CAAM PRESENTS THE RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION JOSEP RENAU 1907-1982. COMMITMENT AND CULTURE

To coincide with the centenary of his birth, the Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales (SECC), in collaboration with the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, has organized the retrospective exhibition Josep Renau (1907-1982): Commitment and Culture, which sets out to review and ideologically, intellectually and aesthetically bring to the public eye the figure of Josep Renau and his important legacy. Jaime Brihuega is the curator of this exhibition, which brings together in the CAAM, following their exhibition in Valencia, Madrid and Seville, more than two hundred pieces representing the artist's prolific career. Paintings, drawings, sketches for murals, photomontages, posters, and all sorts of graphic illustrations make up this collection of works which encompasses a wide range of visual genres clearly demonstrates Renau's tireless creative flexibility.

The show, built around monumental enlargements of Renau's most important images, is completed with diverse audiovisual material, giving the visitor the opportunity to witness previously unseen footage from the television corporation of the German Democratic Republic (DDR). In addition, a documentary, entitled Josep Renau: Arte en guerra (Art in War) and directed by Joan Dolç, has been made especially for the exhibition. There will also be a music concert providing a soundtrack to a number of different moments taken from the life of Renau.

According to the curator of the exhibition, Jaime Brihuega, "Josep Renau is a key figure to understanding the nature and behaviour of contemporary Spanish culture. This is true of all facets of his life: as an artist, as an important figure in cultural politics, and as an intellectual who was able to appreciate the design of the future laid out in the details of the present. He played an important role in the fierce clash between the notions of purity and commitment, which was the driving force behind our culture during the mid 20th century."

In Brihuega's opinion, "his conception of art and culture as agitating elements, or more precisely, as indispensable tools for transforming and forging the structures that govern social relations, make him an authentic counter-culture symbol. He is the paradigm of that intellectual condition that refuses to roll over and die, which is ready to remain in force (or, if you prefer, in waiting) like the most active of genes among all those that have driven the Age of Reason." Reviewing these works chronologically, it becomes clear how Renau remained in tune with the evolving communicative spirit of his time: Art Deco, the primitivism of Vallecas, the graphic activism inherited from Dadaism, his continued presence in radical German politics, the neo-objectivist sensibility of the interwar years, the collective vocation of Mexican mural painting, cold-war realist constructivism... all have contributed to the artist's work.

He also knew how to connect to the linguistic autonomy found in advertising design. The ambitious series The American Way of Life, for example, shows, in the words of Brihuega, "how Renau absorbed the mass media in much the same way as pop art was to do when, around the same dates, he transgressed the boundaries between artistic genres. But Renau did so in a very different way. Although he entered deep into the forest of images he did so in order to attack the very heart of the ideological, economic and political context out of which the mass media universe was emerging."

This exhibition is not just a tribute to the artist and the graphic designer, but also to the man who, through his writing, argued ceaselessly, never missing the opportunity to make himself heard during the key moments of the cultural history of Spain. And, in particular, this exhibition pays tribute to the man who assumed political responsibilities in times of crisis with a brilliance that has struggled to find its equal since. The Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of 1937 in Paris, and its exceptional contents, the saving of the Spanish artistic treasures under threat from the bombing raids of the Spanish Civil War, and the creation of the Consejo Nacional de la Música and the Spanish National Orchestra are three of the momentous actions that he oversaw during his barely eighteen months as Director General for Fine Arts.

Brihuega concludes by saying that this exhibition "is a tribute that also claims a historic act of justice. Nobody can deny today, and nobody does so, the important place that Renau occupies in the history of our contemporary visual culture. Nobody can talk of Renau without referring, as an absolutely integral and essential aspect of this figure, to the ideological, social and explicitly political commitment that he upheld throughout his entire life. Hence the importance of the order of the two words that make up this show's subheading: commitment and culture."

The show is arranged into four sections:

1. Times of the Republic: Between Learning and Commitment (1926-1936)
2. Spain at War (1936-19393)
3. Crossing the Ocean: Exile in Mexico (1939-1958)
4. Images Beyond the Wall: In the German Democratic Republic (1958-1982)

Each section combines original works by the artist with documentary material and audiovisual projections, featuring both works associated with architecture and urban spaces and texts by Renau summing up his intellectual position.

Biographical information:

Josep Renau was born on the 7th of May 1907, but does not appear under that name in any birth registers of Valencia, his city of birth, because his real name was the Castilian José Renau Berenguer. He was the first-born son of José Renau Montoro, a brilliant restorer, painter and teaching academic of the San Carlos School of Fine Art in Valencia, and the housewife Matilde Berenguer Cortés. Thanks to his father's work and to the fact that he was the first child of a large family, he had a love for art instilled in him from a young age.

In 1920, at the age of thirteen, he enrolled at the San Carlos School of Fine Art. Here, in the 1920s, a post-Sorolla aesthetic dominated, against which Renau was to react virulently and, following a fit of artistic rebellion, he was temporarily suspended from the school. His father punished him by making him work at the Ortega lithographic studio, and it was this paternal reprisal that would mark the destiny of the rebellious teenager. Renau reconciled the work at the printer's with his fine art studies and so, in 1927, when he was twenty years old, managed to graduate, even winning the Premio Roig de Teoría de las Formas Arquitectónicas y Arte Decorativo, and the Premio del Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes de Teoría e Historia de las Bellas Artes prizes, both of which brought with them cash prizes.

Somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, the young Renau took on the almost heteronymous pseudonym of Renau Beger, Gallicizing his surname from his mother's side and thus fully entering into the cosmopolitan, frivolous and metropolitan scene of the art deco that dominated Valencian illustration during the roaring twenties. Renau Beger was to opt, via various different lithographic companies, for graphic design, poster art and commercial advertising - an artistic world that he would never abandon.