Spanish Pavilion, 1937 Paris International Exposition

The International Exposition of Arts and Technology in Modern Life opened in Paris on 25 May 1937 and closed on 25 November. During those six months, 31,040,955 people visited the 105-hectare grounds to view, among other things, the pavilions of the forty-five international participants. 

According to the official program, the exposition was to be “a meeting place for harmony and peace”, but the context of 1937 was anything but harmonious and peaceful. The civil war in Spain had been raging for more than ten months, and the increasingly aggressive Nazi regime was ratcheting up tensions in Europe. 

The Paris exposition became a major stage on which international politics were played out. The massive pavilions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union faced each other across the Quai de Tokyo. The government of Largo Caballero (which was replaced days before the exhibit´s opening) also saw the exposition in this way and ensured that its pavilion, shown here, would broadcast its message to the vast international audience. 

The modernist building was a collaboration between Luis Lacasa and Josep Lluís Sert. (Like most of the pavilions, it opened only after the exposition had begun.) Today, it is remembered as the place where Pablo Picasso’s Guernica was first shown to the world, but this was only one piece of an imposing collection of works by both famous and lesser-known artists, gathered by Luis Araquistáin, ambassador to France, and writer Max Aub. Director Luis Buñuel was charged with selecting the films that were shown in the pavilion.

Visitors encountered the art even before they entered the building. Alberto Sánchez’s twelve-metre-tall sculpture The Spanish People Have a Road that Leads to a Star stood in the patio before the main entrance, and the façade was covered with photomurals by Josep Renau. (His work, including one that juxtaposed a rural woman in a traditional bride’s dress with a militiawoman, was also exhibited throughout the building.) The ground floor courtyard featured Guernica and Alexander Calder’s mobile Mercury Fountain. Joan Miró’s mural The Reaper (Catalan peasant in revolt) was on the second floor.

Guernica was not the only work to illustrate Francoist barbarism. Ángela Nebot’s Saint Culture, martyr of fascism is a graphic representation of a teacher shot inside her classroom, and Martí Bas Executions at Badajoz Bull Ring showed the brutal repression that followed the rebel capture of that city in August 1936.

Fedrico García Lorca, who had been murdered by the rebels early in the war, had a strong presence in the pavilion. In addition to Fernando Briones’ painting Allegory of the execution of Federico García Lorca, there were recitals of his poetry and a display of his books.

The building was demolished once the exposition had ended. In 1992, the city of Barcelona commissioned the construction of a reproduction which now houses the University of Barcelona’s archive and library devoted to Second Republic, the Civil War, exile, Francoism, and the transition to democracy.