Genealogies of Art 

All the exhibitions organized by the Juan March Foundation start from a question that is both a challenge. In ‘Genealogies of art, or the history of art as visual art‘, the question is the following: if the history of art consists of objects mostly intended to be seen, shouldn’t the way of telling it also be very visual?

This is the starting point that this ambitious exhibition proposes, to flee from the textual and abstract narration and to bet on something visual and concrete. The famous diagram of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founder in 1929 of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), shows the way: it materializes in the ever-changing exhibition space of the Foundation explaining the evolution and interrelationships of art from 1890 to 1935. Barr composed this diagram for the dust jacket of the Cubism and Abstract Art catalog (1936), and 93 Metros has reproduced it in three dimensions.

Conceived and organized by the Juan March Foundation and the Picasso Malaga Museum, the exhibition brings together 350 works and more than a hundred documents from 230 artists and authors related to visual thinking. It also includes the most varied visual representations of that thought: family trees, tables, allegories, maps, plans, prints, diagrams and informative graphics, all drawn up between the 17th century until today. Some emblematic works of avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Kazimir Malévich, César Domela, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay and Vasili Kandinsky, among others, stand out.