The sleeping factory, Villages - Noucentisme

In this room you will find works from the Catalan Noucentisme movement. This Avant-garde artistic and literary movement was part of what was known in Spain as the “Generation of 1914”, for whom the purpose of art was to perfect form, as well as to open up to foreign influences in order to move beyond the nationalism that had been inherited from the Romantic movement.

You can also see the painting “The Sleeping Factory”, an industrial landscape painted in 1925 by Andalusian artist Daniel Vázquez Díaz.

Under the influence of the French Impressionists, the artist used contrasting sober tones to depict the outline of a factory, reduced to simple geometric shapes that are reminiscent of Cubism. The sharp angles and vertical form of the factory warehouses and smokeless chimney stacks are enclosed by the soft, winding lines of the river and by the mountains on the horizon.

In the picture next to it, you can compare Vázquez Díaz’s use of colour and his fondness for the Basque landscape as his subject matter, in “The Joy of the Basque Countryside”.

Other artists also serve as examples of the wide range of avant-garde styles during this period.Take a look at another nearby canvas, also dated 1925. Villages, by Benjamín Palencia. Two extremes serve to balance the composition of the picture. On the upper left hand side is the blue sky, striped with horizontal lines of white clouds and, on the lower right hand side, are the rounded green shapes of the trees. The middle section, showing the village itself, stretches along a steep slope on which the domes of the church, some steps and some windows are merely suggested, over the randomly alternating cubes of light and shade that form the houses in the village.

(c) (R) 2012, MUSMon com S.L.