With the coup d'état of July 1936, the starting gun was fired for three years of armed conflict between the defenders of the Republican Government and the right-wing forces. Three years of military attacks that not only occurred in the trenches but also affected the civilian population and artistic heritage. To protect and safeguard this heritage, the Generalitat created the Board of Artistic Treasure, which was responsible for confiscating thousands of works, from private collections, churches, or museums, to transfer them to different deposits distributed throughout the republican territory, in Valencia, northern Catalonia, and, with the advance of the war, also in Geneva.
When the Francoist side won the war, the republicans handed over these works of art to the so-called National Artistic Heritage Defense Service (SDPAN), which began to return these pieces to their owners, from large museums such as the Prado Museum to churches or individuals. However, in some cases, this return process was never completed, as their origin was unknown. In this way, some of the works confiscated during the Civil War were never returned to their original owners and were distributed among centers and institutions, from museums to universities.
In total, eight Spanish universities received works from the SDPAN, such as the Complutense University of Madrid or the University of Oviedo. Thus, in January and June 1942, the University of Barcelona (UB) received two deposits with more than twenty objects, including paintings, sculptures, and goldsmith pieces, which would be used mainly to decorate the new chapel of the building. The center has now begun a process to trace the origin of these works donated to the university and try to clarify their original owner.
The result of this investigation is the exhibition Art Dispersed by Francoism. The works deposited at the University of Barcelona, curated by professors Arturo Colorado and Santos M. Mateos, and which can be seen until July 18 in the Aula Capella of the Historic Building. Of the heritage collection that was donated to the institution, the UB still preserves eleven objects ---nine paintings and two sculptures--- that decorate different spaces of the centers, nine of which are part of this new exhibition. An exhibition where the most important thing, as art history doctor Santos M. Mateos relates, is not so much the work of art itself, but what normally remains hidden, such as the labels or the history behind the piece.
To trace this history that each piece hides, an "extensive and arduous documentary task has been carried out to clarify who its owner was," according to its curator, based on documentation from the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, the National Archive of Catalonia, and the Photographic Archive of Barcelona. In at least one of these cases, the documentary research has borne fruit and its origins have been established.
This is the sculpture Sagrat Cor by the Catalan sculptor Josep Llimona, the author of the renowned work El desconsol, which is currently preserved in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), and it is a replica of this work that presides over the fountain of the Parliament of Catalonia in Ciutadella. From photographs, it has been possible to ascertain that the work Sagrat Cor decorated, until the outbreak of the conflict, the main staircase of the Foment de la Pietat Catalana, an entity to which the SDPAN returned some works but not this one by Llimona. Given up for lost for eighty-five years, it had actually been deposited at the UB, and now its history is recovered through this exhibition.
In the other cases, for now, the investigation has not been able to trace their traceability and ascertain their origins. Although almost all the works deposited in the UB retain their label, the information they provide does not allow discovering their provenance before the Civil War, but only knowing the deposit where they were kept, such as that of the Pedralbes monastery, that of the palace of the Duke of Solferino, that of the Mercader palace in Cornellà de Llobregat or that of the Foment del Treball.
In addition to Llimona's sculpture, other relevant pieces are also exhibited, such as the oil on canvas The Continence of Scipio, from the 17th century and attributed to the school of Luca Giordiano, or the copy of Murillo's Holy Family of the Little Bird, painted by Antonio Estrada. Despite not knowing the origin of these works, and in order to contextualize them, the exhibition not only shows these art pieces ---which for years have decorated various spaces of the university--- but also archive documents, original labels, registration numbers and other elements that reveal the traceability of the pieces and their institutional use.
"The most important thing is to make known the provenance of the set of works, but also the documentary task that allows determining their entire itinerary," says Mateos. For this reason, the exhibition can not only be visited physically at the university, but also virtually within the UB Virtual Museum. Likewise, it is planned that this set of works will be part of the second volume of the academic center's painting catalog, with the aim of making its artistic legacy available to the public.