Barcelona Cultura

Modernisme: toward the design culture

Permanent

Barcelona Design Museum, within the scope of its historical collections, dedicates an exhibition reading the collection in terms of "culture of design".

The exhibition focuses on modernisme (catalan modernism) as the beginning of the culture of design, frames it in the European context and highlights the links and uniqueness of the Catalan case. The exhibition will provide a new interpretation of modernism based on the leading role played by the decorative and applied arts, crafts and industry.

Focused on the great modernist splendor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it continues to show the link between modernism and noucentisme and its vindication of the artisan tradition. After Art Deco, it reaches the rationalism and modernity of Mediterranean roots of the GATCPAC, very critical of modernisme but sensitive to craftsmanship and gateway to modern design.

Contents

Arts Decoratives. Disseny de producte. Ceràmica. Arxius

Curator

Mireia Freixa
Pilar Vélez

Number of pieces

372

Surface

357 m2

Exhibition fields

  • Modernisme, an attitude and long road

    “Modernisme” is synonymous with the will to modernize a culture and to integrate into Europe. The Universal Exhibition of 1888, the first international event

  • Art industries, the new culture of design

    Industrialization laid the foundations of design culture. In Catalunya, artistic industries thrived, dedicated to the production of consumer goods especially in

  • The grand protagonists of Modernisme

    Modernisme became a reality in the decorative and applied arts, understood in its dual sense, as an ornamental object or applied to architecture. In the same

  • The bourgeois home, symbol of a societal ideal

    The modernist bourgeois home is a symbol of the ideal of the new industrial society, full of contradictions. This new class acquires other habits present in the

  • The art of twentieth century and the discredit of Modernisme

    While Modernisme had been forged in the intellectual and artistic circles with a desire to modernize a culture and integrate into Europe, Noucentisme (twentieth

  • The recovery of Gaudí and Modernisme

    In the years after the Spanish Civil War, the image of Gaudí and the Sagrada Família survived as a possibility of keeping Catalanism alive in a manner tolerated

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