The aesthetic transition at Fundación March: the thousand discoveries

To date, exhibitions dedicated to specific decades or specific aspects of Spanish art had been organized after the establishment of democracy; Now the Juan March Foundation has wanted to provide one of its most ambitious and complex exhibitions of that period as a whole, and addressing it in a broad sense: from when it was possible to look at it, because the social transformations seemed to anticipate the political ones – the sixties -, until our time, because that stage is still the subject of questioning.

José María Parreño and Germán Labrador would curate an exhibition that, in addition, practically covers in its chronology the development of the cultural activity of that institution, which began precisely in the sixties, time before its headquarters on Castelló Street was built – between 1973 and 1985 – and before, in 1975, it offered its first exhibition around an international artist, which was Oskar Kokoschka.

This proposal, which in Parreño’s words does not pose a visual history of transitionbut in any case a visual story transitionis articulated precisely in decades and from case studies linked to key exhibitions and the progress of the cultural fabric (the first corresponds to Picasso and the construction of his museum in developmentalist Barcelona). It has works by nearly two hundred Spanish authors and seventy foreign authors – some, like Duchamp, practically unpublished for the majority until that time – and in some of them the public becomes important, present as a motif in certain compositions (Elliott Erwitt, Equipo Crónica, Miguel Trillo) or in the references to the reception of the analyzed samples; Thus, we wish to highlight the relationships between the gradual political and citizen opening and the artistic one in the late, post and anti-Franco era. Labrador has emphasized that, although aesthetics and culture tend to unfold autonomously with respect to social processes, we cannot in any case speak of dehistoricityof a forced disconnection.

The route opens with a publications kiosk that reminds us that in the last sixty years we have gone from the scarcity of specialized press to the relative proliferation of it and the arrival of international magazines in our country. Once immersed in the rooms, with a motley layout, we will detect how in the years before and immediately after Franco’s death, an art with political resonance was cultivated and, then, those concerns were diluted during a long period to be revived since 2000, when social issues once again became the thematic axis.

Art, like literature (especially in the sixties), music (in the eighties) and cinema (in the nineties), reflects society, in the theses of this exhibition, but they also prescribe: what was read and listened to in the sixties and seventies – the curators have pointed out – was far ahead of the political structures of that time and to a certain extent outlined a transition that, according to Parreño, did not fully occur.

From Picasso to Lluis Hortalà, creators respectively of the earliest and most recent piece, this exhibition also manifests the progressive prominence of pieces of collective authorship and those that seek to create situations or ways of thinking, the “discontented art” to which Parreño referred in the book of the same title.

“The aesthetic transition”, which is the name of this exhibition, open until January 2027, evokes how this was the moment when, decades late, international authors, and in some cases natives in exile, became known in Spain, such as Kandinsky, Meret Oppenheim, Maruja Mallo, Remedios Varo, Anni Albers, Matisse, Klee, Giacometti, Motherwell, Kosuth, Cage or Ana Mendieta; In the case of Picasso, who chose not to return to Spain, he was able to learn that, in 1960, a presentation of only thirty of his pieces in the Sala Gaspar in Barcelona was so successful with visitors that access controls had to be implemented and, also, that in 1971 his Vollard Suite aroused religious anger in the Theo gallery. Juan Gris, in 1977, did not suffer the same fate there, where he did not sell a single work.

And not long after, in 1983, pop art took over Madrid: Andy Warhol inaugurated in Fernando Vijande -portraying the gallery owner- and Roy Lichtenstein in the March Foundation itself. Between one space and the other there was barely a street.

The documentation that will accompany his pieces – not only in the exhibition, but also online – will help us understand how this art that was introduced in Spain through criticism on radio, television or the press was received and interpreted, until, as we will appreciate in the last section, the mobility of artists and the organization of collaborative initiatives have led to the cultural context, at least in Western Europe, being to a certain extent common already in this century.

Completing this project, the Juan March Foundation has interviewed around twenty important figures in the artistic scene in the transition; His interventions can be seen on Canal March, under the heading of Tell us. An oral history about cultural transitions in Spain. In addition, on November 30th it will be released Authorized for all audiences. A film about the transitions of culture in Spaina film that will collect unpublished material, recordings of the exhibition and comments from specialists.

«The aesthetic transition. Spain, 1960-2020»

JUAN MARCH FOUNDATION

C/ Castelló, 77

Madrid

From October 16, 2026 to January 10, 2027