BarcelonaDecades pass and, why not point it out, centuries, and wars parade before our eyes, one after another, inherited from generation to generation. You don’t have to go back centuries; You just have to have a minimal memory of the 20th century (and now, unfortunately, of the 21st century; we have learned almost nothing, in the provocation and resolution of conflicts), to make us present the images of wars, human destruction (the first and more important) and, behind it, the destruction of the heritage of humanity: books, art, monuments, landscapes, cultural instruments. Everything that constitutes an organized and minimally civilized (cultured) society: the people and their wealth, material and immaterial.
We have at hand the images of the Great War in Europe: Reims razed to the ground, libraries burned, art lost. But then we would have to add the wars and violence in almost all the continents of the world. Have we taken stock of the destruction of European colonial wars? What was destroyed in the war prior to World War II in Asia, when Japan began to build the so-called Asian Prosperity Sphere at the price of conquering much of mainland China by blood and fire? We know quite well the catalog of destruction, robbery and looting of the Second World War in Europe. We would have to review and see the destruction of heritage in other parts of the world. There was, and a lot of it. Heritage, in whatever form, has become another instrument of punishment, a hostage in the hands of the enemy.
When the people of the Republican Generalitat, and the hundreds of volunteers who joined them, rushed to safeguard the country’s heritage in the summer of 1936, they did so to protect it from the revolutionary violence that broke out caused by a military and civil uprising against the Republic. When this first fire could be extinguished, the threat of the fascist war arrived: bombings on urban centers, inhabited and with no other objectives than to destroy the morale of the rearguard and, if necessary, human lives and heritage.
The exhibitionThe Museum in danger! Safeguard and order of Catalan art during the civil war He wanted to explain part of this history, with images and works, and, above all, make a reflection that is also valid for Ukraine these days: safeguarding lives and heritage is a state operation, which goes beyond sheltering some works of art, some buildings, along with protecting the attacked citizens. It is a sign of a certain civility, of a minimum cultural and collective sensitivity.
To see the images of the protection and evacuation of works of all types and conditions from Ukrainian museums is to travel to Barcelona at the end of 1936; to the Louvre in the fall of 1939; to the National Gallery, in London, in 1940, in full Blitz; to San Petersbrugo, where the Hermitage was emptied, in full siege by the German army.
The safeguard works did not prevent the loss of works and heritage. The war machine has always been able to prevail over reason and civility. We have seen it everywhere: in Palmyra, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the Caucasian conflicts, in the Sarajevo Library. And if you couldn’t use the excuse of the Collateral damage in an act of war, there is always the ideological motivation: the Nazis, fascists and Franco supporters burning books (the more practical Franco supporters did not burn them, or burned few; they made paper pulp); radical Islamists vandalizing museum collections. And the relationship would be quite long.
In Catalonia, between 1936 and 1939, the Generalitat invested an enormous amount of effort and resources to preserve the country’s artistic heritage. He did it in various ways and with complementary strategies: from the creation of large deposits in safe places in the rear, to the two exhibitions of medieval Catalan art in Paris (Jeu de Paume and Maisons-Laffitte). It was safeguarded, ordered, classified, registered, restored, explained and discovered. An entire management policy of the collective cultural heritage of the highest category. The monuments men pioneers were in Barcelona, Lleida, Manresa, Tortosa, Vic, Tarragona, Girona or Castelló d’Empúries. Later, a few years later, the monuments men Americans.
In Ukraine, especially in Kiev, civil servants and citizens, academics and professionals, pack, store, protect altarpieces and paintings, sculptures and goldsmith’s pieces; they put books and carvings in boxes. The images that reach us take us directly to Barcelona, Olot or Darnius. His story and ours is the same.
When the Francoist troops arrived at La Jonquera, on February 10, 1939, those responsible for the National Heritage Defense Service (José M. Muguruza, Luis Monreal, etc.) limited themselves to collecting all the heritage that the Generalitat had collected, ordered and preserved. They didn’t have to do anything. Later, people like Muguruza and Monreal would continually lie about the fact that the reds They had stolen, looted, destroyed, etc. It was the privilege of the victors. It is to be hoped that the Ukrainians will not have to go through this bitter experience. That when they can unpack their works again and return them to their places in the museums, they can do so with the satisfaction of not having lost the war, not even their personal freedom. The experience of 1939 in Catalonia cannot be repeated in Ukraine. It would be a return to the barbarism of the European fascisms of the 20th century. Because barbarism, destruction, political and ideological fanaticism, are also part of what has been called European civilization.
* Mireia Capdevila and Francesc Vilanova were the curators of the exhibition The Museum in danger! Safeguard and order of Catalan art during the civil warat the MNAC (July 2021 – February 2022)
[El fotógrafo Bernat Armangué ha documentado estos días cómo los trabajadores del Museo de Lviv trasladaban y protegían el rico patrimonio que guarda]
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