Pérez Rojas devotes an entire chapter to La Esfera in his book about Art Deco in Spain. See Javier PÉREZ ROJAS, “Un momento áureo de la Ilustración Gráfica Española: La Esfera”, op. cit., pp. 67-167.

21 English words were very common in this type of magazine.

22 See the articles about modern style and the modern home in note 46.

23 D’Ací i d’Allà, Extraordinari Exposició Internacional Barcelona, 1929, vol. 18, December 1929.

24 This period can be consulted in the facsimile edition: D’Ací i d’Allà: el primer magazine català d’estil europeu, Barcelona, Àmbit serveis editorials, 1995. There is also a monographic study, the result of a doctoral thesis: Joan Manuel TRESSERRAS GAJU, D’Ací i d’Allà: aparador de la modernitat (1918-1936), Barcelona, Llibres de l’Índex, 1993.

25 Alicia SUÁREZ, “L’exposició internacional del moble de Barcelona (1923) i la bellesa de la llar humil”, in: Anna CALVERA (coord.), La formació del sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat. Assaigs d’història local, Barcelona, GRACMON – Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014, pp. 106-116.

26 Tapestries and carpets by Tomàs Aymat; enamelled glass by Ricard Crespo & Nogués and Josep Mª Gol; ceramics by Francesc Quer and Josep Guardiola; jewellery by Jaume Mercadé and Ramón Sunyer; furniture by Santiago Marco, Antoni Badrinas, Talleres Vídua de Josep Ribas and J. Ibáñez; lacquers by Lluís Bracons, and works by some painters and sculptors were presented. See Mariàngels FONDEVILA, “L’aportació del FAD a l’Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes de París, 1925: L’eclosió de l’estil cubista en les arts aplicades”, op. cit., pp. 107-147.

27 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, “L’afer Gaudí”, op. cit., pp. 118-121.

28 Casa Jorba exhibited a “typographical” pavilion similar to those that the futurist artist and designer Fortunato Depero designed for Campari or for a group of publishing houses at the 3rd International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Monza. This chain of department stores had two buildings: one neo-Baroque in Portal del Ángel in Barcelona (1926) and another one, typically Art Deco, in Manresa (1930), both designed by the architect Arnald Calvet Peyronill.

29 See Ignasi DE SOLÀ-MORALES, “L’arquitectura de l’exposició. Palaus i pabellons”, in Grans Temes l’Avenç, Barcelona, 1980, pp. 3-17.

30 Sílvia SANTAEUGENIA, El Pavelló dels Artistes Reunits a l’Exposició Internacional de Barcelona de 1929: un impuls renovador de la llar, master’s degree thesis directed by Dr Mireia Freixa, University of Barcelona, 2015.

Available at: http://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/handle/2445/66564 (consulted: 15-04-2016).

31 The exhibits in the pavilion comprised sculptures by Pau Gargallo, Enric Casanovas, Àngel Ferrant and Salvador Martorell; paintings by Lluís Mercader; furniture by Santiago Marco and Antoni Badrinas built by the Vídua de Josep Ribas workshops; two Japanese lacquered screens by Ramón Sarsanedas and Enriqueta Pascual de Benigani; jewellery by Jaume Mercader, Ramón Sunyer and Emili Store; a Limoges plaque by Miquel Soldevila; carpets and tapestries by Tomàs Aymat; ceramics by Josep Gual de Sojo and Llorens Artigas, and enamelled glass by Ricard Crespo and Xavier Aragonés. The photographs and the catalogue were by the publicist Josep Sala. Mariàngels FONDEVILA, “Pabelló dels Artistes Reunits de Barcelona: el luxe i el confort modern”, op. cit., pp. 179-195.

32 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, op. cit., p. 184.

33 Various Authors, El Gremi de fabricants de Sabadell, 1559-2009. Organització empresarial i ciutat industrial, Sabadell, Fundació Gremi Fabricants de Sabadell, 2009.

34 The work of Masó, scattered all over the province of Girona, forgotten and mistreated for many years, is now being recovered and studied. See Narcís COMADIRA, El Noucentisme a Girona: Rafael Masó, Barcelona, Curial, 1983. See also the catalogue of the exhibition curated by Raquel Lacuesta and Luis Cuspinera: Rafael Masó i Valentí. Arquitecte (1880-1935), Barcelona, Any Masó – Obra Social Fundació “La Caixa”, 2006; Jordi FALGÀS, Casa Masó: Noucentista Life and Architecture, Girona – Sant Lluís, Fundació Rafael Masó – Triangle postals, 2012.

35 Javier PÉREZ ROJAS, op. cit., p. 185.

36 Julio VIVES CHILLIDA, Jacob & Josef Kohn: una mirada desde Barcelona, Barcelona, La Plana, 2006.

37 Teresa M. SALA and Julio VIVES CHILLIDA, “The Artistic Woodworking Sector in Barcelona at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, in: Anna CALVERA (ed.), From Industry to Art: Shaping a Design Market Through Luxury and Fine Crafts (Barcelona 1714-1914). Essays on Local History, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2011, pp. 115-133.

38 Julio VIVES CHILLIDA, “Salvador Albacar, un mueblista valenciano en Barcelona”, Res Mobilis, Revista Internacional de Investigación en Mobiliario y Objetos Decorativos, vol. 4, No. 4, 2015, pp. 110-125.

39 Julio VIVES CHILLIDA, “La imagen de la fábrica de muebles curvados Hijo de Ventura Feliu (Valencia)”, in: Miguel Ángel ÁLVAREZ ARECES (ed.), Diseño + imagen + creatividad en el patrimonio industrial, Gijón, INCUNA Asociación de Arqueología Industrial, 2011, pp. 337-349. According to a film made for the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929 and which I have been able to view, this company had warehouses in Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, Zaragoza and Castellón, which gives some idea of the size of its market: Hijo de Ventura Feliu. Película viviente sobre la fábrica de muebles curvados, Barcelona, TRILLA S.A. Editorial Cinematográfica, April 1929, Filmoteca de Catalunya.

40 María VILLANUEVA FERNÁNDEZ and Héctor GARCÍA-DIEGO VILLARÍAS, “La sillas del GATEPAC: Un viaje colectivo de ida y vuelta”, Proyecto, Progreso, Arquitectura, No. 11, November 2014 (year V), pp. 40-51. In this article there are some data about the sales figures for the GATEPAC’s chairs.

41 To prolong the useful life of this furniture and to make it look more hygienic, the pieces were often painted white and placed in doctor’s surgeries, hospitals and spas.

42 Despite its originality, Noucentisme was not the only European experience of creating modern art and design inspired on the classical world and which was proposed as a way out of the mannerism of Art Nouveau and the chaos of the avant-garde. See Kenneth SILVER, Caos y clasicismo. Arte en Francia, Italia y Alemania, 1918-1936, Bilbao, Fundación Guggenheim, 2010. This catalogue has an appendix about Novecentismo in its Spanish edition.

43 From Mercè Vidal’s abundant bibliography I shall only mention two recent articles published for the GRACMON research group and closely related to design: “A la recerca d’una identitat en els productes. Noucentisme i política cultural”, in: Anna CALVERA (coord.), La formació del sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat. Assaigs d’història local, Barcelona, GRACMON – Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014, pp. 87-88; “Mediterranisme en el disseny dels anys trenta y la seva pervivencia als anys de la postguerra”, op. cit., pp. 205-241.

44 Christopher WILK (ed.), Modernism 1914-1939. Designing a New World, London, V&A Publishing, 2006.

45 AC, No. 15, 1934, p. 13.

46 See, for example, the following articles about modern décor in D’Ací i d’Allà: “L’estil modern en la casa moderna. Cartipàs d’interiors projectats i resolts per decoradores francesos”, vol. 18, No. 144 (December 1929), pp. 407-409; Josep CLARET, “D’arquitectura. Les nostres botigues”, vol. 18, No. 144 (December 1929), p. 399; Josep MAINAR, “Els nostres decoradors”, vol. 20, No. 159 (March 1931), pp. 104-105.

47 Santiago MARCO, “Algunes notes sobre la decoració moderna”, D’Ací i d’Allà, vol. 21, No. 172 (March 1933), pp. 12-17. The following year he published an article in which he praised rubber flooring. See Santiago MARCO, “El prestigi del silenci”, D’Ací i d’Allà, vol. 22, No. 179 (December 1934), p. 73.

48 GATCPAC, “El que hauria d’ésser un interior de casa moderna”, D’Ací i d’Allà, vol. 21, No. 173 (June 1933), pp. 47-49.

49 Tórtola Valencia became famous in Spain with her enigmatic and exotic dances inspired on the distant past and arcane cultures. They also included recreations of flamenco and the figure of the maja. See Javier ROJAS, “Penagos y Tórtola Valencia”, op. cit., pp. 86-90.

50 It was a typically Spanish decorative style that appeared between the late Gothic and the early Renaissance in the fifteenth century and which spread all over the country in the following two centuries.

51 Ensembliers were in France highly skilled creators who, besides designing the furniture, manufactured or brought together all the decorative features of an interior: lamps, carpets and curtains, ornaments, pictures, etc.

52 With the coming of the Republic in 1931 and the restored Generalitat, he also worked for public institutions: he directed the refurbishment work in the Parlament de Catalunya and did the complete design of the room of the Court of Cassation in the Palace of Justice in Barcelona.

53 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, “Santiago Marco Urrutia. Decorador socialment de moda i un esperit emprenedor del FAD”, op. cit., pp. 372-394.

54 Ester BARÓN BORRÁS, “La figura de Raoul Dufy como diseñador de tejidos entre los mueblistas y decoradores catalanes de los años veinte: el caso de Antoni Badrinas”, in Actas del simposio Modernos a pesar de todo, Barcelona, Fundación Historia del diseño, 2016. Available at: www.historiadeldisseny.org (consulted 16-05-2016).

