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)



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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.