Бенхамин Паленсия. Фигуры, играющие с огнем. 1932 Benjamín Palencia. Figures Playing with Fire. 1932 © Benjamín Palencia, VEGAP, Madrid, 2015. VEGAP Image Bank
banner was the fact they came after the avant-garde narration and its argument, which amounts to the same thing. But the argument existed and resistance to abandoning it was tenacious. During the 20th century, life seemed to be born anew each morning with a golden glow and a tremor of the future, simultaneously symptoms and reflections of a time of cataclysm and promise. However, once that time passed, the historiographical zeal was not eradicated from the universities: thus it still appears possible to use the expression “contemporary art” at times to designate a historical category more or less subsequent to the avant-gardes or late avant-gardes which preserved the dominance conferred on them by the cultural system following the Allied victory in World War II. Looking at the catalogue of the first exhibition of the collection in the Queen Sofía Museum (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), the most important Spanish museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, in 1992, it is not surprising at all that at the very beginning of the first piece on the first work described – Picasso’s “Woman in Blue”, 1901 – the critic Josefina Alix would write: “Contemporary art begins with Picasso in 1901.” It is obvi-
ous that this only becomes true in an account whose argument had previously established that contemporary art is, in truth, avant-garde art, the art subsequent to the modernism that we are to understand included all the modern realisms, naturalisms and romanticisms that lie beneath its category. At any rate, that eloquent syncopated sentence is found before all the explanatory texts about a collection that wanted to be international but also national, thus making it almost obligatory for the requirements of an account which not only provided the Spanish museum with its raison d'être but also a heightened importance, in which the contributions by Spanish artists were accorded a relevance appropriate to world protagonists. And, that being the case, to the effort to establish that it all began with Picasso. We can see straight away how right Pierre Cabanne was when he so very exactly named his book “Le Siècle de Picasso” (published in English as “Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times”, the literal translation is “The Picasso Century”). Because Picasso is the central axis, the node of the artistic argument of the 20th century, the name that came to personify it, and the demarcation point for the 20th century to make any connection to the chronology. I mean that from 1914 to 1989, the 20th century had to make its effective borders line up within the time frame established by the World Wars. In short, the same chronological time period in which “modern art”, “from the 20th century”, or the “avant-garde” came to name the same reality, dominant over all the romanticisms and realisms, and before the “contemporary” arrived to show its colours with the outlines of something completely different. Picasso was, not without reason, the paradigm who served as the backbone for New York’s MoMA, universally esteemed and influential from before the Second World War until well into the 1990s. He filled that role until replaced by the “Duchamp paradigm”, whose validity as the principal support for an alternative account has never been fully confirmed, however. While it was au courant, the “Picasso paradigm” served as the hallmark for works that attempted – as almost all the avant-garde artists did – to place themselves simultaneously both on the margins of and inside the artistic tradition. Picasso was the point of reference who displayed the strange virtue of being inside and outside, for celebrating art and destroying it, like “The One” who, after tearing down the temple, said he could raise a new one in three days. Picasso travelled to Paris for the first time in 1900 after developing his craft in La Coruña, Barcelona and Madrid. In 1904, when he had already begun and ended his Blue and Rose Periods, he settled for good in Paris, where the
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