55 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, “L’ensemblier Badrinas: entre el Noucentisme i l’Art Déco”, op. cit., pp. 394-411.

56 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, “Jaume Llongueras”, op. cit., pp. 411-429.

57 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, “Vídua de Josep Ribas, uns tallers al servei dels decoradors”, op. cit., pp. 429-445.

58 Luz FEDUCHI, “Breve historia de Rolaco y su incidencia en el diseño de Madrid”, in Various Authors, Diseño industrial en España, Barcelona, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía – Plaza y Janés, 1998, p. 83.

59 According to Fondevila, the appearance of the figure of the “advertising officer” in Catalonia had a lot to do with the publications by the advertising theorist Pere Prat Gaballí: Técnica de la publicidad (ca. 1916), La publicidad científica (1917), El poder de la publicidad (1939). Gaballí was also the editor of the magazine Fama.

60 Mariàngels FONDEVILA, Myrurgia 1916-1936. Bellesa y glamour, Barcelona, Lunwerg – Museu Nacional d’Art de Cataluña – Myrurgia, 2003. On the work of the designer Esteve Monegal, see Cristina RODRÍGUEZ, “Esteve Monegal: de l’escultura a la perfumeria. Fundació i evolució de l’empresa Myrurgia”, in: Anna CALVERA (coord.), La formació del sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat. Assaigs d’història local, Barcelona, GRACMON – Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014, pp. 177-127.

61 In the case of music, popular Spanish themes were also much used by composers Isaac Albéniz, Manuel de Falla and Enrique Granados.

62 Raquel PELTA, “Pervivencias e ideologías: los ilustradores déco en la época de la autarquía”, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, series VII, H.ª del Arte, t. 9, 1996, pp. 383-408.

63 The company Roca Radiadores manufactured the successful models of American “Standard” toilets from the 1930s to the late 1960s.

64 See note 2.

65 About ten years ago I was able to witness the dismantling of the Sunyer jewellers’ shop, whose shop and workshops had remained intact since the 1930s, forming a unique Art Deco site in the centre of Barcelona.

66 Museo del Art Nouveau y el Art Déco. See: www.museocasalis.org (consulted 14-04-2016).

Mediterraneanism in 1930s Design and its Survival in the Post-war Years

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme, Paris, G. Crès et Cie., 1930, p. 105. A compilation of the lectures given in Buenos Aires (1929), reprinted by Altamira, 1994. There is a translation into Spanish, Barcelona, Apóstrofe, 1999.

3 Text by Le Corbusier responding to the criticisms that the writer Karel Teige, one of the most influential Czech theoreticians, had made in 1929 of his work in the Mundaneum; appeared reproduced later in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, in 1933. Manuscrit mecanografiat, FLC A32, Fondation Le Corbusier (Paris). See Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier et la mysthique de l’URSS, Théories et projets pour Moscou 19281936, Liège, Pierre Mardaga, 1987, and the compilation of articles by Karel Teige in Karel Teige, Anti-Corbusier: Textos completos de la polémica Karel TeigeLe Corbusier (edition, foreword and notes by Enrique Granell, translated by Simona Sulcová), Barcelona, ETSAB, 2008.

4 Over time, others were added to it; I have only mentioned those that appear at the meeting of 6/12/1930 to choose the Board of Directors of the new group. Llibre d’Actes. Arxiu Històric Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC). See, for the history of the GATCPAC, the issues of the journal Cuadernos de Arquitectura y Urbanismo (Barcelona), 1972 and 1973, No. 90 and No. 94, respectively; and also the introductions by Francesc Roca and Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubió of the facsimile edition of AC/GATEPAC. 19311937, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1975; Jordi Oliveras Samitier, “Seguidismo, adaptación y originalidad de la vanguardia arquitectónica catalana” in Joan Ramón Resina (coord.), El Aeroplano y la estrella: el movimiento de vanguardia en los Países Catalanes (19041936), Barcelona, Rodopi, 1997, pp. 271-284.

5 AC, 1st quarter 1934, No. 13, p. 35.

6 Josep Mainar, “Els arquitectes i els decoradors”, Mirador (Barcelona), 25 June 1931.

7 Session 19/8/1932, Llibre d’Actes, Arxiu Històric COAC.

8 As it appears in the Llibre d’Actes, session 5/2/1931, Aizpúrua, representing the North Group, is against publishing articles in Catalan in the journal. Arxiu Històric COAC.

9 Session of 25/12/1931. He joined as a director partner taking into consideration the work done in Berlin. Session 12/5/1932. Llibre d’Actes, Arxiu Històric COAC.

10 Also reproduced in AC, 1st quarter 1936, No. 22, pp. 31-39.

11 AC, 2nd quarter 1931, No. 2, pp. 13 and 14.

12 See, for further information, the article by Joan C. Theilacker, “La organización interna del G.A.T.C.P.A.C.”, in Cuadernos de Arquitectura y Urbanismo (Barcelona), July-August 1972, No. 90, pp. 8-17.

13 AC, op. cit., 1931, No. 2, p. 34.

14 See the study by Joan Manuel Tresserras, D’Ací i d’Allà. Aparador de la modernitat (19181939), Barcelona, Llibres de l’Índex, 1993.

15 See the catalogue of the show that was held in 1999, Margaret Michaelis. Fotografia, Avantguarda i Política a la Barcelona de la República [exhibition catalogue], Barcelona, CCCB, IVAM, 1999.

16 According to agreements made by the Board all these works, except for personal commissions, that had been dealt with collectively had to be submitted signed by the group, session 21/7/1932, Llibre d’Actes, Arxiu Històric COAC. Reproduced in the sense of standard element in AC, 4th quarter 1931, No. 4, p. 21.

17 At least until 2009, the Roca Jeweller’s shop, on the corner of Gran Via and Passeig de Gràcia, conserved the original furniture and one piece is in the collection of the Museu de les Arts Decoratives de Barcelona; See the study made by Mercè Vidal, “Cadira de braços Joieria Roca”, in Col·lecció de disseny industrial, Barcelona, Barcelona City Council, Institute of Culture, Museu de les Arts Decoratives, 2008.

18 AC, op. cit., 1931, No. 4, p. 19.

19 Ásdís Ólafsdóttir considers it to have been created by Josep Lluís Sert, claiming that he is the one who conceives modern, functional chairs and because of the frequent use of the wood he makes for his furniture, relating it to the armchair designed in 1935 for the Casa Tipus A in El Garraf. See Ásdís Ólafsdóttir, Le mobilier d’Alvar Aalto dans l’espace et dans le temps. La diffusion internationale du Design 19201940, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998, p. 179.

20 AC, 4th quarter 1932, No. 8.

21 See reproduction No. 8 in Charlotte Perriand, Une vie de création, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1998. A porró is a sort of glass container that is used to drink from. It has a narrow neck at the top, where it is filled and held, and a narrow conical spout that begins near the bottom. When it is suitably decanted a stream of liquid comes out of its hole. It is part of the everyday artisanal and rural landscape of Catalonia and of many other parts of Spain. (Coordinator’s note.)

22 Interview with Jordi Maragall i Noble and his wife Basi, 26/11/1997. The price paid was 3,000 pesetas, and it comprised a table with a light-blue top and legs painted white, a set of chairs and two armchairs. Unfortunately, not all this furniture has been conserved.

23 For further details, see the article by Rosa Maria Subirana i Torrent, “El mobiliario del GATCPAC. Joan Baptista Subirana i Subirana interiorista y diseñador de muebles”, DC 13 14 (Barcelona), 2005, pp. 110-119. In this case both the furniture and the documentation is conserved.

24 Both reproduced in Fèlix Fanés (dir.), Dalí Arquitectura, Barcelona, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, 1996, p. 64.

25 On 24 November, 1 and 15 December 1932, the architect Francesc Folguera lectured about “The essential conditions in the structure of the room”.

26 Admission session 21/7/1932, Llibre d’Actes, Arxiu Històric in COAC. On ADLAN, see the monographic issue of Cuadernos de Arquitectura (Barcelona), 1970, No. 79; Avantguardes a Catalunya [exhibition catalogue], Barcelona, Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, 1992; Pilar Bonet and Martí Peran (eds.), ADLAN

27 Session 27/10/1932, Llibre d’Actes, Arxiu Històric COAC.

28 In 1934, Joan Prats and Josep Lluís Sert produced a special issue of the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà. See Mercè Vidal, “El primer panorama en català de l’art i l’arquitectura d’avantguarda. Una lectura detallada”, Materia. Revista d’Art (Barcelona), 2008, Nos. 6-7, pp. 307-326.

29 Ólafsdóttir, op. cit., 1998, p. 179.

30 Session 2/6/1932; 25/8/1932, Llibre d’Actes, Arxiu Històric COAC.

31 Ásdís Ólafsdóttir, op. cit., 1998, p. 275. In 1936 they had invoiced Artek to the tune of 14,625 FM, the equivalent, in 1997, of 24,877 FF.

32 Reproduced on the cover of AC, 4th quarter 1932, No. 8.

33 Session 12/9/1932, “all the commissions for wooden dwellings or buildings that can be made with standard elements are considered a group study”, Llibre d’Actes, Arxiu Històric COAC.

34 Session 13/7/1933, Llibre d’Actes, Arxiu Històric COAC.

35 Luz Feduchi, “Breve historia de ROLACO y su incidencia en el diseño de Madrid”, in Daniel Giralt-Miracle, Juli Capella and Quim Larrea (eds.), Diseño industrial en España [exhibition catalogue], Madrid, Ministry of Education and Culture, Ministry of Industry and Energy, 1998, pp. 83-84.

36 In 1957 it was possible to manufacture the cantilevered design of Rafael Marquina and Antoni de Moragas’s chair industrially because this technology was now available. Explanation given by the authors to Isabel Campi and Anna Calvera when they were interviewed; I am thankful to them for the information.

