This exhibition aims to show the task of safeguarding and organizing that the Generalitat de Catalunya urgently undertook in the summer of 1936, when the fascist uprising led to an explosion of unprecedented revolutionary violence that affected Catalonia’s artistic and architectural heritage. The show also wishes to acknowledge the fundamental role played in this protection of the heritage by figures such as Joan Subias, Joan Bardolet, Miquel Joseph i Mayol and, especially, Joaquim Folch i Torres, a figure essential for understanding the entire Catalan museum and heritage system, who was the crucial promoter and first director of the Museu d’Art de Catalunya, and who suffered in the purges and the repression after the war.

The emergency in the summer of 1936 was successfully dealt with thanks to the fact that the Catalan government had introduced policies in 1934 to safeguard and organize the cultural heritage as never before, with the creation of the main Catalan museums (the Museu d’Art de Catalunya and the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya) and a well-defined cultural policy.

The exhibition focuses on the years 1936-1939, but it begins with the implementation of this early organizational work. Starting in the summer of 1936, intensive work was done on the heritage all over Catalonia (and in the “western strip” in Aragon, with the salvaging of works of art in Roda de Isábena or Sixena, for example), which involved several almost simultaneous actions: salvaging and safeguarding, concentrating on deposits and museums, classifying, organizing, restoring, identifying, etc., even developing ideas for exhibitions and museum design that went beyond the needs of Republican and Catalanist propaganda. The clearest example was the Exhibition of Catalan Medieval Art in Paris.

With the situation under control and the policies of safeguarding and organizing the heritage underway, the next step was to preserve the works of art from Francoist aggression and the bombing raids carried out by the Italian-Spanish fascist air force, hence the need to evacuate, for safety reasons, the main museums in Barcelona and some of the deposits and concentrations of works in other parts of the territory. The safeguarding operation was thus devised and put into practice because Spanish fascism, with the support of Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, had launched a military assault that opened the doors to all manner of violence, revolutionary and anticlerical at first, then bombing raids on the civilian population and non-military targets by the fascists later.

Museum in Danger! will combine different types of exhibits: original works, primary documents, lists, purge records, bibliographical catalogues and volumes, photographs, materials from newspaper and periodicals libraries, films, maps, posters, etc.

The visual power of the surviving photographs of those transfers and movements is striking, a veritable treasure that allows us to see the conditions in which the managers and technicians had to work to be able to safeguard and organize the artistic heritage of Catalonia. All this material will show spectators a surprising historical episode.

The Exhibition of Catalan Medieval Art in Paris will have a separate monographic space in the rooms of the Romanesque art collection.

This monographic space will show how, much more than a propaganda operation, the 1937 exhibition at the Jeu de Paume was a memorable action revolving around a proposal for an exhibition that involved organizing and interpreting medieval art, restoring works of art and displaying a unique heritage. This show was a turning point in the international projection of the museum’s medieval collection and the ideas about the works in it.