Sculpture, Catalan Art Nouveau and Academy: on Teaching, Official Aesthetics and Art Nouveau Sculpture in Barcelona (1888-1910)

Abstract

The present article deals with the relationship between public sculpture and the Academia de Bellas Artes in Barcelona in the period of configuration of Catalan modernism. It seeks to offer a renovated vision of the Academy of the time by questioning the idea that it was impermeable to innovatory currents that appeared in the western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article takes an unusual historiographical approach, in which the esthetic discourse emitted by the Academy plays an important role, and proposes a new look at academicism and the academic in its relationship to sculpture that may also be applied in other geographical contexts.