37 Interview with the Blanch family 31/10/2001.

38 Letter dated 3/1932, Correspondència, Arxiu Històric COAC. Raimon Torres attributes it to his father, Josep Torres Clavé, but in none of the documents consulted does the authorship appear, only that it was an anonymous design by the group. See Raimon Torres, “Los Diseños de Josep Torres Clavé y el GATCPAC”, Josep Torres Clavé, Barcelona, Santa & Cole Ediciones de Diseño, SA, Centre d’Estudis de Disseny, ETSAB, 1994, p. 19; also Mercè Vidal, “Llum de peu GATCPAC”, in Col·lecció de disseny industrial, op. cit., 2008.

39 Erich Dieckmann, Möbelbau, Holz, Rohr, Stahl, Stuttgart, Julius Hoffmann, 1931.

40 “Sección de noticias. La Feria de Muestras de Barcelona”, AC, 2nd quarter 1933, No. 10, pp. 40-41. The Edarba publishing house (Madrid) dedicated Vol. III to the GATEPAC. It included images of interiors and planned buildings, among which there was a good selection of the works done by the Catalan group. See Arquitectura Contemporánea en España. Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea, Madrid, Edarba, s.d. [1935], book III.

41 Francisco Javier Muñoz Fernández, “Un nuevo moblaje para una nueva arquitectura. Espacio y modernidad en el País Vasco anterior a la Guerra”, in Congreso Internacional Imagen y Apariencia, November 2008, La Rioja, University of La Rioja, 2009, p. 9.

42 Lecture transcribed in AC, 4th quarter 1934, No. 16, pp. 43-44.

43 See the illustrations that appeared in the article by José Gaya Picón, “La meritoria labor social del Comisario de la Casa Obrera”, El Mundo Gráfico, 18 April 1934, and “Ensayo de un tipo mínimo de viviendas obreras. Proyecto del GATEPAC (G.E.)”, AC, 3rd quarter 1933, No. 11, pp. 18-21.

44 Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubió, “GATEPAC: Vanguardia arquitectónica y cambio político”, in AC/GATEPAC, op. cit., 1975, p. 24.

45 See the subject dealt with in greater depth in Martí Perán, Alícia Suàrez and Mercè Vidal (ed.), El noucentisme, un projecte de modernitat [exhibition catalogue], Barcelona, Department of Culture, Generalitat de Catalunya / Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 1994. Also, Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground. Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 19101930 [exhibition catalogue], London, Tate Gallery, 1990. And also, see my article in this book, “In Search of Product Identity: Noucentisme and Cultural Policy”.

46 See Per a la bellesa de la llar humil. Recull d’orientacions, Barcelona, printed by Oliva de Vilanova, s.d. [1923]. The graphic documentation that it displays is interesting, through which a simile is made between the foreign examples, which ranged from the ad hoc furniture of the English garden cities, or American colonial furniture and also Dutch interiors, and the examples produced in Catalonia. Also of interest is the project drafted by Eugeni Giral d’Arquer and Albert Carbó Pompidó, Les cases a bon preu. Les institucions socials i els problemes obrers, Barcelona, Societat Econòmica Barcelonesa d’Amics del País, 1920. See the article by Alícia Suárez on the Furniture Exhibition of 1923 in this book.

47 In 1936, ADLAN organized an exhibition on “The art of today’s primitives” in which there were examples of black and oceanic art, and pre-Colombian objects and sculptures. AC featured an extensive graphic report on it: See AC, 4th quarter 1934, No. 16, pp. 35-42. ADLAN had also dedicated a competition to fairground objects and, in the broadest sense of the artistic concept, it organized an exhibition dedicated to bad taste; this, aside from those dedicated to Picasso and Dalí.

48 Màrius Gifreda, “Le Corbusier a Barcelona”, La Publicitat, 18 May 1928; See also Josep F. Ràfols, “Le Corbusier”, Arts i Bells Oficis (Barcelona), July 1928, pp. 145-148; Fernando Marzá (dir.), Le Corbusier i Barcelona [exhibition catalogue], Barcelona, Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, 1988; Juan José Lahuerta (ed.), Le Corbusier y España, Barcelona, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 1997.

49 Typewritten text, which was the reply made to Karel Teige, and which Le Corbusier published later in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. See also the subject dealt with in Mercè Vidal, “Design History in Catalonia between the influence of Le Corbusier and Mediterranean Historical and Vernacular Sources”, in Design Discourse Japan, Osaka, Osaka University, May 2008, No. 4, Vol. III, pp. 40-49 (translation pp. 76-79).

50 Panos Djelepy, “Les maisons de l’archipel grec observées du point de vue de l’architecture moderne”, Cahiers d’Art (Paris), 1934, Nos. 1-4, p. 93. On the subject of Yogos Simeofordis, See “De l’Athos aux Cyclades: la découverte du Paysage”, in Le Corbusier et l’antique voyage en Mediterranée, Paris, Fondation Le Corbusier, December 1996.

51 “El IV Congreso del C.I.R.P.A.C”, AC, 3rd quarter 1933, No. 11, pp. 12-16.

52 Le Corbusier, “En Grèce, à l’échelle humaine”, Le Voyage en Grèce (Paris), summer 1939, pp. 4-5. See the large collection on this account in Le Corbusier et la Méditerranée, Marseille, Parenthèses, 1987.

53 “La exposición de ‘La Triennale’, Milán”, AC, 1st quarter 1935, No. 13, pp. 35-41.

54 In the session of 29/3/1934 Sert began to insinuate the idea of their being an independent group. In the session of 31/7/1935 the making of GATCPAC model furniture is already taken into account, but, so that it can be displayed on the premises, it is agreed that a vote will be taken in a general meeting, and in the session of 5/2/1936, MIDVA is already considered a collaborating manufacturer. Actes de la Ponència Administrativa, Arxiu Històric COAC.

55 We can see a reproduction of it in AC, 3rd quarter, No. 19 and in the 4th quarter, No. 20, both in 1935.

56 Reproduced in AC, 2nd quarter 1936, No. 22. Prior to that it was reproduced in AC, 3rd quarter 1935, No. 19, in which it shows the interior of the house that Rodríguez Arias designed for his parents-in-law in Sant Antoni on Ibiza. Around a low table there are three of these armchairs. Only the vertical strut to support the arm is shown moved with respect to the front legs, made with palm cord. Was it Rodríguez Arias, we may wonder, who conceived the model? And, based on this one, did the MIDVA group provide the definitive solution for it? Since 1991 it has been sold by Mobles 114 as the Torres Clavé armchair. The plaited cord from Palma on the backrest and seat has been replaced by wicker and it has been made in cedar wood. The Museu de les Arts Decoratives de Barcelona now displays a model of the 1930s made with plaited cord from Palma. See the study by Mercè Vidal, “Butaca de braços MIDVA”, in Col·lecció de disseny industrial, op. cit., 2008. See also Josefina Alix Trueba, Pabellón Español. Exposición Internacional de París. 1937 [exhibition catalogue], Madrid, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1987, p. 43, in which we see several views of the patio where these armchairs were placed for the purpose of putting on theatre plays in there, very near to Picasso’s Guernika mural and Calder’s mercury fountain.

57 See the commentary that was published about this show in which one can deduce the contrast between the MIDVA stand and those of the other FAD associates entered under the concept of the decorative arts: Josep Mainar, “El I Saló d’Artistes Decoradors del Foment de les Arts Decoratives”, Butlletí dels Museus d’Art (Barcelona), September 1936, No. 64, pp. 275-280. The stand was also praised by Màrius Gifreda, but, on the other hand, he considered the work by Joan Miró to be “an outdated note”: “I Saló d’Artistes Decoradors”, Mirador (Barcelona), 28 May 1936.

58 Reproduced on the cover and inside pages of AC, 3rd-4th quarter 1936, Nos. 23-24, p. 20.

59 This blue colour was quite probably the one called blauet, which is still used today to paint the outside patios of many houses on the Catalan coast. We find it called this on Ibiza and in Sitges.

60 Josep Mainar and Josep Corredor-Matheos, Dels bells oficis al disseny actual. FAD 80 anys, Barcelona, Blume, 1984, pp. 65-67.

61 See the biographical profile Albert Illescas offers us, unfailingly in keeping with the important ethical nature of his professional work. Albert Illescas, “Germà Rodríguez Arias 1902-1987”, Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme (Barcelona), 1987, No. 175, pp. 150-151.

62 Sigfried Giedion, Escritos escogidos, Murcia, Colegio de Arquitectos, 1997, p. 215.

63 I dealt with the matter in the paper presented at the second ICDHS held in Havana (Cuba) in June 2000 on the subject of the “Emergence of Regional Histories”. See Mercè Vidal Jansà, “Internacionalismo/ Regionalismo: Emergencia de unas directrices en el diseño catalán y latinoamericano a mediados de los años 30. El exilio como puente”, pp. 1-6, www.culturadeldiseno.cult.cu.

64 Interview with Cristian Aguadé, 7 and 24/1/1997.

65 Some of the projects are conserved in the COAC’s Historical Archive.

66 Letter from Neruda addressed to Germà Rodríguez Arias 1/3/1943, in which he tells him above all to use Oregon pine with lots of streaks. Arxiu Històric COAC.

67 “Casa en San Antonio. Ibiza”, AC, 3rd quarter 1935, No. 19, pp. 30-31.

68 Isabel Campi Valls, “Butaca d’orelles ‘Isla Negra’”, in Moble Català, Barcelona, Department of Culture, Generalitat de Catalunya / Electa, 1994, p. 358; Juli Capella and Quim Larrea, “L’era del moble dissenyat. Moble català contemporani (1930-1993)”, in Moble Català, op. cit.; Mercè Vidal, “Butaca Isla Negra”, in Col·lecció de disseny industrial, op. cit., 2008; Pilar Calderón and Marc Folch, NerudaRodríguez Arias. Cases per a un poeta, Barcelona, COAC, 2004.

