We are pleased to announce the publication of Paula Barreiro López book’s Compagnons de lutte. Avant-garde et critique d’art en Espagne pendant le franquisme, a translation of the book Avant-garde and Criticism in Francoist Spain (LUP 2017) now out in French with MSH PARIS (2023).

In Spain during the period of late Francoism (1957-1975), art critics played an essential role in the protest movements that agitated a society in full mutation. Against the doctrine of an autonomous and depoliticized modern art advocated by the regime, they produced aesthetic discourses that re-established the link between culture and politics and pushed artists to place their works within the broader framework of ethical and social issues.

Based on the study of hitherto unexplored archives and unpublished interviews, Companions of Struggle focuses on the work of seven Spanish critics and art historians who took an extraordinarily active part in the intellectual and political life of their country in the 1960s: they published, edited, translated, organized exhibitions, debates, and meetings. Thanks to the complicity established with Giulio Carlo Argan and Umberto Eco in Italy, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez in Mexico, Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Julio Le Parc and the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris, they appropriated the theories and artistic tendencies circulating at that time in Europe and the American continent, adapting them successfully to the specific conditions of Franco’s Spain.

As result of an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to the artistic networks of the global South, the book reveals a part long neglected by the historiography of European art, shedding light on the functioning of the Spanish avant-garde in the last years of the dictatorship, its dissemination and its critical reception in the left-wing cultural circles during the Cold War.

For orders and distribution in France : http://www.editions-msh.fr/livre/?GCOI=27351100683880

For orders and distribution outside France : https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/compagnons-de-lutte-7519

Announcement on the DFK Paris website : https://dfk-paris.org/fr/publication/compagnons-de-lutte-3593.html

Electronic publishing in Open Access (available from the 26/01/2023): https://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/7428

Paula Barreiro López is Head Researcher of the International Platform Decentralized Moderniti(es) and Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Universidad Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès/Laboratoire FRAMESPA. She has worked at several European research institutions and universities in France, the U.K., Switzerland and Spain, including the Institut National d´Histoire de l´Art [INHA] in Paris, the University of Liverpool, the Université de Genève and the Instituto de Historia of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas [CSIC] in Madrid and at the University of Barcelona.
She is the author of La abstracción geométrica en España (2009), editor of Atlantico Frío: Historias transnacionales del arte y la política en los tiempos del telón de acero (2019) and co-editor of Modernidad y vanguardia: rutas de intercambio entre España y Latinoamérica (2015) and Crítica(s) de arte: discrepancias e hibridaciones de la Guerra Fría a la globalización (2014). She is also the author of numerous articles on art criticism, politics and cultural networks in Spain, Western Europe and Latin America during the Cold War.

Compagnons de lutte. Avant-garde et critique d’art en Espagne pendant le franquisme
Paula Barreiro López 
Paris: MSH Paris, 2023

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