The history of false coinage is as old as the history of legal coinage. The aim of this exhibition is to draw the public’s attention to some aspects that have surrounded the forgery of coinage and its prosecution in each historical period, from Antiquity to the present, in Catalonia and in the political communities with which it has been historically associated.

The authorities have prosecuted the forgery of coinage as constantly as they have fruitlessly, with the provision of very severe punishments for these crimes. Forgery, however, has played a significant role in the improvement of the minting of official coinage, with the idea that it should be ever more difficult to imitate. The exhibition will enable us to compare the forgeries with the authentic coins from each period.

Other aspects that will be presented in this exhibition are the cutting of the precious metal for the coins and the appearance of scales and weights to check that their weight is correct, as well as the mechanization of the minting of coinage and the introduction of the decorated milling of the edges to avoid them being filed down. Moreover, mention will be made of the continuity of the criminal legislation and the prosecution of the crime of forgery. Finally, the show will compare the old forged coinage with more modern phenomena like the forgery of old coins with the aim of deceiving collectors, legitimate reproductions or the tokens that are inspired on or imitate coins.

Exhibition organized by the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catlunya

Curator: Albert Estrada-Rius, curator of the Numismatic Cabinet of Catalonia

Prague, Paris, Barcelona, 1918-1948 shows the experimental richness that characterised avant-garde photography and compares the work of the most outstanding photographers of these three cultural centres. The artistic revolution that took place in Prague and Paris in the period between the wars reached Catalonia through European illustrated magazines, and photographers like Pere Català-Pic, Emili Godes, Josep Sala and Josep Masana embraced photographic experimentation very successfully. The exhibition presents nearly 200 photographs that incorporated the technical, creative and formal innovations that were within their reach.

From the closing stages of the nineteenth century to the First World War, photography tagged along behind the new trends in painting with the aim of elevating the discipline to the level of art and fighting against the stigma of being a simple mechanical reproduction of reality. Indeed, photography did not throw off the yoke of painting until the interwar period, characterised by a great experimental boom in all the arts. From the classrooms of the Bauhaus, the revolutionary German school, a commitment was made to a new culture of space that became the foundations of the New Photography, emerging in Germany around 1920. This current proposed photography that intensified the gaze in order to get close to the world free of prejudices and definitively freed it from the pictorialist model, by considering it an artistic practice in its own right. The New Photography experimented with all the technical, creative and formal innovations it had to hand, incorporating to photography abstract stills, high- and low-angle shots, backlight shots, photomontages, combinations with typographies, copy negatives and solarizations. From that moment onwards, photography participated definitively in the avant-garde and in all its ideas: new subjectivity, constructivism, abstraction, social criticism and surrealism.

The appearance of this new photography had a huge impact all over Central Europe, above all in countries like Germany. With the creation of democratic Czechoslovakia, in 1918, Prague became a centre of modernity and cultural excitement where numerous painters and sculptors gathered. Paris, in turn, was the place to meet for many intellectuals and artists from all over the world, who, with their creative effervescence, turned the city into the centre of the avant-garde ideas that were coming thick and fast.

The avant-garde came to Catalonia, in the sphere of photography, through cultural magazines like D’Ací i d’Allà, published between 1918 and 1936, and illustrated magazines from all over Europe. The model championed by the Bauhaus, which was promoting an integrated art that would reach all the artistic disciplines, took photographic experimentation to areas of mass diffusion, like advertising, in which photographers like Pere Català-Pic, Emili Godes, Josep Sala and Josep Masana had great success with their quest for new aesthetic experiences.

Exhibition organized by the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catlunya

Curator: David Balsells, Head curator of photography, MNAC, in collaboration with Joan Naranjo, photography historian and member of the MNAC’s photography advisory committee.