Extensiones de una política cultural decimonónica: Asociaciones vanguardistas y articulaciones de lo popular en la Cataluña populista

This article analyses the configuration of an inclusive and non-polemical cultural field in the avant-garde bourgeois collectives of 1930s’ populist Cataluña. In a context marked by populist conflagration, the essay studies how bourgeois culture is deployed to imagine an appeasing social field. I pay particular attention to the depictions of popular and traditional practices in the artistic initiatives of Catalan civil society. In order to delve into the regional objects that give form to those depictions and initiatives, I put in conversion the cultural scene of 1930s with long-established patterns of cultural and political intervention in the Catalan bourgeoisie. Thus, by exploring the continuities of the region’s nineteenth-century cultural politics in a later context, this study addresses the bourgeois models of socialization and artistic pedagogy that informed the projects of the Catalan avant-garde groups, specially the design of an extended art archive that placed surrealist and experimental practices alongside canonical art tendencies and popular and traditional customs. I focus on two collectives: a group of cultural entrepreneurs that promoted surrealism among the Catalan elite, ADLAN (Amics de l'Art Nou), and a functionalist group of architects that proposed rationalist reforms to allocate the popular masses in the cities, GATCPAC (Grup d'Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l'Arquitectura Contemporània). In both cases, I study how an inclusive artistic archive and a non-polemical cultural field operated as mechanisms of bourgeois cultural intervention that recanted and reconfigured the terms of the antagonistic populist field in the populist scene of 1930s’ Cataluña.