Multimedia

After the intervention project that has been taken in the work Portrait of Joella by Salvador Dali, this important surrealist object returns to the Collection galleries.

Portrait of Joella, is a pictorial intervention of Salvador Dalí on a portrait of the gallerist´s wife, Joella Bayer in 1933. It is a work in full development of his paranoiac-critical method, a proposal to allow associations of images with their hidden meanings, often related to sexuality and death.

This video, produced by the Museum, collects the interesting conservation process carried out, in which those responsible for the intervention explain the study's findings.

Produced on the occasion of the master lectures of 2011, this video offers a comprehensive theoretical introduction to modernism with the art historian TJ Clark. The author of Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013) and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), among other seminal studies, TJ Clark discusses the ideas that shaped modernism (the process of secularization, the loss of the aura or the disenchantment with the world) and how these notions survive or have been transformed throughout history, placing special emphasis on the Museum's Collection.

This video looks at Museo Reina Sofía's Collection 3, giving special attention to the set up of the exhibition and to the contributions made by Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Museum, Rosario Peiró, the head of the Collections Department, and Jesús Carrillo, the head of Cultural Programs. Learning about the set-up process helps expand visitors' vision and enriches their understanding of this section of the newly arranged Collection, starting with the projection of works in the exhibition rooms where the stories are told, with commentary by the people directly involved.

In this video, the director of the Museum, Manuel Borja-Villel, the head of the Collections Department, Rosario Peiró and the head of Cultural Programs, Jesús Carrillo, discuss some of the key ideas that make up the new Collection rooms. The visit, which covers the two floors of the Nouvel building, explores a field in continual expansion: practices that no longer follow a single direction but rather come from positions that are not only markedly different, such as tropicalism and feminist art, but also from artistic practices that overlap with one another and others that choose to intervene in repressive contexts such as the dictatorships in Spain and Latin America.

José Gutiérrez Solana painted La tertulia del café de Pombo in 1920, at the request of his friend Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a writer linked to the avant-garde movement in Spain. The painting captures a singular moment in Spanish intellectual life during the 1920s, between the dark connotations of España Negra and the renewal brought by the Generation of '98. A recent conservation analysis has revealed previously unknown details about the painting, leading to new interpretations.

Structured around various core ideas, this interview with the author of the book Modernismo después de la postmodernidad (2011) shows the dilemmas arising between a revision of the melancholic and contemplative past, returned in the form of the architectural memorial, and a critical reading from the museum, in which history and memory are confronted. Huyssen discusses the foundations of a new modernism, which has future prospects and projects but lacks a geographical centre and power hierarchies.

During the Spanish Civil War hundreds of pieces of photojournalism were published on the conflict, in magazines in both Spain and abroad. The interest that the war aroused in other countries is manifested in the participation of foreign photographers such as Robert Capa or David Seymour ("Chim"). This room of the Collection also shows the work of photographers such as Agustí Centelles, Alfonso Sánchez Portela and Juan Pando.

This room of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection shows posters and drawings made during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), underlining the importance of the document in understanding the history of modern art. Works produced in series were, in 1930s Spain, one of the most effective weapons in communicating the effects of the war, and they influenced not just ordinary citizens but also artists such as Picasso and Miró.

In this work of the Museum's Collection, Juan Gris (1887-1927) plays with truth and illusion, using elements from daily life within the painting. The newspaper cuttings, for example, include messages about the socio-political context and double meanings, statements, opinions and specific allusions to the role of the artist, as interpreted by Eugenio Carmona and María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco.

The work of Juan Gris (1887-1927) has often been considered secondary and derivative; this video is a response to such affirmations. Through a visit to the room dedicated to him at Museo Reina Sofía, the work of this painter is re-evaluated, showing it to be the real source of the notions of analytic and synthetic cubism, based on a conception of painting as a poetic analogy of the world.