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 Spanish Civil War not only created a rupture between the two sides in conflict, but also a distance between the different cultures that make up Spain as a whole.

Continuing through the complicated post-war years, the Poetry Congresses held in Segovia in 1952, Salamanca in 1953 and Santiago de Compostela in 1954 signified the first rapprochement after the war between Castilian, Galician and Catalan intellectuals and poets -Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Luis Rosales, Leopoldo Panero, Dionisio Ridruejo, Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Carles Riba o Rafael Santos Torroella, entre altres- and the recognition of the so-called "regional" languages, until then silenced.

As a result of these meetings, some fundamental texts were published for the dissemination of Catalan culture in the rest of the country: the Anthology of Contemporary Catalan Poets (1952), the Bierville Elegies (translation into Spanish from the original by Carles Riba, 1953) and the Catalan edition of Salvatge Cor (1953) by the same poet, illustrated by Antoni Tàpies.