Portraits of the Belle Époque at CaixaForum

The years of the Belle Époque, between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, were a time of economic growth and social change that favoured portrait painting, a genre that enjoyed a golden era despite the recent invention of photography.

The exhibition “Portraits of the Belle Époque“, showing at CaixaForum until 9 October, takes you back to the years of optimism and good living that also saw major upheavals in the art world.

Up to three different generations of painters portrayed society figures and scenes of the period, using styles that ranged from Realism through to Impressionism and Expressionism. You’ll find works by up to forty different artists in the exhibition.

The portrait genre developed from a static pose to being a symbolic representation, often including the surroundings in which the subject was being portrayed. Types of portrait included group scenes, usually families.

Nobles, the bourgeoisie, writers and also anonymous people feature in the paintings on display in the exhibition, many of which were commissions for the artists, who had the task of trying to convey the subject’s character on canvas.

Giovanni Boldini and John Singer Sargent specialised in painting society portraits, but other artists, whose work is displayed here, such as Joaquim Sorolla, painted the ordinary people around them.

Toulouse-Lautrec in particular was fond of painting anonymous characters from the Paris streets and cabarets, while towards the end of the Belle Époque, paintings by Egon Schiele and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner reflect the widespread feeling of loneliness and despair as the Great War approached.

The exhibition gathers together over seventy works, including pieces by Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, Ramon Casas and Hermen Anglada-Camarasa.

Montjuïc at Night: Open Music Festival

On 2 July, Barcelona will once again pay tribute to its own home-brewed live music, with a new white night on Montjuïc mountain, Montjuïc at Night, where the best bands from the city’s main music festivals will be meeting up at the same site.

Sonar, Barnasants, De Cajón! Festival Flamenco, Cruïlla BCN, Mas i Mas, BAM. Up to twenty festivals with a highly varied programme that includes some forty performances in every style to suit every taste, from pop to jazz, hip-hop and electronica.

The white night will also offer a taste of the Beefeater In-Edit, the Barcelona International Music Documentary Film Festival, with a screening of two music documentaries.

As usual, the music evening of this fourth edition of Montjuïc at Night will be accompanied by an open night at various museums and mountain venues, such as the CaixaForum, the Fundació Joan Miró, MNAC, the Poble Espanyol and the Teatre Grec gardens.

The festival will kick off at 8 pm and go on until 4 am. For access to some of the mountain stages, the public will have extra public transport and a free bus service until 5 am, connecting Montjuïc Castle to Plaça d’Espanya and Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina with the funicular.

13th BDigital Global Congress in Barcelona

Smart World will be the star attraction at this, the 13th BDigital Congress, with the latest developments in digital societies and ICT’s at the CaixaForum from yesterday, 30 May to 2 June.

The congress, taking place just after World Telecommunications Day, will deal with energy efficiency and process optimisation in large cities, based on international and Spanish cases, over the four days.

The congress, which is free but requires prior registration, can be followed live on its website.

As part of the city debate five companies will have an opportunity to explain, in five minutes, the solutions their products provide for the demands posed by cities.

Like Smart World the social media will also be a focus of the discussions, with speakers from the main companies in the world explaining their social media business models.

One of these speakers will be Peter Shankman, the creator of the free information repository, Help a Reporter Out. He is going to explain how he sees the social media, public relations and marketing.

13th ‘Bdigital Global Congress’ | From 30/05/2011 to 02/06/2011
CaixaForum Centre Social i Cultural -> Av Francesc Ferrer Guàrdia, 6 | Sants-Montjuïc

Barcelona Sports Film Festival

The Barcelona Sports Film Festival, the only sports-themed cinema and TV festival in Spain, is set to take place in Barcelona between 17 and 21 May. Any audiovisual production with a sports theme can compete, whether it is an animated film, documentary, report, fiction film, promotional or advertising video.

Films will be screened at six different venues:

• Museu Olímpic i de l’Esport Joan Antoni Samaranch
• Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
• Sala d’Àmbit Cultural El Corte Inglés
• Ateneu Barcelonès
• CaixaFòrum
• Filmoteca de Catalunya

Apart from the film sessions the festival includes a whole series of parallel activities that aim to illustrate that sport is a sphere of activity capable of entering into a symbiotic relationship with art, philosophy and innovation.

More inf@: BCN Sports Film Festival

New Exhibitions at Museums of Barcelona

The Picasso Museum is holding an exhibition on artists’ responses to the Franco dictatorship in Spain. It takes as its departure point a series of engravings made by the artist in 1937 entitled The Dream and Lie of Franco.

Montjuic offers explorations into the past: MNAC is giving an exhibition on the 19th-century French Realist painter, Gustave Courbet while the CaixaForum is presenting an archaeological exhibition on the ancient Mexican site of Teotihuacan, whose fame rests on its enormous step pyramids.

If you fancy a bit of thought-provoking photojournalism, then you mustn’t miss the exhibition on at the CCCB featuring photographs taken by Gervasio Sanchez and showing the parallels between forced disappearances under oppressive regimes in South America, the Middle East and Spain.

FotoPres 2009 at CaixaForum Barcelona

The 135 photographs corresponding to the six projects awarded prizes and grants are now being shown at CaixaForum until February 2010 to prompt visitors to think deeply about living conditions in countries in conflict.

The competition, which came about thanks to a determination to recognise the then little-valued work of photojournalists, has this year awarded the winning prize to Spaniard Emilio Morenatti for his project ‘Gender violence in Pakistan’.

The selection tells the stories of ten Pakistani women based on their faces, disfigured because of family disputes or by rejected suitors. Just through these faces the photographer succeeds in portraying the cruelty of gender violence and the tragedies faced by these women for the rest of their lives.

Keeping to the subject of violence, second-prize winner Walter Astrada and his report ‘Post-electoral violence in Kenya’, made in that African country during the months of January and February 2008.

Distancing himself from the other prize winners, third-prize winner Alfonso Moral portrays Lebanon’s social reality in ‘Lebanon, between sea and fire‘ from two opposing angles: the tranquility of the sea and the changes brought by the conflict.

Besides the three winners, La Caixa awarded six grants to produce documentary projects, the results of which can be seen in the exhibition. It includes works by Lurdes R. Basolí, Fosi Vegue, Marta Ramoneda, Aleix Plademunt, Mikel Aristregi and José Luis Expósito.

This year 316 works were entered for the competition, the highest level of participation in the FotoPres Awards since it was first held in 2003.

FotoPres’09 Exhibition | From 30/10/2009 to 21/02/2010
CaixaForum Centre Social i Cultural -> Av Marquès de Comillas, 6 Sants-Montjuïc

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Barcelona Design Week

The fourth BCN Design Week will be one of the big events on the IF Barcelona programme with sessions dealing with the main challenges facing this European project. BCN Design Week 2009 runs from 26 to 30 October and is one of the events promoting and debating design not to be missed in the international diary .

Businesses of diverse productive or services sectors, professionals and experts of the world of design as well as prestigious speakers will give themselves appointment in a platform of experiences in which the main topics to be addressed are Design Thinking & Creativity, Design Management, Mobile Design or Creativity and family business, among other topics.

The activities to be orgnized for this fourth edition will be held at top venues such as CaixaForum, MACBA, Casa Llotja de Mar and the Mies van der Rohe pavilion.

The 2009 BCN Design Week acquires special relevancy due to the celebration of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation.

More inf@: www.barcelonadesignweek.es  |  Design Center Barcelona: www.bcd.es

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