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

The trajectory of the young Salvador Dalí goes through a key episode in his training, which is his stay in Madrid during the first half of the 1920s at the Residencia de Estudiantes, a cultural centre of reference which brought together many of the most restless and inquiring figures of the Spanish intelligentsia of the time. There, the artist from the Empordà was involved in some meetings which were fundamental for the development of his later career: Rafael Barradas, Maruja Mallo, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca.

Especially with these last two, he would establish a friendship and a creative dialogue that would bear fruit, in the case of the collaboration with Buñuel, in two classic pieces of avant-garde cinema (Un chien andalou, from 1929, and L'âge d'or, from 1930) and, in the case of the Dalí-Lorca tandem, in a constant flow of exchange of influences.

Various works and documents of the time bear witness to this exchange, such as the so-called Putrefactos, a series of caricatures made as a two-hander with which they articulated a sort of encrypted colloquium, the manifestos and articles published by both of them, Lorca's poems written in these years and Salvador Dalí's works of art from his time in Madrid.