69 15/2/1943, Arxiu Històric COAC.

70 An example of the popular chair can be found in the collection of the Museu de les Arts Decoratives de Barcelona, displayed next to the one designed by Rodríguez Arias. It was reproduced in Arts Decoratives a Barcelona: col·leccions per a un Museu [exhibition catalogue], Barcelona, Regidoria d’Edicions i Publicacions de l’Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1994, p. 162.

71 José Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat, “Historia de unas castañuelas (1967)”, Nueva Forma (Madrid), November 1974.

72 See the figure on page 254 in the article by Viviana Narotzky “Constructing the Canon – Design Discourse” in this book.

73 Gio Ponti, “Spagna”, Domus (Milan), 1951, No. 260, p. 22.

74 “Dalla Spagna: una casa a Sitges, una casa a Cadaqués, J. A. Coderch e M. Valls architetti”, Domus (Milan), 1959, No. 350, pp. 5-10.

75 Mercè Vidal, “Xemeneia Polo” and “Làmpada Coderch”, in Col·lecció de disseny industrial, op. cit., 2008.

76 Interview with the designer Miquel Milà, 5/II/1997.

77 Antoni Gallardo and Santiago Rubió i Tudurí, La Farga Catalana, Barcelona, Exhibition of 1930, 1930.

78 “A Cadaqués”, Domus (Milan), November 1961, No. 384, pp. 47-51.

79 Interview with Mercedes Coderch de Sentmenat, 6/12/1996.

The Graphic Avant-garde and the Radius of Influence of Barcelona: Enric Crous-Vidal (Lleida, 1908 - Noyon, 1987)

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 Miquel Pueyo, Lleida: ni blancs, ni negres, però espanyols, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1984, p. 106.

3 See Anna Calvera, “Local, regional, national, global and feedback: several issues to be faced with constructing regional narratives”, in Mind the Map, Design History Beyond Borders, Book of proceedings, Istanbul, 2002, p. 34.

4 Gui Bonsiepe, El diseño de la periferia, Mexico City, Gustavo Gili, 1985; Tony Fry, “A Geography of Power: Design History and Marginality”, in Design Issues, 1989, No. 1, Vol. VI, pp. 15-30.

5 Fry, op. cit., 1989, pp. 15-17; Anna Calvera, “Presentación. Historiar desde la periferia, historia e historias del diseño”, in Historiar desde la periferia: historia e historias del diseño, Barcelona, Publicacions de la UB, 2001, p. 22; Calvera, op. cit., 2002, p. 33.

6 Horacio Gorodisher, “El diseño gráfico desde la periferia de la periferia. Una mirada desde la superficie de la globalización”, in Historiar desde la periferia…, op. cit., 2001, pp. 193-196.

7 Calvera, op. cit., 2001, p. 23.

8 This theory was also developed by Tevfik Balcioglu, “On the priorities of regional design historiography”, in Emergencia de las historias regionales, CD with the Book of Proceedings, Havana, 2001.

9 Proposed – on a political level – by the Italian politician Palmiro Togliatti in 1956, it is a position that can easily be extrapolated to the history of design and relations between the centre and the periphery.

10 I have taken the liberty of using these words by Ausiàs March, very poetic and visual, to refer to the exceptions, or the outstanding elements in a particular context. (Ausiàs March – Gandia, 1397-Valencia, 1459 – was one of the poets who renewed the Catalan language in the fifteenth century. His work falls within the Valencian humanist movement. (Coordinator’s note)

11 Jonathan M. Woodham, “Local, national and global: redrawing the design historical map”, in Mind the map..., op. cit., 2002, pp. 22-31.

12 La Canadenca was the popular nickname for the Barcelona Traction, Light and Power company, founded by Fred Stark Pearson in 1911 for the task of building and running the Seròs canal – among others – from 1912 onwards. About this electric company, see the article by Isabel Campi in this book.

13 In any case, according to Pueyo, Lleida continues to be “the little sunken provincial capital that made the grief-stricken Màrius Torres shudder and which, free of all anguish, we could describe with the same harsh words that Ricardo Macías Picavea applied, in 1899, to small Spanish cities: “Lifeless backward places, ruins and cadavers of ancient decadence […] that sadly vegetate alongside their hazy historical memories and present daydreaming”. See Pueyo, op. cit., 1984, p. 78.

14 Pueyo, op. cit., 1984, p. 87. Joan Fuster devotes an entire chapter to Valencian provincianisme and provincialisme, placing special emphasis on the subsidiarity that this implies. See Joan Fuster, Nosaltres, els valencians, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1996, pp. 203-221.

15 Josep Vallverdú: “Notes sobre el provincianisme”, Serra d’Or, 1964, Nos. 2-3, pp. 17-19.

16 Vallverdú, op. cit., 1964, pp. 17-18.

17 Josep Vallverdú, “Lleida i Barcelona”. Cited in Pueyo, op. cit., 1984, p. 97.

18 An example of vulgar exaltation would be the article by Josep M. Junoy (despite him not being from Lleida), “Lleida”, Vida Lleidatana, 1926, No. 3, p. 45; while apologetic texts against the vulgarity of Lleida and the desired cultural effervescence could be found in No. 11, 1 October 1926, and in No. 16, 15 December 1926, respectively. In No. 9, published on 1 September 1926, the same magazine comments with visible joy on the monographic article about Lleida that had recently appeared in La Publicitat.

19 Pueyo, op. cit., 1984, p. 108.

20 Pueyo, op. cit., 1984, pp. 109 and 113, for example.

21 Another possible job in this discipline in Lleida could be costume or stage set design, but this activity was virtually non-existent in the city, and professionals with links to the artistic avant-garde and the Modern Movement were also few in number

22 And yet the city of Tàrrega, in the province of Lleida, had had an arts and crafts school since 1777, the present-day Escola Ondara, founded then by the city’s Economic Society of Friends of the Country and made official in 1923 by the Republican government. Founded as a free school of drawing, it was supported by the Llotja School in its early days, but it soon leant towards the Basque model according to which these institutions, instead of evolving towards artistic training, reinforced the training of draughtsmen who were experts in technical drawing. See Pilar Vélez, “On the relationship between art and industry: a cultural debate in the nineteenth century, the precursor of industrial design?”, in From Industry, Art: Shaping a Design Market through Luxury and Fine Crafts (Barcelona 17141914). Essays on Local History, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2013, and the documents of reference for the history of schools founded in the eighteenth century (Coordinator’s note.)

23 Taking advantage of the fact that several initiatives took place in 2008 to commemorate the centenary of his birth, I shall mention here the publication of Memòries by Enric Crous, Barcelona, Mediterrània, 2008; the catalogue coordinated by Raquel Pelta, CrousVidal i la grafia llatina, Lleida, IMAC, Museu d’Art Jaume Morera, 2008, and the biography by Esther Solé, Enric CrousVidal: enfant terrible, 19081987, Lleida, Edicions de la Clamor, 2008.

24 Joan Torrent and Rafael Tasis, Història de la premsa catalana, Vol. II, Barcelona, Bruguera, 1966, p. 233.

25 Enric Crous, “Salut!”, Art, 1932, No. 1, p. 1.

26 I could cite numerous articles here, but I shall especially mention the commentary by Enric Crous, “Lletrística”, Art, No. 5, in which he predicts the success of Paul Renner’s Futura.

27 A cinema club, a university theatre group and a film production company, Imán-Films.

28 “Presentació”, Art, 1933.

29 J. V. Foix, “Notes i simulacres”, La Publicitat, 1934.

30 Enric Crous, “Provincianisme”. Cited in Valeri Mallol, La Revista «Art» de Lleida, Lleida, Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs, 1995, p. 91. Even in the 1960s, Art still went unnoticed in some collections of Catalan magazines. See La Presse catalane: 1920-1960, s.l., Grup de Resistència Catalana, 1962, p. 28, in which there is mention of the existence of a magazine entitled Art in Barcelona, but the Art published in Lleida, although it came out first, is not mentioned. Moreover, one must also mention important exceptions, such as Enric Satué, El disseny gràfic a Catalunya, Barcelona, Els Llibres de la Frontera, 1987; or the dignifying of Art carried out in 1977 with the publication of the facsimile (without advertising) by Letteradura.

31 Enric Crous, “Justificació i acusació personal”, Art, No. 0 (1935-1936).

32 See Jan Middendorp, “La tipografia a Europa després de la Segona Guerra Mundial” and Raquel Pelta, “Enric Crous Vidal i la grafia llatina”, in Pelta (coord.), op. cit., 2008, pp. 15-29 and 43-62, respectively.

33 Crous wrote four treatises about Latin script: Richesse de la Graphie Latine (1951), Grâce et Harmonie du Graphisme Latin & Autres Remarques (1952), Doctrine & Action. Pour la renaissance du graphisme latin (1954) and Pour la renaissance du graphisme latin. Suite doctrinale du mouvement graphique (1956).

34 All these creations – Fugue d’Arabesques, Catalanes, Paris, Ilerda, ÎledeFrance, ChampsElysées, Structura – have been the subject of an interesting study by Andreu Balius. See Pelta (coord.), op. cit., 2008, pp. 64-85.

35 The year when, coincidentally, Enric Crous became the director of the FTF.

36 It goes without saying that confidence in the value of Enric Crous’s proposals in favour of a new Latin script was so great that Ilerda, created in 1954 for the FTN (distributed in France after 1956, after a purge that turned it into ChampsElysées), was used in the FTN’s official paper until well into the 1970s. See Solé, op. cit., 2008, p. 96.

