Visit to CaixaForum

On the 17th of December of 2018, we had the opportunity to visit CaixaForum, cultural centre created by Caixa d'Estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona within its Obra Social. 

This museum is located in Barcelona, in Montjuïc mountain, and occupies the old factory Casaramona. This project was ideated by Josep Puig i Cadafalch and responds to the modernist style. However, it is important to remark that it has been rehabilitated. It has three big and enlightened exhibition halls, where there are permanent and temporal exhibitions. 

Our visit was to visit two exposures: Velázquez i el Segle d'Or i Toulouse-Lautrec i l'esperit de Montmartre.

In the first plac, we entered to Velázquez's exhibition. An important aspect that needs to be mentioned is that we did not have any type of guide. Thusly, this fact difficulted the comprehension of the works of art, because they were also mixed with other pieces of different authors from the golden century. Although I understood that they were a help in order to understand and analyse both context and influences of the Sevillian painter, in my opinion I felt a lack of information in relation to the importance of his paintings, the most relevant aspects of his work, anecdotes... The thing I appreciated the most was the space for the families, in which there were giant frames that reminded of paintings. Also, you could grab some tooling so as to try and recreate one of Velázquez works of art.

In the second place, we visited the exhibition about Toulouse-Latrec. In comparison to the previous one, in this one we did have a guide that really helped us to understand the works of art shown. Despite going a little bit quick, I think the guider knew how to select the pieces and its details, explaining from personal aspects of the painter from curiosities. His explanations were really useful to comprehend the context in which Toulouse-Lautrec lived, as well as the atmosphere of Montmartre,  much or more important in the exhibition. 

In summary, I think that from the two exhibitions, the one about Toulouse-Lautrec was my favourite since I could understand the situation in which the painter lived and how it influenced his work. I also liked the style of the paintings, which I was not familiar with. Instead, in Velázquez's, I think there was a lack of information in order to understand the magnitude of his paintings.  Additionally, its style is more familiar to what I have studied, so it did not catch my attention as much as the other one. I also think that we could have worked the exhibitions in classroom beforehand, in case that we did not have a guide and could pay attention to the most relevant aspects of the exhibition. Another interesting thing would have been to see how to work these exhibitions (or the museum) with primary children. However, I have to say that our guide did tell us some things about the paintings in order to work them with kids.
Even so, I positively value the fact of having been able to attend a museum in class hours.