428 tain historiographical criteria and critics on the so-called Avant-gardes, but also postulated the idea that art was the privileged form of a cultural imagination in profound transformation. The cultural, social and political frame in which the creation of the IVAM took place was also of great significance for the recent history of Spain. The transition to democracy and to a political standardization, after long decades of ideological and cultural control, sparked unprecedented enthusiasm that made possible the implementation of processes in a relatively short time transforming not only the political situation, but also the most different instances of the social and cultural life of the time. The extensive literature on the Spanish transition to democracy has not forgotten to outline the importance that the cultural aspects played in that transition. A new way of thinking, a tension open and exposed to new cultural scenarios, made particular a ferment that give wings to an artistic culture increasingly powerful and creative. Without a doubt, the first museums of modern art, IVAM and Reina Sofia, played a key role in this process. First of all, it was an introduction of the different movements in their contexts that expressed the trends of the contemporary world. The goal was to approach to the public the history of 20th-century art, either from different moments of the historical Avant-gardes following the names of those who were recognized by the set canon through criticism, or by leaning to the more immediate present in the complex tastes, trends, and aesthetic values. In this sense, the role played by the museums of modern art was crucial to educate, guide the taste and sensitivity of a public who lived the 80s and 90s with great curiosity. In one way or other they all found in art a form and speech of a new way of thinking and imagining the future. The analysis of Jean Baudrillard in relation to the so-called “Beaubourg effect” pointed out the start of an era that Alain Touraine and Daniel Bell had defined as postindustrial society and which the emerging cultural industry would not only transform the taste, but also the way of thinking, as Th. W. Adorno had indicated with his analysis. The decade of the 80s was a time guided by deep aestheticized values, which will benefit the primacy of art in the configuration of the system of values and attitudes prevailing in the subjects of the decade. As it is well known, it was from these years that the institution of art acquired its maximum presence and visibility, articulating contexts, languages and exhibition strategies in a world that was already taking the first steps of an incipient but intensive globalization. 2 In case of the IVAM these were years of big activity oriented in two main directions. The first one, the exhibitions that from the beginning can be considered to be a marked dialogue with the great European and North American artists which ruled the XXth century art history. A reading of the history of the museum reflects in an exemplary way this primary focus. But without stopping to address the great artists of the century of Spanish art such as Picasso, Miró, Dalí or Julio González, etc., along with other artists that for the last 60 years have proposed their particular way of artistic expression and that ended up being the voice of generations that will soon have a renown name in the international context of the successive decades. At the same time the direction of the IVAM Collection was being considered, being this exhibition just only a sample and interpretive work. As we know art collecting is a universal phenomenon and its history is one of the most fascinating adventures, which limits can scarcely be draw by our imagination. The largest of the museums is without a doubt, the world. Among others, personalities such as Athanasius Kircher assembled them in their different collections. This idea of rebuilding the world in an instance, enclosure or museum has generated several stories, often extravagant. Among these the soul of the collector strolls. He will gather all that is between curiosous and rare. Some marked by the exception, other by the remoteness or exoticism. They will all be collected in the gallery of each era. The New World will be presented to the European Courts as a stronghold populated by surprising beings that will soon become part of the collections of the XVI century. In the Wunderkammern of the XVII other objects occupy the insatiable curiosity of those who love the extremes of the world, its natural irregularities, its exceptions and that strange universe of shadows of which the monsters emerge. Later, it will be the Enlightenment, which attempts to order the map of beings, by establishing the measure governing the system between taxonomies and other classifications of the planches of the Encyclopédie, which considered by Barthes as the most beautiful picture of the 18th century. An order that will later generate other models, always guided by modern curiosity that identifies and loves new worlds and objects that lead first to their own collections, then to the museums. A history that Krzysztof Pomian, among others, has traversed exemplarily paying special attention to the different moments in which collecting defines their tastes and preferences. From Venice to Paris, through the course of the XVI to the XVIII century, grows the most varied forms of collecting. At its own pace, the lines that define the territory of the visible and the invisible are drawn, leaving the open space for desire and curiosity, a space that will cover all kinds of curious people, attentive to the fascination of what could be produced in them by the new, strange and unusual. It would be enough to see the surprising syntax that relates to the objects of the collector. They gather all those possible extravagances that due to their rarity and exception request amazement, irresistible fascination in which knowledge and fantasy are found. It has been Hans Blumenberg who explored moments of formation of modern curiosity, which suggested a map of relationships that are at the base of those mechanisms that govern systems of curiosity and taste. A complex network of relations decides the form of organization of the systems of analysis that are at the base of the modern curiosity and taste. In this same direction and historical perspective will be new ways of collecting, being the museum, in its modern variants, one of the current models of greater prestige and legitimacy. Modern art will
Colección del IVAM. XXV Aniversario
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