37 The first criticisms, which insisted on the poor legibility of Crous’s designs, and on a lax orthodoxy camouflaged behind a supposed freedom of movements, came principally from France and England, and they emerged between 1954 and 1955 just when the Crous-Vidal’s fonts were beginning to make inroads in the Spanish market. See Patrícia Molins, “Enric Crous-Vidal”, in Enric CrousVidal. De la publicitat a la tipografia, Valencia, IVAM, 2000, p. 21, and Kenneth Day, “Crous-Vidal. Continental designer with international implications”, in Print in Britain, 1955, pp. 133-140.

38 However, in recent years, the trend has been reversed somewhat, visible in the reprint of the magazine Art in 1977, in the recent publication of books and studies about his life and work and also in the digitization of Crous-Vidal’s typographies, done by Neufville Digital.

39 Dominique Marcou, “La scuola grafica di Parigi”, Linea Grafica, March-April 1955, No. 3-4, pp. 78-80.

The Radio and Household Electrical Appliance Industries Before the Civil War (1929-1936)

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 David Landes, Progreso tecnológico y revolución industrial, Madrid, Tecnos, 1979.

3 See, respectively, Donald Bush, The Streamlined Decade, New York, George Braziller, 1975; Claude Liechtenstein and Franz Engler (eds.), Streamlined. A Metaphor for progress, Baden, Lars Müller, 1993; David A. Hank, David and Anne A. Hoy, American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow, Paris, Flammarion, 2005.

4 See Mariàngels Fondevila (ed.), Myrurgia 19161936. Bellesa y glamour, Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and Lunwerg, 2003. See in this book the articles by Cristina Rodríguez on the founder of the company and by Mariàngels Fondevila about Art Déco in Barcelona.

5 Horacio Capel (dir.), “Conclusiones”, in Las tres chimeneas. Implantación industrial, cambio tecnológico y transformación de un espacio urbano barcelonés, Barcelona, FECSA, 1994, pp. 169-215.

6 Manuel Lecuona and Manuel Martínez, “Espanya i l’electricitat”, in Various Authors, La mecanització de la casa. Una història de l’electrodomèstic. Col·lecció AlfaroHofmann, Valencia, Generalitat Valenciana, 1995.

7 Capel, op. cit., 1994, p. 190.

8 Penny Sparke, Electrical Appliances, London-Sydney, Unwyn Hyman, 1987.

9 While the rural family was a unit of production, the urban family, typical of the industrial age, rapidly became a unit of consumption, as it depended totally on external services for its supplies.

10 Sparke, op. cit., 1987.

11 Capel, op. cit., 1994, p. 197.

12 After that the show was held from 1948 to 1983, and served as a model for the Barcelona shows El Hogar Moderno and Hogarotel, which were held in the Barcelona Trade Fair from the 1960s onwards.

13 María Luisa Rocamora, La perfecta ama de casa, Barcelona, Biblioteca Delfos de Conocimientos, 1946; Sección Femenina de FET y JONS, Economía doméstica. Quinto curso y sexto curso, Madrid, 1961; G. de Corbie, Cómo conservar y equipar la casa, Barcelona, Bruguera, 1968 [1st edition, Gautier Languerau, 1965].

14 F. F. Sintes Olives and F. Vidal Burdils, La industria eléctrica en España. Estudio económicolegal de la producción y consumo de electricidad y material eléctrico. Barcelona, Montaner y Simon, 1933.

15 Sintes Olives and Vidal Burdils, op. cit., 1993, p. 722.

16 Sintes Olives and Vidal Burdils, op. cit., 1993, pp. 797-798.

17 Neveras “Todo a plazos”, El Hogar y la Moda, 15 May 1935.

18 See, respectively, Luis Ezcurra, Historia de la radiodifusión española. Los primeros años, Madrid, Editora Nacional, 1974; Carmelo Garitaonaindía, La radio en España. De altavoz musical a arma de propaganda, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1988; Armand Balsebre, Historia de la radio en España, Volume I (1874-1939), Madrid, Cátedra, 2001; Joan Julià, Radios españolas. Valoración de los aparatos, Barcelona, Marcombo-Boixareu, 1999, and Joan Julià, Radio. Emisoras y receptores, Barcelona, Marcombo-Boixareu, published on CD, 1993.

19 Balsebre, op. cit., 2001, p. 126.

20 Radio Ibérica and Radio Castilla, which had been founded in Madrid with local capital, were unable to survive and were also taken over by Unión Radio.

21 Eduard Rifà i Anglada, “Una realidad lamentable”, in Articles (1938), Barcelona, Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de la Presidència, Direcció General de Radiodifusió i Televisió, 1999, pp. 34-35.

22 The first receivers were crystal (galena) sets and had so little power that it was necessary to listen to them with telephone headphones. They were relatively easy to build at home by so-called galenistes. The valve radios that became popular in the second half of the 1920s were much more powerful and could be listened to through a loudspeaker.

23 Balsebre, op. cit., 2001, p. 182.

24 Ironically, Unión Radio was not nationalized until the end of the Civil War, when Franco’s government turned it into the Sociedad Española de Radiodifusión (SER) with the aim of applying severe censorship.

25 Balsebre, op. cit., 2001, p. 351. As regards the data for 1936, Balsebre suggests that if 50% of the listeners cheated and did not pay the license that means the figure can be doubled.

26 Data taken from Carmelo Garitaonaindía, op. cit., 1988, p. 126, and from Luis Ezcurra, op. cit., 1974, p. 246.

27 Published or reproduced, respectively, in La Ràdio d’Època, 31 December 2000; Catalunya Ràdio, 11 September 1934, No. 123; “2 años de plazos”, Pelayo Radio. El Hogar y la Moda, 5 January 1936, and advertisement in D’Ací i d’Allà, summer 1933, No. 173.

28 The lowest daily wage, 5 pesetas, was paid to cardboard box operatives, and the highest, 20 pesetas, to watchmakers. Monthly salaries ranged between a minimum of 200 pesetas and a maximum of 600. See Instituto Nacional de Estadística, “El salario y la jornada en Madrid, 1931”, Anuario 19321933, pp. 624-625.

29 Figure found on an original postcard in Joan Julià’s collection.

30 See the various issues of the Guía del importador americano.

31 Rifà i Anglada, “Els industrials comerciants de ràdio i els qui escolten les emissions”, in op. cit., 1999, pp. 80-81.

32 Rifà i Anglada, “Efectes de la darrera Exposició de Ràdio”, in op. cit., 1999, pp. 288-290.

33 INE, Instituto Nacional de Estadística, “Grupo E. –Artículos de exportación; Grupo I. –Artículos de importación, Serie mensual de enero 1920 a diciembre 1932”, Anuario 19321933, p. 608.

34 The number of unemployed people in Great Britain reached 23% of the working population in 1932. That same year, 45% of German workers were unemployed and 23% were working half days. In Spain 12.8% of the active population was unemployed. The highest unemployment figure in Catalonia was 6.5% of the working population in 1936. See Joseph Harrison, Historia económica de la España contemporánea, Barcelona, Vicens Vives, 1980, pp. 178-179.

35 Leandro Benavides, Política económica de la II República Española, Madrid, Guadiana, 1972.

36 Alonso and Conde, op. cit., 1994.

37 Jordi Maluquer, “De les construccions metàl·liques a les construccions mecàniques, 1914-1939”, in Història econòmica de la Catalunya Contemporània. S. XX. Indústria, finances i turisme, Barcelona, Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1989, p. 93.

38 Joan Julià, op. cit., 1993, p. 13.

“Banned Due to its Unpleasant Colour”. Censorship and Design During the Early Years of Francoism (1936-1945)

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 Joaquín Arrarás Iribarren (dir.), Historia de la cruzada española, Madrid, Ediciones Españolas, Vol. VII, second edition, 1940.

3 “El Norte de Castilla”, Valladolid, 19 July 1936. Text included in Fernando Díaz-Plaja, La Guerra de España en sus documentos, Barcelona, Ediciones G.P., 1969, pp. 14-16.

4 The complete text of this law is also included in the work by Díaz-Plaja, op. cit., 1969, pp. 36-38.

5 Justino Sinova, La censura de Prensa durante el franquismo, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1989, p. 16.

6 The question of the model followed by Spanish press legislation is a matter of controversy. According to some testimonies, like that of Serrano Súñer in his memoirs —Entre el silencio y la propaganda, la historia como fue— and that of Ramón Garriga, our laws were inspired on the Italian ones. Moreover, the drafter of the 1938 Press Law, Giménez-Arnau, resided in Italy in the 1930s and was very familiar with Mussolini’s work. For others, German influence is indisputable, especially that of Joseph Goebbels. On this subject you can consult the text by Elisa Chuliá Rodrigo, “La legislación de prensa del primer franquismo: la adaptación española de un modelo importado”, in Various Authors, Comunicaciones del Congreso Internacional: El régimen de Franco (19361975). Política y relaciones exteriores, Madrid, UNED, 1993, pp. 423-433. See also by the same author, El poder y la palabra. Prensa y poder político en las dictaduras. El régimen de Franco ante la prensa y el periodismo, Madrid, UNED, 2001 (Biblioteca Nueva).

7 On the organization of the press and propaganda in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, see the work of Alejandro Pizarroso Quintero, Historia de la propaganda, Madrid, Eudema, 1990.

8 Justino Sinova, op. cit., 1989, p. 88.

9 Alicia Alted Vigil, Política del nuevo Estado sobre el patrimonio cultural y la educación durante la Guerra Civil, Madrid, Ministry of Culture, Directorate General of Fine Art and Archives, National Centre of Artistic, Archaeological and Ethnological Information, 1984, p. 62.

10 Javier Lasso de la Vega, Concepto y misión de la biblioteca en el momento actual, p. XXXIV, cited by Alted, op. cit., 1984, p. 55.

