Image: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
On 29 September 2026, Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s personal archive was enriched with new unpublished documents and photographs. The donation was made by his daughters, Lourdes and Victoria Cirlot, who had already given the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya a significant group of documents in 2009; the new gift consists of nine folders of textual documentation and 52 photographs.
The newly incorporated material includes correspondence with Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart, André Breton, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, as well as with several members of the El Paso group. The correspondence documents Cirlot’s relationships with leading representatives of the avant-garde and postwar art in Catalonia and Europe, while providing new sources for studying the critical reception of informalism and the exchanges among participants in the period’s European artistic renewal.
The additional material reinforces the coherence and scope of a fund that helps explain Cirlot’s role in defining the critical reception of informalism, formulating the concept of the ‘Escola de Barcelona’ in painting and constructing historiographical accounts of contemporary art.
The earlier archive donation, covering 1958 to 1972, comprises documentation related to Cirlot’s working process, notes and reflections on literature and art, originals of his poetry, correspondence, material on aesthetic theory and various publications.
The incorporation of personal archives and documentary holdings is a strategic line of work for the Museu Nacional, linked to the institution’s commitment to preserving, studying and disseminating documentary heritage connected to Catalan art and culture.
