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“The Abelló Collection is a great opportunity to see significant pieces of Modernism”


07/11/2019
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The Abelló Museum has one of the most important modernist art collections in Catalonia. It is a treasure for Mollet and in 4 cantons we have set out to discover it with the help of Teresa Sala, professor of Art History at the Faculties of Fine Arts and Geography and History at the University of Barcelona. Her main lines of research revolve around cultural studies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Sala regularly collaborates with museum and heritage institutions, especially in the field of exhibitions.

Teresa, what is your relationship with the Abelló Museum?
I have a very special relationship. I consider myself a regular contributor. From the first moment, the Museum gave me a great surprise and I can say that it has not ceased to be so. Not only because of what it contains, but also because of the human team that works. It’s extraordinary!

How did you discover the Abelló collection?
Mireia Ollé, restorer of the Museum, is a former student of mine and one day she called me proposing to make an exhibition on Modernism from the Abelló Collection. My first visit was so pleasant that instead of making an exhibition we made a trilogy, which gave rise to the cycle Vestigis del Modernisme, with a very profitable collaboration between the university and the Museum: We open the curtain, Everyday interiors, and Between rooms: Granados & Pellicer.

Within the Catalan art scene, where would you place it?
It is a collection of collections that occupies a prominent place in the Catalan art scene. The figure of Carles Pellicer is intertwined with that of Joan Abelló, with endless singular objects from the 19th and 20th centuries that transcend the local sphere and offer a broad vision of art and of the time.

Any singularity that makes the Abelló Museum special?
Apart from the importance of its collection, I would highlight the space of L’Aparador, which is located on the street as if it were a shop and allows the dialogue of the artists and the works with the public that walks by. And, of course, the Casa del Pintor, which has a special charm in which you can still breathe the atmosphere and the passage of time, and allow us to immerse ourselves in the Abelló universe. It is, for me, a privileged showcase of the various art collections on display.

Teresa M. Sala (photograph by Anna Elias)

From the Abelló Collection, what would you highlight?
It is not easy to stand out among the diversity and the number of interesting pieces, but I will take a risk. As we can go through authors and movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, through different aesthetic proposals or through special objects, some of them saved from shipwreck, I would say that the collection is an opportunity to see some significant pieces of Modernism, both painting, sculpture , drawing or decorative arts, such as posters, knick-knacks, furniture, scores… We can also appreciate the traffic through Noucentisme towards the Vanguards, passing through Dalí until reaching Joan Abelló himself.

Do you have a favorite garment?
Among my favorites, Coves de Mallorca stands out, a painting by Joaquim Mir which, in fact, is a marvelous fragment of the decoration of Casa Trinxet, a building by Josep Puig i Cadafalch in Barcelona’s Eixample, now disappeared, and which is currently loaned to the Caixaforum of Zaragoza for the Azul exhibition. The color of Modernism.

Let’s do an experiment: imagine that the Museu Abelló is in the middle of Barcelona. Do you think something will change?
I can’t imagine it in the middle of Barcelona, ​​really. I think it’s interesting that it is in the place where the artist was born. In my opinion, within this globalized world, local museums have even more reason to exist. We must distinguish the particular, the proximity, an art with a sense of belonging that makes us more cosmopolitan if we value it. Many likes for the Museu Abelló and word of mouth will be what will make it popular. As well as the support of the administrations, because without resources it is very difficult to function no matter how good will and imagination you have.

What do you think Museums should currently promote to attract new visitors and, above all, a younger audience?
I don’t have a magic wand… but I think if the “mountain doesn’t go to Muhammad, Muhammad will have to go to the mountain.” Therefore, we must continue to make an attractive program for all types of audiences and go outside the walls of the museum towards spaces in society where it can be made visible.

30 YEARS AT THE ABELÓ MUSEUM
The title may cause a misunderstanding, since the Museum has just turned 20, but Victoria Pérez Miralles has been linked to it since 1989, when she met Joan Abelló and began working directly for him: “my work with Abelló arose from the need to catalog all his pieces, always thinking about the moment of making a donation to become his dreamed Museum”.

A huge task, since the Abelló Collection is made up of more than 10,000 pieces, of all types and conditions. “Abelló was a man in love with beauty, and beauty can be found anywhere. He both made her a cup of coffee, like a painting or a piece of glass; if he found beauty, he acquired it.” And little by little, it was forming this eclectic collection that we found when visiting the House of the Painter, full of excesses, objects, cultures and trips… “until you enter, you can’t imagine it” , Victoria sentence.

We asked him about the moment in which the City Council reached an agreement with the painter to carry out the Museum. “Getting this agreement made Abelló very happy, who had always wanted to build a museum to show his collection to the people.” And as a painter, what was Abelló like? “Very prolific, too much. He was a man with so much energy, that he was three people at once: painter, collector and art dealer. It would have taken me three lifetimes to do what he did.” It is estimated that the Museum has cataloged a quarter of all the work that Joan Abelló did.

Victòria Pérez

(Interview that appeared in the municipal newsletter of the Mollet City Council “4 Cantons”, October 2019.)