The MNAC at war

A bullet hole in the head of a Saint Joseph in a 17th-century Baroque canvas greets visitors to the exhibition El Museu en perill, which the MNAC inaugurated a couple of weeks ago.

The bullet hit at the beginning of the Civil War, when a group of anarchists broke into the home of the painting's owners. It was one of multiple attacks against artistic heritage in Catalonia, which not only faced the danger of Francoist bombings but also the fury of various revolutionary and anti-clerical movements.

The MNAC exhibition narrates an epic chapter, not warlike but no less transcendent, which was the titanic effort by the Generalitat authorities to save hundreds of works of art.

Led by Joaquim Folch i Torres, the works were first concentrated in the MNAC, later evacuated to Olot, and most ended up in Paris in 1937 in the exhibition L'art catalán du Xème au XVème siecle, an operation also propagandistic to reinforce support for the Republic.

The painting with the bullet hole begins the story of that operation, with the exhibition of some of the MNAC works that were evacuated and photographs documenting it. One of the stories of that heritage safeguard is not part of the exhibition, but it is worth telling due to its uniqueness.

One of the evacuated works that were part of the Paris exhibition is the chair of King Martin the Humane, a folding gold seat that the monarch always carried with him to rest when his physical condition required it. When King Martin died without descendants, he stipulated to bequeath the chair and other goods to Jesus Christ as King of Kings.

This fact generated centuries later Hitler's interest in the throne to be part of the museum of power relics that the Nazi leader had planned. This peculiar collection had begun with a presumed Spear of Destiny —with which the Roman soldier Longinus would have killed Jesus on the cross— which was kept in a museum in Vienna.

One of the evacuated works that were part of the Paris exhibition is the chair of King Martin the Humane, which centuries later generated Hitler's interest

The Nazis dedicated many efforts to this endeavor and especially to the search for the Holy Grail, the great relic. Even Himmler looked for it in the Montserrat monastery.There was also an attempted theft at Westminster Abbey in London of the Stone of Scone, on which British kings are crowned.

Today, King Martin's golden throne is exhibited in the Barcelona Cathedral museum along with the monstrance. The piece, with the rest of the works from the Paris exhibition, returned to Spain in 1940.

El Museu en perill is one of the MNAC's activities in recent months related to the Civil War. A few weeks ago, in this same section, we talked about La guerra infinita, an exhibition about images of the conflict in Barcelona that photographer Antoni Campañà kept hidden for decades.

In parallel, in the Oval Room of the MNAC, an installation by artist Francesc Torres can be seen until next September, in which he recreates the participation of Soviet aviation in the Civil War.

Replicas of two aircraft that participated in the conflict spectacularly transform the emblematic space of the museum into one of the scenarios of those events, whose base was the La Sènia airfield, which would later also be used by the German Condor Legion.

The two planes on display are a Tupolev SB-2 Katiuska bomber in a vertical dive position, as if it were centimeters from crashing to the ground. The other is a Polikarpov I-16 Mosca fighter.

In the Oval Room, an installation by Francesc Torres on the participation of Soviet aviation in the Civil War can be seen until September.

To complete the MNAC's thematic offer with the Civil War, since July 1, they have opened new rooms dedicated to art in this historical period. An avant-garde art that captured the influence of propaganda on both sides and in which artists expressed their ideological commitments in painting, sculpture, and engraving, but also with new media such as posters, photography, and cinema.

Overall, it is a good opportunity to visit the Montjuïc museum and engage in cultural activism as a means for the economic and social reactivation of post-pandemic Barcelona.