A commitment to the new art Journeys of the avant-garde in Catalonia through the Rafael and María Teresa Santos Torroella collection Temporary exhibition

In the first three decades of the 20th century, modernity and the past, avant-garde and classicism all coexisted in the artistic scene of Barcelona.

On the one hand, there was the legacy of the new art that had its roots in the generation of postmodernist painters from the scene surrounding the bar Els 4 Gats (1897-1903) and the magazine Pèl & Ploma (1899-1903), where the young Picasso learned the ropes, along with others, such as Isidre Nonell, Carles Casagemas or Ramon Pichot, and also the gallery owner Josep Dalmau. It was a tradition of innovation that, after the arrival of the foreign avant-gardes, will add new episodes with the activity of the futurist poets Josep Maria Junoy and Joan Salvat-Papasseit and the offerings, between classicism and modernity, from painters such as Rafael Barradas, Joaquín Torres García, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí.

On the other hand, there was the "noucentista" line, which, promoted in the early 1910s by Eugeni D'Ors or Francesc Pujols and with the support of Les Arts i els Artistes and Santiago Segura at the Faianç Català and the Galerías Laietanes, would continue in the new generations represented by Els evolucionistes (1917), the Agrupació Courbet (1918), Nou Ambient (1919) or the Agrupació d'Artistes Catalans (1919). It was a moderate modernity that in the 1920s joined up with the new classicism of the international trends of the Return to Order.