ABSTRACT
On 12 and 13 October 1936, 90 days after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the board of the Office International des Musées met in Paris to consider how to minimise the impact of the War on Spanish artistic heritage. At this meeting, it was decided to publish in its journal Mouseion a report outlining the actions to be implemented to protect works of art from the dangers of war. When this report was published, the treasures of the Art Museum of Catalonia (Museu d'Art de Catalunya) and other Catalan museums had already been moved outside Barcelona and stored, thus following the pioneering example set by the Louvre and the British Museum during the First World War. This chapter will argue that the Civil War was thus an important catalyst for the development of the idea of artistic heritage as a political tool in the twentieth-century ideological arsenal, situating the measures taken by the Catalan government to safeguard art in a transnational context. In particular, it will analyse key aspects of the success and results of the safeguarding: rapid reaction capacity, training of operational staff, the prior existence of a legislative apparatus and, above all, the defence of a certain idea of what artistic heritage was. For the Catalan government, the ultimate aim was to identify and preserve Catalan masterworks, so that what made Catalonia unique would not disappear, even if this meant displacing the material from that unique territory. The decisive exhibition ‘L'Art Catalan,’ held in Paris at the beginning of 1937, should be seen not only as a way to show the world the ‘saved’ artistic heritage of a nation, but also as an ideological device that sought to add allies to its cause. The exhibition, a sort of Museum of Catalan Art in exile, was yet another political instrument in the Spanish Civil War.
