Between hospitality and propaganda. The “Exhibition of French Art” in the Barcelona of the First World War

In 1917, during the First World War, took place in Barcelona the Exposició d’Art Francès following an invitation extended by a group of Catalan artists to the main French artistic organizations. Th e result was, however, a strongly institutionalized event involving, on the one hand, the City Council of Barcelona and the Board of Museums—in constant tension with the Spanish government—and, on the other, the French administration of Fine Arts and its Ministry of Foreign Aff airs through the Service of Propaganda. Such an exhibition points to the highly political issue of “national art”, which was discussed during the years prior to the First World War and radicalized during its course as “artistic nationalism”. Th e conception of a national art as the embodiment of the nation underlies the title of the exhibition, abstract and timeless, which turns it into a manifestation of the French spirit, that is, the genius of the nation. From this point of view, the promotion of this “French art” must be controlled by offi cial institutions, with purely propagandistic purposes and precise political guidelines. Th is process coincided with the consolidation of “cultural diplomacy” in the European states, particularly in France. At the same time, reception of the exhibition in Catalonia involved mechanisms of self-defi nition, together with the projection of ideological expectations, such as considerations of the Catalan (and Spanish) identity