[Exhibitions and catalogues since 1973]
Since it began its work in the field of the visual arts, the Fundación Juan March has conceived and organized, independently or in collaboration with other national and international institutions, nearly 600 exhibitions presented at its venues in Madrid, Cuenca and Palma as well as in other venues in Spain and abroad. Some of these exhibitions have centered on the Fundación's own collections, and the immense majority have included loans from other institutions. In January 1975, the Fundación presented its first exhibition, Arte '73, devoted to Spanish abstract art, in its recently inaugurated building on Calle Castelló in Madrid, after which the exhibition traveled to other institutions in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.
Already at its establishment in 1955, the Fundación Juan March offered grants to young Spanish artists. Arte '73, however, represented a qualitative shift in the institution's activities, for it was the first of a series of exhibitions, devoted primarily to international art, that the Fundación embarked upon at a time when such programs were virtually non-existent in Spain.
Since 1975 the Fundación has presented numerous artists and contemporary movements for the first time in Spain, in an era when, in Valeriano Bozal's words, "contemporary art was a mirage that rarely became a reality." For over two decades the Fundación was the first and one of the few Spanish institutions to organize exhibitions of the leading figures of modern and contemporary art. This initiative brought to light a kind of art that was utterly unfamiliar in a country that lagged behind the prevailing cultural trends abroad and that had almost no collections or museums of its own devoted to modern and contemporary art.
To the present day, the Fundación has continued its pioneering work, with a succession of individual and group exhibitions focusing primarily on twentieth-century masters and the avant-gardes. Noteworthy among them are the exhibitions on Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky organized between 1977 and 1980. No less significant are the exhibitions on modern French and Belgian artists (Bonnard, Redon, Rouault, Braque, Léger, Delvaux, Magritte, Delaunay), British artists (Turner, Bacon, Nicholson and Hockney), Austrians and Germans (Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Corinth, Beckmann, the Die Brücke group, Klee and Schwitters), Russians (Malevich, Popova and Rodchenko), and Americans (Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Rothko, de Kooning, Stella, Warhol, Cornell, Hopper, O'Keeffe and Durand). Nor has the Fundación devoted exclusive attention to modern painting over the course of its existence: Its exhibition galleries have also accommodated sculpture, printmaking and photography.
[Exhibitions and research]
After almost forty years of groundbreaking endeavors, the Fundación now combines a reflexive cultivation of that tradition with a firm commitment to exhibitions based on the most current research. The resulting monographic catalogues are also published in English and distributed internationally. They include exhibitions built around a central argument, such as The Abstraction of Landscape: From Northern Romanticism to Abstract Expressionism (2007) and Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow, 1960–1990 (2008); exhibitions devoted to figures, periods and little-studied issues pertaining to modern history and culture, such as Tarsila do Amaral (2009) and Wyndham Lewis, 1882–1957 (2010); and exhibitions that adopt unconventional approaches to canonical figures and movements, such as Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End (2008), Caspar David Friedrich: The Art of Drawing (2009), Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America, 1934–1973 (2011), and Aleksandr Deineka (1899–1969): Avant-Garde for the Proletariat (2011).
[The Fundación Juan March's museums: exhibitions and catalogues]
In 1981, the artist Fernando Zóbel donated his collection to the Fundación Juan March. From the moment the Fundación assumed responsibility for Zóbel's Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, located in the Casas Colgadas or 'Hanging Houses' of Cuenca, exhibitions were organized in its gallery spaces. The same is true of the Fundación's third venue, in Palma, which opened as the Col•lecció March in 1990 in what had been Juan March Ordinas's family home, at number 9, Calle Sant Miquel, a building that has since been remodeled and expanded in stages until it became what is now the Museu Fundación Juan March. In addition to preserving and exhibiting the two museums' collections, the Fundación has also presented exhibitions on international artists and movements at both venues, including Frank Stella: Graphic Work, 1982–1996 (1997), Rodchenko: Geometries (2001) and Vladimir Lebedev, 1891–1967 (2012), as well as exhibitions focusing on artists represented in the collection such as Millares: Paintings and Drawings on Paper, 1963–1971 (1996), Chillida: In Praise of Hands (2003), and Pablo Palazuelo: Paris, 13 rue Saint Jacques, 1948–1968 (2010).
Running in tandem with the Fundación's work mounting each of these exhibitions are its publishing endeavors, and it has produced, on its own or in collaboration with other institutions, 221 catalogues for the exhibitions held at its three venues in Madrid, Cuenca and Palma. Since 2005 nearly every catalogue has appeared in both Spanish and English editions as well as, in some cases, digital editions and e-books.
Today, with the great majority of these books now out of print, new technology allows an established institution like the Fundación Juan March, with its correspondingly substantial record of publications, to offer valuable resources on the Internet for the history of art and the history exhibitions. All Our Art Catalogues since 1973 is not simply content provided in a more flexible and functional medium: It constitutes an organized digital repository that will constantly grow and expand. The project is the result of the multi-disciplinary collaboration among museum staff and exhibition coordinators, librarians and computer programmers and now joins the Fundación Juan March's ensemble of digital resources. It is supported on open-source software.
The contents comprising the Portal are placed at public disposal for interested parties and researches with the consent of the heirs. Users with principal purpose are for teaching and research, may be freely consulted and reproduced in accordance with the pertinent laws governing intellectual property. Readers who make use of the portal for teaching or research must properly cite the sources they utilize, including indication of authors and titles, as well as this database and its URL. Fundación Juan March will be grateful if scholars who use this database in their published research would communicate the pertinent bibliographic information to the Fundación (biblioteca@march.es), so that their work may be included its library's specialized bibliography.
The content And use Of the Portal will be governed by Legal notice/ General terms Of use Of the website And by Privacy Policy established by Fundación Juan March.
Development of All Our Art Catalogues since 1973 began in August 2013 as a joint project between the Museums and Exhibitions Departments, the Library Service, and the Computer Technology and Administration Departments of the Fundación Juan March. The following individuals and entities collaborated on the project: Paz Fernández y Fernández-Cuesta, José Luis Maire, Celia Martinez, Luis Martínez Uribe and Carmen Jodra (Library); Jesús García de la Reina, Pilar Cofiño Rubio, Mario Domínguez Jareño, Ismael García Navas, Francisco Ángel Guerrero Vivas, Juan Luis González Sáez, Cristina Hidalgo Mayo, María Belén Lugo Heredero, José Manuel Navarro Gesta and Patricia Pérez de la Manga; and Vinfra S.A. and Hispaliber Distribución S.L. (digitization); Jesús Royo Mejía, Fernando Martínez de Guzmán, Joaquín Solís Fraile, Aurelio Medina Pizarro, Dolores Iglesias Fernández, José Luis Prieto Panadero and Ángel Prieto Martínez (HTML and CSS, photography and design); Manuel Fontán del Junco, Aida Capa, Deborah Roldán, Maite Álvaro de la Fuente, Catalina Ballester, Assumpta Capellà, Lukas Gerber, Jorge de la Fuente, Ami Mehta, Marta Ramírez, Anna Laura Gallhoff, Lara González, Daniel Gimmler, Pablo Mazarrasa, Lucía Pérez, Alfredo Villanueva, Tessa Regueiro, Irene García Chacón, Anna Wieck, Alex Hillgarth, Marta Suárez-Infiesta, Fernando Peiró, Eva Marqués, Ignacio Rubio, Alexandra Millón, Dalma Türk, María Martínez, and Edith Carrillo (Contents).
© Fundación Juan March, 2013
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