Colección Telefónica. Cubismo(s) y Experiencias de la Modernidad

Jacques Lipchitz claimed that Cubism had been a task of emancipation of all previous art. Juan Gris considered that Cubism was not a procedure but a state of the spirit and that, as such a state of the spirit, it was in relation with all the manifestations of the thought of its time. The visions and stories of the Cubist experience are sometimes divergent. Cubism is pronounced in the singular, but its creative space was plural. It is right to talk about “Cubism.” A certain vision -which is perhaps a dominant vision- tends to be restrictive with the protagonists, the times and the scenarios of the Cubist experience. Another vision, on the contrary – a currently necessary vision – tends to be broad and complex, and understands Cubism as a process extended in time, varied in its contributions and numerous in its protagonists.

The Cubist Collection of Telefónica meets with the Cubist collections of the Museo Reina Sofía show the plural conception of the cubist experience. And the meeting of both collections implies, in addition, the expository and plot domain of the work of Juan Gris. To raise the cubist experience is, without a doubt, to raise the prevalence of the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. But in the present moment, the reconsideration of the cubist experience attending to the formulations of Juan Gris is not only legal and possible, but it is also desirable, since it contains in itself the complexity of what Cubism really was.