Red city, blue period: Social movements in Picasso's Barcelona
Dublin Core
Titre
Red city, blue period: Social movements in Picasso's Barcelona
Sujet
culture urbaine, Barcelona, Barcelone, histoire urbaine, politique de la ville, participation, mouvement social, femmes, women, gender, genre, conflit urbain, Kaplan Temma
Description
Extract from the introduction:
The task I have undertaken in this book is to account for the peculiar sense of solidarity that the citizens of Barcelona developed between 1888 and 1939, and to explain why shared experiences of civic culture and pageantry were sometimes sufficient to galvanize resistance to national authoritarian governments but not always enough to overcome internecine struggles based on class and gender in the city itself. Most of all, I am concerned here with the process by which principles of regional freedom and economic equity developed and changed in a city long known for its commitment to human dignity and artistic achievement.
Women occupy a central place in this study of the creation and transformation of civic culture as a forum for political struggle. The grassroots politics in which activist women overwhelmingly participated has often been overlooked in studies of political life in Barcelona at this time. Yet because this study regards streets and cafés as political arenas, women's activities in them and in the movements that emanated from them assume a pivotal position in the arguments that follow.
From 1888 to 1939 the politics of region, class, and gender expressed themselves in terms of assorted communal manifestations of Barcelona's civic culture. Festivals and other street gatherings were prominent, providing a means to vent officially repressed aspirations as well as officially sanctioned sentiments. The same festivals or public events could serve divergent purposes at different times. They could express or encourage either local solidarity or internal struggle, celebration or opposition. Thus, civic forms could and did evolve over time, providing a rich and flexible political language that, in turn, gave rise to new strains of thought and new political options. This process both influenced and was reflected in the words of artists like Pablo Picasso, who came of age in Barcelona during this period.
