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presents themself as a specialist in freedom, adopting the guises of thedandy, thebohemian, the revolutionary and the avant-gardist. The key to themodern artist therefore lies inhis confrontingof bourgeois conventions and the bourgeoisie as a class. This in itself is somethingof a paradox and a contradictiongiven that thebourgeois enemy is the artist’s client and art is, as revolutionary as itmay be, the epitome of a luxurymarket. Modernisme The site of bourgeois power and class struggle, the city iswrackedby the turnof the century and is the home of modern art. All the effects of industrialisation, technification, luxurymarkets and newmassmarkets of consumption, fashion, spectacle, the exaltationof the image and iconoclastic violence. Construction anddestruction, liberty and repression all takeplace here. Some of themore traditional arts combinewith the arts and crafts andnew media to create the characteristic styles of the 1900s. Modernisme is theBarcelona equivalent ofmovements such asArt Nouveau, Sezession , Jugenstil or Liberty styles, whose names implied concepts of novelty, breakingwith the past or youth. Novecentismo(s) From the early years of the 20th century, various European cultural and artistic sectors reacted against the fin-de-siècle styles such asArt Nouveau and Modernisme , charging themwithbeingdecorative, irrational and lacking in shape or structure. This reactionmade itself felt in twoways: on one hand, as a return to classicism; on the other, there is an approach that critically questions of art and the role of the artist in an industrialised urban society through the avant- garde. However, theprestige of the utopia of bourgeois progress is questionedby thewars and revolutions that have takenplace, not in faraway colonies, but in the heart of Europe. After the horrors of the FirstWorldWar, a new reaction came about against the avant-garde under the banner ‘the return toorder’, often fromwithin the ranks. Therewas amovement against the radical experimentation in techniques andmaterials that had takenplace inprevious years – collage and assemblage, for example, and against themore abstract trends. Thismovement called for a return to the traditional trades and a new realist that would actually be the object of rather diverse interpretations. Art andCivilWar General Franco’s coup against theSpanishRepublic’s legitimate government on the 18thof July 1936was the start of a civil war that would end in1939with a victory for the fascists and thedefeat, persecution and exile of theRepublican forces. From the outset, theRepublican institutionswere aware of the need todisseminate the news of the fate of theSpanishpeople around theworld, andof the need to coordinateboth internally and externally the image of the fight against the fascists. The highpoint of thiswas the activity of the Generalitat deCatalunya’s PropagandaCommissariat , directedby JaumeMiravitlles and the subsequent PropagandaMinister for theRepublican Government. Traditional arts, such as painting, sculpture and engraving, and newmedia such as illustratedpublications, posters, photography, photomontage, cinema and so onwerebrought together in a kindof singlemobilisation that was tounitemany of the aspirations ofmodern and vanguard art, especially those that conceive of the artist as a producer and a leader ofmasses. Perhaps the apex of this synthesis of arts at the service of thepropagandamachine –which is also themost importantmoment of Spanish artists’ commitment to the Republic– is theSpanishRepublicPavilion, built for the 1937Paris International Exhibition. Designedby JosepLluís Sert, aswell as housingPicasso’s Guernica , it alsoheld photomontages andphotomurals of JosepRenau, amongst others andboth avant-gardeworks by JoanMiró, Juli González, Albertoor Alexander Calder aswell asmany other less-known,more traditional albeit not less necessary artists. Epilogue: The recoveryof theavant-garde in the post-war period Towards the endof the 1940s a groupof artistic and cultural groups is set up that intends to recover the impulse of the avant-garde lost once theCivilWar was over. The Dau al Set , founded inBarcelona in1948 is aprime example of a situation that, despite announcing newpathways, remains rooted in themodels of the classical avant-garde, and especially so in surrealism. Dau al Set exemplifies abeginning, but also inmany ways the end, of an artistic cycle that hadbegun 40 years previously at thebeginningof the 20th century. OlgaSacharoff. Unaboda/ AWedding , 1919-23.MNAC (Barcelona) 25