The devastating effects of the Spanish Civil War on cultural heritage are well known, as are the policies deployed by the governments of the Republic and the Generalitat de Catalunya for the protection of artistic and scientific treasures, public and private.

However, the stage following the exile of the republican institutions, with the assimilation of the cultural heritage by Franco, is the stage in which the most doubts remain to be resolved.

Moving towards a new horizon in the knowledge of the effects of the war conflict on heritage, the performance of the National Artistic Heritage Defense Service (SDPAN) in Catalonia will be studied. This service begins operations coinciding with the fall of Lleida (April, 1938) to continue advancing until the total occupation of Catalonia (February, 1939). At the end of the war it was the body responsible for the heritage and, therefore, the artistic deposits gathered by the republican government and their subsequent return and distribution.

 

 

With "IGUEMUS". The impact of the Civil War on the configuration of museums in Catalonia. Traceability, location and destination of saved cultural goods", it will be possible to complete the portrait of one of the most turbulent periods for cultural goods.

Knowing in detail the actions of the SDPAN in Catalonia during the Civil War with the advance of the front, as well as in the first period of Francoism is the next step and the direct consequence of the work carried out so far by the ICRPC and the researchers that brings this project together.

Restoring the complete itinerary that these works underwent also has an important derivative. A good part of the current museum holdings are made up of works deposited by the SDPAN, but lacking the documentation explaining their provenance, preventing optimal cataloguing. Singularizing these works by tracing the route they followed from July 1936 until they entered the museums, would allow to document provenances that have been ignored until now. Also, the analysis of these funds will allow us to advance in the knowledge of the formation of a large part of the collections contained in the Catalan museums. And at the same time confirm one of the working hypotheses of the present project. Beyond the widely studied loss and destruction, the cataclysm of the Civil War had a derivative that has not been sufficiently taken into account until now. The basis of the collections of a large part of the museums is made up of the works gathered by the republicans and entered by the Francoist authorities.

 

 

We are dealing with a fundamental issue for the history of the heritage of Catalonia and its museums. A topic that has not been dealt with in Catalonia before and the study of which will allow, in the future, to establish parallels with other territories in Spain and even other conflicts of an international nature.

The analysis of the heritage policies deployed by the new authorities will reveal the propaganda impact of the actions carried out by the agents of the SDPAN. In other words, the discourse elaborated around heritage recovery and its materialization. In addition, the personal and professional trajectories of men and women who worked in the protection of cultural assets during the Republic and the first Francoism will be recovered.