Essayist, poet, cultural researcher and trafficker of ideas, in the last five years Vicenç Altaió (Santa Perpètua de Mogoda, 1954) has given himself, body and soul, to the research that leads, today, to El radar americano. Architecture, art, visual communication and the cold war.
“We always want to know what is hidden behind each door when we arrive at a town,” says Altaió, who has lived in Cadaqués for more than thirty years. In his previous research, Miró i els poetes catalans, the artist’s biography served as the axis to weave a series of relationships between Miró and Catalan poets, which allowed the author to project Catalan culture to the world. Now he makes the opposite move: starting from the biography of the architect and gallery owner Lanfranco Bombelli Tiravanti (Milan, 1921-Cadaqués, 2008), Altaió traces a historical account of the relationship between art, culture and politics in the second half of the 20th century, which part of the world to reach Catalonia. This story, which begins in 1940 in Italy and concludes in 1982 in Cadaqués, is organized around four historical moments and is woven with multiple textuality, which incorporates various images and documents from Bombelli’s personal archive.
The chronicle begins with the departure of the young Milanese architect to Switzerland, due to the Nazi occupation of Italy, and with the consequent relationships he forges with an intellectual refugee in the neutral country that promotes the concrete art movement: the construction of a new reality. in the context of a Europe devastated by bombs. Once the Cold War had begun, Bombelli would work in Paris as an architect and coordinator of exhibitions for the Marshall Plan – directed by the North American Peter Harnden, his lifelong and professional partner. With this aid and development plan, the United States was betting on democracy in Europe, encouraging the free market and rationalist modernity applied to the productive system. Here is the heart of the essay: the exposition of the virtues of this model of social and progressive liberalism exported by the United States, as well as those of “the persistence of the critical experimental model in the artistic field until its end, swallowed by neoliberalism and populist consumerism” from the sixties onwards.
In the second half of the book, Bombelli and Harnden arrive in Barcelona and Cadaqués, in the 1960s. They introduce architectural modernity to the Empordà town, developing, together, a brilliant business of construction and rehabilitation of single-family houses, many of them for artists. The author delves into the vast network of relationships and the vibrant climate of local and international intellectuals and artists who fell in love with the town. By closely reviewing biographies such as that of Duchamp or Mary Callery, Altaió manages to outline the history of artistic modernity from a concrete and local perspective.
With Harnden dead, the opening of the Cadaqués Gallery by Bombelli represents a fundamental milestone: the gallery owner would introduce a community of great international artists to the state, and would promote very important collaborations in the history of art, such as that of the father of English pop art Richard Hamilton with Diter Roth. Establishing herself as a key figure for the renewal and artistic internationalization of the country, the gallerist Juana de Aizpuru would recruit Bombelli for the formation of the Arco fair in Madrid, with the consequent integration of Spain in the international art market and in the Europe of the states. , an event with which the story of this book closes.
“We must consider the permanent form and perennial substance of Cadaqués in Duchamp and Hamilton as key pieces to understand the art of the 20th century. It is strange that in the retrospective exhibitions that have been dedicated to them this symptom has been ignored: internationalism and ultralocalism,” says Altaió. This is the researcher’s task: to investigate what happened in ultra-local terrain, outside the system and, sometimes, during vacation time. Pulling the thread of microhistory to trace, from Milan to Zurich and from Paris to Cadaqués, from anti-art to pop-art and passing through concrete art, a story of the indissoluble link between politics and artistic modernity in the 20th century. A sharp, suggestive interpretation by this indefatigable semantic weaver from Cadaqués by adoption. And with all the blue force of his verb.
