Reading a Collection

For secondary education and high school students

This project starts with material designed for use in the classroom before visiting the Museum. It contains the basis for initiating a debate that will then continue in the museum, accompanied by theart on display.

The objective of this project is to awaken and encourage an interest in art and society in the students with reference to diverse subjects. Using this material, the students will be able to approach the works of art competently, passing from a historical and culturalperspective to an aesthetic and cognitive understanding based on a direct and personal confrontation between the artwork and the observer.

'Between documentary and the poetic gesture' is the first of aseries of texts that provide different perspectives on the world of art and their historical context with reference to the MACBA Collection.

Preparatory work in the classroom

The project is divided into two stages: the first takes place in the classroomwith the help of an interactiveCD-Rom provided by the MACBA for each teacher to use according to the curricular needs of each group. This initial work session provides a specific itinerary through the works of the MACBA Collection, establishing a frameworkfor debate.

Museum Visit

During the subsequent visit to the museum, the students will have the chance to directly experience the works of art, some of which they will have already seen on CD-Rom, putting into practice the different analytical processes developed in response to constructed notions. The objective is to encourage a debate among the group from different perspectives and points of view and contrast them with the specific information provided by the monitor.

Between documentary and the poetic gesture

These two concepts will help us to analyse the changes that art underwent following the end of the Second World War. Within the desolate post-war environment, art searches for a possible escape or a response to the anguish that characterised the period, either through a need to bear witness (documentary) or as a means of escape or detachment from reality (poetic gesture). Documentary allowsa witness to reality by generating an archive, either textual (written document) or visual (photographic, cinema),which explores a fragment of individual or collective memory.

We study the work of artists likeJoan Colom, Roberto Rosellini and Robert Frank, which reflect a city in ruins, poverty and a precarious existence through an emotional and humanistic prism. On the other hand, another group of artists opted for a deliberate distancing from reality and a more poetic approach, involving the search for new solutions on the margins of representation of reality. In this sense, anger, pessimism and the need for change become apparent in the work of artists like AntoniTàpies, Henri Michaux, Manuel Millares, Lucio Fontana and Jean Dubuffet, who reflect a situation of crisis and a need to escape through an intimate expression of interior worlds.