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RCC is pleased to announce this lecture series delivered by Francisco Prado-Vilar, as part of the winter activities organized at Harvard January@GSAS.
Abstract: “Picasso's ‘Guernica’ Borrowed by Fogg Art Museum For Two Weeks. Picture One of Artist's Most Spectacular Works” (October 1, 1941). With this headline, the Harvard Crimson announced the arrival to campus of one of the most emblematic visual testimonies of the Spanish civil war. For two weeks, the Guernica was exhibited at the Fogg Museum alongside an extraordinary collection of artworks from Spain, dating back to the Middle Ages – a collection that had been assembled in the previous decades through the efforts of eminent Harvard professors such as A. Kingsley Porter and Chandler R. Post. The intellectual engagement of Harvard scholars with the art and culture of Spain – reflected not only in their scholarship but also in letters with Spanish colleagues and journalistic documents –, coincided with a crucial historical moment in the political, cultural, and artistic life of that country, which was at the forefront of central aspects in the development of avant-garde movements in Europe, and also became a battlefield in the fight against fascism. A unique educational institution in Madrid, known as the “Residencia de Estudiantes” (the Student’s Residence) embodied the vibrant cultural life of pre-civil war Spain. Its resident students, among whom were poet Federico García Lorca, painter Salvador Dalí, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and scientist and Nobel prize winner, Severo Ochoa, shared a rich intellectual life that fostered creativity, excellence and freedom, enjoying at the same time the recurrent presence of invited lecturers such as Albert Einstein, Paul Valéry, Marie Curie, Igor Stravinsky, John M. Keynes, Alexander Calder, Walter Gropius, Henri Bergson and Le Corbusier. In a series of two lectures, each followed by a seminar discussion, where a wealth of documentary and visual material from the Harvard archives and from archives in Spain will be analyzed, this course introduces students to this crucial historical moment of the Harvard-Spain connection, delving into the biography of its most prominent figures, stories, and artworks.
Registration required.
Contact: rcc@harvard.edu