Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The relevance of the museum as an agent of social, cultural and urban change in the European city has only increased since the last decades. In contrast to the traditional museum, some of the new centres have faced up to the demands promoted by artists, architects, curators or the public manifesting the changes in the processes of creation, dissemination and reception of art. The aim of the article is to address these changes by analysing three paradigmatic cases in the last decade in Europe: Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Fondazione Prada in Milan, and more recently KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels. In three cases, the reconversion of a previous industrial heritage into emerging centres for contemporary culture exemplifies an interest in updating the age-old infrastructure of modernity. As well as the importance of the cultural institution as a booster of the urban project in the European city and as an investment of the public in the context of globalisation.

During the 1990s, two major museums with international projection were opened in Spain: the MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and the Guggenheim Bilbao. Due to their public-private nature, both museums could be framed under the category of «corporate museums» defined in 1990 by art critic Rosalynd E. Krauss in her essay «The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Museum». Through a detailed reading of this text and based on works of the so-called institutional critique of the MACBA collection, this essay analyzes the implications derived from the construction of these two museums under the paradigm of minimal art architecture and the way in which its current organization is far from what is needed to face the crisis of civilization derived from ecological collapse. From this eco-social perspective, neither the «Guggenheim effect» nor MACBA, understood as a tourist attraction claim, are currently sustainable in environmental or social terms. As a conclusion, is proposed an image as a speculative fiction to begin to imagine a possible eco-social museum.

Santiago de Compostela seems like an optimal reflection of the optimism that marked the architecture in the 90’s. On the one hand, Xerardo Estévez’s city government developed some contemporary architectures in dialogue with the story of the city. On the other hand, Galician president Fraga pushed the brand «Xacobeo» as a strategy to transform peregrination into a touristic framework based on new cultural and architectonical references. Both Galician architects, who were being well considered by critics, and foreign architects participated in this complex process. As Compostela became a cultural destination, the increasing spectacularization of architecture played a major role. Peter Eisenman’s City of Culture, fuelled by Fraga’s government, was the culmination of this process. This project intended to be a benchmark for Galicia in the 21st Century and to establish, as the architect asserted, a «Gaiás effect».

This paper explores the relationships established between museum project, collection and space based on three examples of museums under the same copyright: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Analysing and comparing its three projects in New York, Venice and Bilbao as spaces for the exhibition of modern and contemporary art would help us to understand the relationships generated between building, content, space and collection and its consideration as a contemporary monument, from the second half of the 20th century to the present.

The aim of this article is to delve into East-West encounters through the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) from 1948 to the early 1970s, by focusing on Eastern bloc scholars and determining factors of the political context. This is intended to shed light on CIHA role as a promoter of international cooperation in the field of Art History, as a space for supra-state interaction between art historians in Europe, and as an actor in shaping the geography of the discipline during the Cold War.

Among the vast collection of artistic patrimony that Arthur Byne and Mildred Stapley acquired and exported from Spain to the United States between the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century, was the patio of the house of the Count of Ayamans (Palma de Mallorca, Spain). New data has illustrated this operation which had as its principal objective the intent to satisfy the demands of their main client: the media tycoon, W. R. Hearst. The transaction was carried out thanks to José Costa Ferrer, who was known as «Picarol» in his facet as an illustrator/artist and who also provided Mallorca with the first stable business dedicated to the international commerce of art and antiques. He was the one who put the valuable patio in Arthur Byne’s hands. The study of the correspondence between José Costa and Arthur Byne offers clues not only to the character of this transaction that culminated in the relocation of the beautiful patio to the United States, but also, the close relationship that was woven in those years between the study of art, the antique market and the promotion of tourism and culture. Proof of this was the honours paid to the Bynes for their work.

Considering expressionism as a cultural phenomenon of international scope, we present the milestones in its historiographic approach in Latin America. The different stages of thought are reviewed, describing the proposals of some of its most significant representatives and emphasizing the conceptual changes in terms of the conception of temporal axes, the materiality of artistic discourses and their relationship with the spaces and cultural contexts in which they are produced. In particular, we identify the possibilities offered by conceptual proposals from the beginning of the twentieth century to the current notion of «simultaneous vanguards», which enables their productive activation in both modernity and postmodernity. This contribution seeks to make the Latin American contribution to transnational expressionism visible and to recover the productions that have been excluded from the debates, placing their protagonists in a scenario of international appreciation and recognition.

The history of Catalan furniture in the 19th century is mainly focused on a small number of cabinetmakers and workshops associated with the Art Nouveau period. Prominent businesses such as the Casa Busquets is well documented, and we begin to have an accurate approximation of wood artists such as José Ribas or Francisco Vidal, but little or nothing is known about a large number of carpentry and cabinetmakers workshops that formed an essential part of the city’s industrial fabric. The fame acquired by its work, the volume of its business, its clientele and its participation in various industrial competitions make it one of the most important of its time. After deep research in archival sources and newspaper archives, this article brings to light the story of the furniture and wood merchants commercial house of José Tayá e Hijos, in the nineteenth-century Barcelona.

In recent years, not a few books, essays or novels, chronicles or breviaries have been published in Spanish, which directly or indirectly have dealt with the circumstances of transparency and its interference in contemporary architecture. Among the literary novelties, this text investigates some of the hypotheses that about the relationships between the concept of transparency and the notion of architecture are present in, among others: El gran misterio (Aira); Fenêtre sur le Rien (Cioran) and Chaque jour est un arbre qui tombe (Wittkop), in addition to X-Ray Architecture (Colomina) and Escritos sobre la invisibilidad (Muñoz). From their detailed and comparative analysis it is deduced that the interest in studying the intimate links between the phenomenology of architecture and the conditions of the transparent have not only not lost validity but are in full swing, and that it is a matter whose resolution and disciplinary approach is still pending to be carried out by architectural theory.

Cristóbal García Salmerón was a Baroque painter born in Cuenca around 1603 whose biography has been treated by few scholars over the centuries. These authors, apart from giving brief information about the painter, sometimes made errors that have been repeated for centuries. This data about the artist links his learning to the Murcian master Pedro Orrente. This learning would have taken place in Toledo or in the city of Cuenca, presumably during a stay Orrente would have had in these places.The aim of this work is to try to verify this information, for which purpose we have had to search for information in various archives and libraries that have resulted in a series of documents that do not place Orrente in any of these cities for long enough to have taught a disciple, so it seems necessary to assess other options for García Salmerón’s learning.