11 Typewritten text of the speech by the Minister of Education, Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez, for the “Book Fair”, 23 April 1938. Reproduced by Alicia Alted, op. cit., 1984, p. 59.

12 Alted, op. cit., 1984, p. 33.

13 Pedro Laín Entralgo, Descargo de conciencia, Madrid, Alianza, 1989, p. 234.

14 Order of 15 October 1938, Madrid, BOE, 19 October 1938.

15 Decree-law, 27 July 1945, whereby the Vice-secretariat of Popular Education is abolished and its services are transferred to the Ministry of National Education.

16 Official letter signed by M. G. Vallina, on 30 January 1942 (General Archive of the Administration [AGA], Culture, box 102).

17 In this order, once again, the censorship measures were explained, saying: “The state must ensure the dignity and decorous representation of its own symbols, figures and slogans, as well as those of the Movement and of the National Armed Forces and of the representations of the history of Spain, of the heroism of the Spanish people. Colours, arms, emblems, symbols, names and episodes are a dearly loved patrimony and they are a vehicle of national emotion that cannot be used freely for private purposes, nor diminished with clumsy distortions”.

18 AGA, Culture, box 56.

19 In the General Archive of the Administration, Culture, boxes 55 to 65, numerous examples are conserved with their corresponding censorship reports.

20 AGA, Culture, box 60. Official letter dated 4 February 1943.

21 AGA, Culture, box 60. Official letter dated 9 February 1943.

22 AGA, Culture, box 63. File 53-14238. José Caballero (1915-1991) was an artist with connections to the Surrealist avant-garde before the war. General Franco’s military coup surprised him in Huelva. Under suspicion for his links with Federico García Lorca’s circle, he was summoned by Dionisio Ridruejo – who was in charge of the National Propaganda Head Office – to join the Plastic Arts Section with the job of “aesthetically guiding the appearance of the new state” (Pedro Laín Entralgo, Descargo de conciencia, Madrid, Alianza, 1989, p. 234), where, besides collaborating as a painter and set designer, he worked as a censor.

23 AGA, Culture, box 63. File 147-14182.

24 AGA, Culture, box 64.

25 AGA, Culture, box 55. File R-8-03065.

26 AGA, Culture, box 145. Official letter, 31 March 1942.

27 AGA, Culture, box 56. Official letter, 4 September 1942.

28 AGA, Culture, box 103. Official letter, 12 November 1942.

29 Román Gubern, La censura. Función política y ordenamiento jurídico bajo el franquismo (1936-1975), Barcelona, Península, 1980, pp. 34-35.

30 AGA, Culture, box 56. File 66-7285.

31 Ángel Llorente, Arte e ideología en el franquismo (1936-1951), Madrid, Visor, 1995, p. 65 (La Balsa de la Medusa).

32 Works associated with religious subjects had also to be subjected to the ruling of the ecclesiastical advisor on Censorship. An example of this is file number 294 processed to authorize some “Religious postcards for calendar” done by Luisa Butler (AGA, Culture, box 65. Official letter, 12 November 1943). Ecclesiastical censorship also intervened in certain works, as indicated by file 173-11281, of 29 December 1942, in which the illustrations by Alberto Rivas for the book La alegría de vivir were authorized, but it said “subject to ecclesiastic censorship” (AGA, Culture, box 54). Moreover, the only nude drawings found in the course of my research are some sketches of three women in slightly erotic poses signed by Pilar Aranda. They were banned by Juan Cabanas as he thought they lacked all artistic merit. The sketches were of doubtful quality, but we do not know if the subject depicted was added to this (AGA, Culture, box 55).

33 AGA, Culture, box 56. Official letter, 27 July 1942.

34 The illustration does not appear with its file (AGA, Culture, box 103. Official letter, 4 December 1942).

35 Rafael Sánchez Mazas, “Confesión a los pintores”, Arriba, 17 March 1940. See also R. S. M.: “Textos para una política de arte”, Escorial, Book IX, October 1942, No. 24.

36 The cover in question consisted of a black background against which the said badge was placed as the only decorative feature (AGA, Culture, box 102. Official letter, 10 March 1942).

37 AGA, Culture, box 102. Official letter, 12 March 1942.

38 On the organization of the section’s staff, the shortcomings of the service, the disputes with other departments, the problems of space, etc., see AGA boxes 102, 103 and 105, Culture.

39 Justino Sinova, op. cit., 1989, p. 19.

40 AGA, Culture, box 102. Official letter, 18 March 1942 (my italics).

41 Miguel Delibes, La censura de prensa en los años 40 (y otros ensayos), Valladolid, Ámbito, 1985, p. 6.

42 Note sent by the Press Office to newspapers, dated 29 October 1943 (Delibes, op. cit., 1985, pp. 12-13).

43 A year after the end of the war the printing of the words “banker” and “food” was banned, or allusions to them in the news items about public events organized in Madrid. It was said that special attention had to be paid in relation to the parties held at the Palace or the Ritz. The order is dated 11 April 1940 (AGA, Culture, box 360). Also at that time precise instructions were given about the announcements of Christmas, New Year’s and Three Kings’ Night dinners, which could not show the details of the food and drink, being restricted to simply indicating the place where they were going to be held and the cover charge. Order of 5 December 1940 (AGA, Culture, box 349).

44 A note of 13 April 1942 says, for example: “Attention [,] censors! All photographs of sporting championships, of the Women’s Section, in which the ladies are showing their knees are banned and must therefore be deleted” (AGA, Culture, box 348).

45 Both inspection sheets are in AGA, Culture, box 343, and Justino Sinova mentions them in op. cit., 1989, p. 134.

46 Note, 5 February 1941 (AGA, Culture, box 354).

47 13 April 1942 (AGA, Culture, box 348).

48 Text published in newspaper Arriba, quoted in Rafael Abella, La vida cotidiana en España bajo el régimen de Franco, Barcelona, Argos Vergara, 1985, pp. 22-23.

49 Ministerial Order, 8 March 1941, whereby rules are laid down for the work plans of publishers and publishing houses (BOE15 March 1941).

50 Ibid.

51 Alted, op. cit., 1984, p. 65.

52 Circular No. 48, 7 September 1942, signed by Adriano del Valle. Included in Bibliografía Hispánica, July-August 1943.

53 Circular No. 52, 30 September 1943, published in the magazine Bibliografía Hispánica, July-August 1943, p. 49.

54 Official letter, 23 November 1943, in Bibliografía Hispánica, November-December 1943, p. 84.

55 Comment by Julián Marías in Antonio Beneyto, Censura y política en los escritos españoles, Barcelona, Euros, 1975, p. 67.

The Idea of Design: an Ideal of Modernity or a Model of Modernization? Thoughts on the Idea of Design as it was Formulated in Barcelona in the 1960s and 1970s

1 The first version of this text was a lecture given at the symposium on design and modernity organized by the MuVIM in Valencia in the spring of 2005. For some time I had been studying, through the writings of designers and critics from the pioneers’ generation, how an idea of design had been forming in Barcelona and how it had been introduced in the city since the 1970s. The research work done at GRACMON has made it possible to revise the text and update some aspects of it.

2 In December 2012 the Barcelona Design History Foundation and the online journal Monografica organized a seminar on design in the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games. The conclusions of the seminar more than corroborate the correlation between design, modernity and modernization mentioned here.

3 For a comparative analysis of the terms ‘Modernism’ in English and French, see Paul Ricoeur (2000/1a) La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2003, ch. ‘Nôtre Modernité’, pp. 400-412. How to talk about the modern nature that gives an image and unity to the short twentieth century (1914-1989), the modern period, or ‘Modernist’ in English, was a constant subject of discussion with Isabel Campi when she was preparing her study of design in the twentieth century (available as Doctoral dissertation, at the University of Barcelona thesis archive, 2016).

4 For a more detailed study of the periods mentioned in passing here, see, on Art Deco, the articles by Isabel Campi in this book and the one by Àngels Fondevila in Calvera (ed.), From Industry to Art, Barcelona, GG, 2013, pp. 211-233. With regard to Catalan Modernisme, this volume includes new research on the period done by experts from this research group.

5 ICDHS are the initials of the International Committee of Design History and Design Studies that organizes a congress on these disciplines every two years.

6 “In countries lacking organic industrialization, design was born with the help of external influences, so it is urgent to begin to define what is typical and specific or the way in which these influences are reinterpreted [...] In Cuba, as in other countries outside the European scene, one cannot speak of modernity but of successive imported modernizations that have been introduced due to different events throughout history. Modernizations are sudden transformations with no time to adapt and acclimatize to our realities, that is, without proper transculturation” Lucila Fernández, ‘Modernidad y posmodernidad en Cuba’, in Calvera & Mallol (eds.), Historiar desde la periferia: historia e historias del diseño, Barcelona, Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2001, p. 71.

7 That the idea of design emerged from the most industrialized heart of the West and spread internationally in the mid 1950s and early 1960s is a theory based on the activities done by ICSID and ICOGRADA after they were founded in 1957 and 1963, respectively. They were created with the intention of grouping together associations of professionals from all over the world. A way of discovering when and how design reached the different regions of the world is to monitor the dates when members joined both entities. The associations of Barcelona, founded in 1960 and 1961, joined straight away, in 1961.

8 Jonathan M. Woodham, Twentieth Century Design, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 160.

9 A similar proposal, that is proposing an idea of modernity independent of processes of industrialization, was launched by Andrea Branzi in relation to Italian design. He called its story “incomplete modernity”. See Introduzione al design italiano, Milan, Baldini & Castoldi, 1999.

10 Perhaps one of the first historians critical of the model was, in Catalonia, Ignasi de Solà Morales in Eclecticismo y vanguardia, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1980. The first chapter contains a very good analysis of the historiography inherited from Pevsner.

