An exhibition recovers intervened art by Franco’s regime

From June 16 to July 18, the Chapel of the Historic Building hosts the exhibition “Art dispersat pel franquisme. Les obres dipositades a la Universitat de Barcelona”, which opens an unknown and silenced art collection, which had been forgotten to date. The exhibition will be available from Monday to Friday, from 10.00 am to 8.00 pm, until July 18, and it is part of the strategy to value the university heritage, launched by the Office of the Vice-Rector for Culture, Memory and Heritage. Please check the schedules in www.ub.edu/cultura since the exhibition can remain closed some days if there are other activities.   

The opening ceremony took place on 10 June at 1.30 pm, and included the participation of the rector of the UB, Joan Guàrdia, and the curators of the exhibition, professors Arturo Colorado (Complutense University of Madrid) and Santos M Mateos (University of Vic – Universitat Central de Catalunya).

The exhibition presents a set of nine works of art deposited at the University in 1942 by the Servicio de Defensa del Patrimonio Artístico Nacional (SDPAN), the body created by Franco’s regime to manage the heritage requisitioned during the Civil War. Although the original inventories also included several liturgical objects, these are not preserved today. Some of the missing pieces are reproduced in an image on one of the exhibition’s information panels. 

These pieces, which came from private collections, political and religious institutions or spaces seized by the rebel side, were redistributed by the new state with the aim of “restoring” a symbolic and institutional order that would fit in with the ideology of the regime. 

The curators have reconstructed, on the basis of documentation from the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, the National Archive of Catalonia and the Photographic Archive of Barcelona, the itinerary of many of these pieces: when they were requisitioned, how they came into the hands of the SDPAN, and what role they played in the symbolic project of the Francoist authorities. In the case of the UB, the two deliveries of works (January and June 1942) ended up, in part, in the university chapel created by the Rector’s Office to institutionalize the presence of the Church in the academic space. Other works, now part of the University’s art collection, have spent decades without public contextualization. 

Among the most outstanding pieces are a sculpture of the Sagrat Cor by Josep Llimona, recently identified as coming from the Foment de la Pietat Catalana; La continència d’Escipió, attributed to the school of Luca Giordano, which will be exhibited undergoing restoration; and other works of sacred art and civil themes, such as Sant Francesc d’Assís rebent els estigmes, La Mare de Déu de la Misericòrdia, La Immaculada del Braç Militar, a Paisatge d’hivern by Ramiro Lafuente and La Sagrada Família de l’ocellet, a copy by Antonio Estrada del Llano. 

The exhibition project is not limited to showing paintings: it also offers archival documents, original labels, registration numbers and other elements that reveal the traceability of the pieces and their institutional use. The itinerary is conceived as a critical historical account, and incorporates interpretative panels that contextualize both the works and their administrative and ideological path. 

In parallel to the physical exhibition, a virtual version has been prepared for the UB’s Virtual Museum, and it is planned that this group of works will form part of the second volume of the UB’s catalogue of paintings, which is currently in the process of being compiled. All this is part of the University’s commitment to revising, documenting and making its historical and artistic legacy available to the public, even in its more uncomfortable aspects. 

Art dispersat pel franquisme proposa, proposes a critical and contextualized look at the works of art that were trapped in the war and in the symbolic politics of the regime. The project aims to open up a line of research into the role of university institutions in the management of intervened heritage and at the same time invite a collective review of the historical narratives associated with the despoilment, memory and institutional construction of Franco’s regime.