11 Here we must ignore the debate about the printing press and the industrial nature of the publishing sector after the mobile printing press was invented: this is a very long discussion that it is best to leave for another time because it requires us to bear in mind the entire guild system and its productive structure.

12 Alexandre Cirici Pellicer: “Eina fa deu anys”, Serra d’Or, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, No. 208 (January) 1977, pp. 41-44. From the same period, it is worth mentioning here the chapters devoted by Xavier Rubert de Ventós to a range of aspects, from aesthetic reflection to the puritanism of the predominant artistic and architectural style of the twentieth century, in La estética y sus herejías, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1974.

13 Renato de Fusco, “Artifici” per la storia dell’architettura, Naples, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1998. On periodization as a resource of historiographical research, see Jacques Le Goff, Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches?, Paris, Seuil, 2014.

14 See in this book the article by M. Àngels Fortea on the subject of the Catalan Pop graphic artists. A previous version of the research can be found in Calvera (ed.), La formació del Sistema Disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014, pp. 399-428.

15 This is the content of the debates about industrial merchandise —or industrial arts, to use the terms habitual in Spain at the time— about which I have written in previous books. See GRACMON From Industry to Art, edited by Anna Calvera, Barcelona, GG, 2013. In Catalonia, research into the period has evolved greatly in recent years and the bibliography is now very extensive. With regard to Papanek and the current aesthetic crisis, a theoretically and ideologically complex problem for today’s design culture, I attempted to approach it in ‘El mundo real se venga: estética y antiestética en el mundo del diseño actual’, a lecture given in 2013 to mark the new translation into Spanish of Papanek’s classic text, by Raquel Pelta.

16 ‘La utopia és possible’, exhibition devoted to remembering the ICSID on Ibiza, open from 19 June 2012 to 20 January 2013 at the MACBA and curated by Teresa Grandas and Daniel Giralt Miracle. The 25th anniversary of the Congress had previously been celebrated at the former headquarters of the MADB, in the Palau Reial de Pedralbes, on 24 October 1996, with an “Instantaneous Exhibition”.

17 There is currently a discussion as to whether the opening of sections of the schools of applied arts and artistic crafts all over Spain, like Llotja and Massana, devoted to advertising graphic art (in about 1957), may or may not be considered the first teaching of design. From my point of view, if design entailed a break with the past, they cannot be considered as such until the professionals organized in the corresponding institutions take charge of them, as was the case with Massana after Grafistes FAD was founded. Indeed, Cirici’s decision to promote the teaching of design at a brand new school linked to the FAD at least tells us to what extent the wish to start afresh dominated the scene. The other experiences are the result of the development of earlier teaching that adapt to the reality of the country as it is consolidated through associations like that of the commercial draughtsmen promoted in Madrid in the 1940s thanks to the efforts of Emeterio Melendreras in the journal Arte Comercial (1946-1952).

18 An inverse example: Maurizio Vitta, El sistema de las imágenes, Barcelona, Paidós, 2003, p. 255: in Italy, “visual design is the modern heir to a graphic tradition that goes back to the origins of mankind [...] it was not limited to receiving such a prestigious inheritance, adapting it to the demands of the modern world, which it also did; it gave its mandate as the continuer of tradition a professional conscience and a disciplinary organization. In short, with a few decades’ delay it has done the same with the design of everyday representation as industrial design did with the projection of the utilitarian object”.

19 For a history of the Minipimer, (the hand blender made by Pimer), see Rosa Povedano, “Aparició a la indústria catalana del petit electrodomèstic: disseny i evolució de la batedora elèctrica de braç (Gabriel Lluelles i la Minipimer), in Anna Calvera (ed.), Op. cit., 2014, pp. 309-334. For the other objects, the reference texts are now the catalogues of the collections published by the Museu del Disseny de Barcelona.

20 For a study of Cirici as an art critic, see the article by Narcís Sellés in Anna Calvera (ed.), Op. cit., 2014, pp. 355-368. For Perucho, see the article by Calvera in this book.

21 Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, ‘Art. Cit.’, 1977.

The Photographs of Xavier Miserachs: Constructing the Image of Barcelona

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 Report by Amador Ferrer on the urbanistic plans passed in Barcelona between 1956 and 1970 in Amador Ferrer Aixalà, Presentación y estadística de los planes parciales de la provincia de Barcelona (19561970), Barcelona, Publicaciones del Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Catalunya y Baleares, 1974.

3 Otto Steinert, “Sobre las posibilidades de creación en fotografía”, in Joan Fontcuberta (ed.), Estética fotográfica. Selección de texto, Barcelona, Blume, 1984, p. 220.

4 Ferran Mascarell, Barcelona y la modernidad. La ciudad como proyecto de cultura, Barcelona, Gedisa, 2007, p. 38.

5 Joan Oliver, “El hombre y la ciudad”, in Xavier Miserachs, Barcelona, blanco y negro, Barcelona, Aymà, 1964, pp. 9-10.

The Conceptualization of Design: the Contribution of Joan Perucho and the Nature of Graphic Art in the Founding period

1 A Catalan version of this paper was previously published in La formació del Sistema disseny Barcelona (1914-2014), un camí de modernitat, Anna Calvera (ed.), Barcelona, Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2014. Translation by Andrew Stacey.

2 See Maurizio Vitta, El sistema de las imágenes. Estética de las representaciones cotidianas, Barcelona, Paidós, 2003 (1st Italian edition, 1999).

3 Vitta, op. cit., 1993, p. 256.

4 Norberto Chaves explained the historical reasons for this parallel in the first White Book on Catalan Design situation. In the Vol. 2, p. 19 stated: “The appearance of design as a specific stage in the historical evolution of graphic communication is a crucial landmark: the division between the direct source and the person “who writes” the social message, between the client and the advertising professional, is institutionalized. The artist, who has been restricted to a fundamentally rhetorical and illustrative task on the already written message, is replaced by a technician who operates at deeper levels of communication rationalizing the semantic structure of the message and optimizing its conditions of register. This qualitative change of the poster artist and the graphic designer also coincides with the change from the applied arts to industrial design. In actual fact it is a unique process —the boom in design— that appears in two of its fields: product and communication”. This was the first truly “institutional” book about design to appear after the political transition in Spain, and it marks the period of normalization of design in the social and economic life of Catalonia: Llibre blanc del disseny gràfic a Catalunya, Barcelona, Generalitat de Catalunya, 1985.

5 See the texts by Moragas for the first FAD catalogues. For a study on Moragas’s concept of design, see M. Glòria Farré, La dimensió humana d’Antoni de Moragas i la coherència íntima del disseny, Barcelona, Elisava, 1991. As for Pevsner’s comments, Barcelona legend has it that it was the sight of Gaudí that made him rethink his ideas about international Modernisme expounded in his book on Modern Design Pioneers (1936) as can be seen in the following work: The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (1968). The first work was translated into Spanish in 1976 in Buenos Aires by the Infinito publishing house, and it was reprinted in 2001. The second was translated in 1969 in Barcelona (Gustavo Gili; there have been several subsequent editions).

6 See Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubió, Eclecticismo y vanguardia. El caso de la arquitectura moderna en Cataluña, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1980, pp. 188-203.

7 Probably, the most careful exposition of everything that the modern dictates signified for design can be found in the introduction that Giulio Carlo Argan wrote for the publication in book form of the text by Tomàs Maldonado El diseño industrial reconsiderado in 1976 (Barcelona, Gustavo Gili). Argan argued that this idea failed because it was an ideal implicit in the very notion of industrial design.

8 “La sensibilitat gràfica d’Antoni Morillas”, Destino, February 1966, No. 1490, in Joan Perucho, “Crítica d’Art”, Obres completes, Vol. VII, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1993, pp. 401. On the crisis of the Modern Movement, see “Vers un academicisme de les formes industrials”, in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 387. Article written for the ADI-FAD exhibition at a Hogarotel fair (s/d).

9 Years later he made a selection of these articles and he grouped them together in two books translated into Catalan: Una semàntica visual (Barcelona, Plaza & Janés, 1986) and Cultura i imatge (Barcelona, Destino, 1991). They have been compiled in Volume VII of his Obres completes in the collection “Clàssics Catalans del Segle XX”, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1993.

10 Daniel Giralt Miracle, “Joan Perucho, l’art entre el real i l’imaginari”, introduction to Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 9.

11 “Vers una semàntica visual” (1964), in Joan Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 53. This text was originally published as the introduction to Publicity in Spain. Grafistas Agrupación FAD, Barcelona, Blume, 1964: IX. All the references of the articles by Perucho that have been used come from Volume VII of the above-mentioned Obres completes.

12 “Vers una semàntica visual” (1964), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 53 and “El disseny industrial” (1961). Article written as a result of the founding of ADI-FAD, in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 99.

13 “El cartell publicitari”, Destino, 1967, No. 1574, p. 44; Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 319.

14 “Vivim en un món d’imatges” (‘we are living in a world full of pictures’). He mentions René Huyghe and continues the reflection “our period is gradually abandoning the printed culture and entering what he [Huyghe] calls the ‘civilization of the image’”. “El grafista i el món de la imatge” (1963), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 160-162. The article was written for the first exhibition of posters in the street organized by RED, a company managing the new billboards, and G-FAD. This first exhibition was planned to advertise both graphic design as visual language and the billboards as media. Its meaning was touristic and its slogan was “Conozca España en Barcelona”. Advertising hoardings were installed for the first time in Spain in 1960.

15 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 465.

16 “El Pop art, de Lichtenstein a Andy Warhol” (1965), in Perucho, op. cit., 1991; in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 298-300.

17 In order of mention, Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 259, and “Fotografia i publicitat”, Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 276.

18 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 162.

19 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 467; “Pla-Narbona” (1964, 1965), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 465, respectively.

20 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 358.

21 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 307.

22 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 52.

23 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 51.

24 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 52.

25 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 161. Perucho says that he follows Gillo Dorfles in his reasoning.

26 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 259.

27 Joan Perucho: introductory text to Grafistas, Agrupación FAD, Barcelona, Blume, 1964: IX. Reproduced in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, as “Una semàntica visual”, pp. 51-54.

28 1961, Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 98, and Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 53, respectively.

29 “Grafisme publicitari espanyol” (1963), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 267.

30 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 340 and 319.

31 “Ricard Giralt Miracle i les arts gràfiques” (1960), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 122, and “El cartell publicitari”, in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 319. Perucho refers to Cassandre’s famous words cited countless times: “The poster is a means to an end. A means of communication between the salesman and the public, rather like the telephone. The poster designer has the same role as a telegraph operator. No one asks him for his opinion, they only ask him to provide a clear, good and exact connection.” A. M. Cassandre, L’art internationale d’aujourd’hui, 1929.

32 The citations in the three previous paragraphs come from the articles “Ricard Miracle i les arts gràfiques” (1960), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 122; “El grafista i el món de la imatge” (1963), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 160; “El cartell publicitari” (1967), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 319; “L’arquitectura gràfica de Francis Deswarte” (s/d), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 335 and “El grafisme de Tomàs Vellvé” (s/d), in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 340.

33 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 335.

34 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 467, 161 and 160-162.

35 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 54, 467 and 54 again.

36 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 465.

37 “La imatge i el text”, in Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 261-263. In this article, Perucho comments on the latest French tendencies in the page setting of books and newspapers after the publication of the book by a printer of the École de Lure.

38 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 319 and 340.

39 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 335 and 340.

40 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 335.

41 In order of citation: Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 319 and 335; Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 53; Perucho, op. cit., 1993, pp. 467; 276, and 467 again.

42 Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 319.

43 Joan Perucho, op. cit., 1993, p. 276.

The First Signs of Pop Art Graphics in Barcelona in the 1960s

1 Hugh ADAMS, Art of the Sixties, London, Peerage Books, 1984, p. 7.

2 Nova Cançó is the name for the group of singer-songwriters who wished to revive and innovate Catalan song, following in the footsteps of the French chansonniers. Starting in 1959, some of its representatives were hugely popular for over four decades.

3 The state could not oppose a project for a magazine written in Catalan as it depended on a religious order.

4 Just as Alianza Editorial in Madrid did, thanks to Daniel Gil’s design.

5 Enrique HELGUERA DE LA VILLA, “La cola de paja y el retrato de humo”, in: Emilio GIL, Pioneros del diseño gráfico en España, Barcelona, Índex Book, 2007, p. 142.

6 An Italian-Swiss designer from the Basel School, he arrived in Barcelona in 1957 bringing Swiss graphics with him.

7 Anna CALVERA, “Pioneros. Notas en torno al nacimiento de una profesión”, in: Emilio GIL, op. cit., 2007, p. 40.

8 The gauche divine played a fundamental role in the modernization of the city of Barcelona. The majority of its members took part in the relaunching of the Catalan culture industry, adopting in their daily lives the forms, ways and customs of pop culture. It could therefore be said that the gauche divine acted as a vehicle for the presence of pop in Barcelona life in the 1970s.

9 A similar case of graphic renewal, although in a very different style, would be the work done by Daniel Gil from 1963 to 1966 for the Madrid-based Spanish record label Hispavox.

10 Such as Oriol Maspons (1928-2013), Leopoldo Pomés (1931), Colita (1940) and Toni Catany (1942-2013).

11 Julià GUILLAMON, “El pop catalán: una edad de oro”, La Vanguardia, Cultura supplement, 7 January 2004, p. 2.

12 Designed by Robert Freeman (1936), an English designer and photographer, the cover features a series of repeated photos of the faces of the different members of the group, as American Pop Art was doing at the time.

13 On some occasions, for the illustrations he worked with Cesc and Jaume Perich, two of the most renowned cartoonists in Catalonia.

14 The title Tots som pops is a pun that alludes to the two meanings of the word “pop” in Catalan: octopus and pop.

15 A live music venue, emblematic of Barcelona night-life, where in the afternoon people danced to pop music and at night listened to protest songs.

16 Carrer Tuset was where most of the establishments and businesses created with a new mentality were, the reflection of a modernity that was different from the official one, and it therefore became the in place to be in Barcelona. For this reason, and parodying London’s Carnaby Street, this street became known by the English name “Tuset Street”.

17 The graphic identity of La Cova del Drac and of Concèntric was designed by Josep Maria Subirats (1963).

18 In the early 1970s, Conceptual Art took over from Pop Art. A representative example of this change of style was the design created by Silvia Gubern and Ángel Jové for the Sala Zeleste (Barcelona) in 1973.

19 Diòptria was considered by reviewers to be one of the best records in the history of rock. A double LP, Riba’s cover for disc one, Diòptria 1, made a big impact. He took as the centre of the composition an Infant Jesus from the painting Der Morgen (1809) by the German Romantic painter Otto Runge, placing it in the centre of a desolate landscape.

20 The principal representative of Catalan comics in the 1960s and 1970s, who eventually gained great fame and prestige all over the world..

21 Juan Carlos Pérez Sánchez is his real name. In 1980, when another graphic designer of the same name appeared on the Spanish scene, he chose to borrow his mother’s name and since then he has been known as America Sanchez, always written by him without accents.

22 Norberto CHAVES, Seis diseñadores argentinos de Barcelona: Alberto Lievore, Jorge Pensi, Carlos Rolando, Ricardo Rousselot, Mario Eskenazi, América Sánchez, Barcelona, Santa & Cole, 2006, p. 10.

23 The Agens agency, owned by an important Argentine industrial group, Siam, was in that period considered to be the epicentre of Argentine design. America worked there along with well-known names in Argentine design like Rubén Fontana, Juan Andralis and Alberto Di Mauro.

24 Jorge FRASCARA, “Prólogo”, in Rubén Fontana, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1993, p. 8.

25 Daniel GIRALT-MIRACLE, “Prólogo”, in América Sánchez, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1993, p. 10.

26 The open format was broadsheet size. The closed format, almost square-shaped and approximately 180 x 200 mm in size, was obtained after the application of a simple vertical fold and two oblong ones.

27 Terenci MOIX, Historia social del cómic, Barcelona, Bruguera, Ediciones B, 2007, p. 34.

28 The works mentioned are: President Elect by James Rosenquist (1960-1961/1968); Towards a Definitive Statement on the Coming Trends in Menswear and Accessories (a) Together Let Us Explore the Stars, by Richard Hamilton (1962); and Retroactive II by Robert Rauschenberg (1963).

29 Poster entitled Fotografías, designed by Juan Carlos Pérez Sánchez in 1963.

30 Poster entitled Analogías, designed by America Sanchez in 1983.

31 These works are: the graphic identity for the design agent Paz Marrodán (1984), for which he won a Laus Prize in 1986; an institutional poster for the Barcelona Metropolitan Corporation (1985); the redesigning of the graphic identity of Barcelona’s taxis (1986); and lastly the design of the commemorative illustration for the FAD party (1994).

32 In 1986 America Sanchez put on an exhibition entitled Foto-Grafic Art at the Galería Ciento in Barcelona, in which the posters exhibited were designed with photographs that he had found one day in a rubbish bin, discarded by a photographic studio; photos that he picked up, kept and which are in his collection, and are known as the Serie Niños (Children’s Series).

33 Enric SATUÉ, Cròniques de disseny amb gust de vainilla, menta o xocolata, Valencia, 3i4, 2011, p. 170.

34 Jordi MIR GARCÍA, “TEMPS DE REAFIRMACIÓ I INTERVENCIÓ: GENT DEL PSUC I PUBLICACIONS DE CRÍTICA I POLÍTICA CULTURAL. DUES REVISTES, Nuestro Cine i CAU”. Paper read at the First Congress of PSUC History, Barcelona, October 2006.

35 The editorial “CAU estrena diseño”, in issue 69 (January 1981), announced the definitive change in the design.

36 Cited by Jorge GOROSTIZA and Ana PÉREZ, “El cine en las revistas de arquitectura españolas”, XII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Española de Historiadores del Cine AEHC, Castelló, March 2008.

37 Sabartés was elected president of the Association in 1968. His appointment meant the transformation of the body and the start of a period of intense professional, political and cultural activism.

38 Edited by Sergio Pitol, a hitherto unknown series of titles and authors, censored by the Franco regime, were published for the first time in Spain in this collection.

39 Alexandre CIRICI, “El diseño en el campo capitalista”, CAU, September 1970, Nos. 2-3, p. 48.

40 It was Dr Anna Calvera who introduced the term Neo-Noucentisme in the early 1990s to refer to this so special graphic trend. The first time she used it was when Satué’s poster Los Heterodoxos, designed to announce a collection of books published by Tusquets, was chosen to appear in a book about contemporary art published by Salvat. Calvera also used the term in the chapter “Historia del diseño gráfico”, in volume 12 of the work coordinated by Xavier Barral Arte en Cataluña, published in 1996 by the L’isard publishing house in Barcelona; and lastly, in the article “La cultura del diseño, paso a paso. La reflexión de los profesores”, published in 1996 in issue 13 of the journal Temas de Diseño, dedicated to commemorating the 35th anniversary of the Elisava School. Anna Calvera has always maintained the hypothesis that the pop movement, adopted in Catalonia as an expression of youthful modernity and of a new cosmopolitan culture, was a means to review the indigenous past through new eyes, very different from those of the bourgeois nostalgia of the post-war years – and that means was Neo-Noucentisme.

41 He reproduced, by redrawing it, one of the posters that made the biggest impact during the Spanish Civil War, that of the wounded militiaman pointing accusingly at the viewer, by Lorenzo Goñi, of the Sindicato de Dibujantes Profesionales (SDP), in 1937.