October 10, 2007 January 27, 2007
By means of this exhibition, the Eugenio Granell Foundation joins the Andreu Nin Foundation in marking the 70th anniversary of the politicians murder and recovering the historical memory of the POUM.
The exhibition is made up of a small section of plastic works featuring the work of Eugenio and Mario Granell, Arturo Souto or Andrés Colombo, among others, as well as graphic, bibliographic and audiovisual documentation about the political party that dominated the life of Eugenio Granell. It also includes a section devoted to the POUM in Galicia.
Completing the exhibition is a programme of activities made up of a series of talks, presented by scholars specialising in this political party and the history of Trotskyism (Pelai Pagés, Eugenio Castro, Dionisio Pereira, Dolors Genovés and Andi Durgam), and the screening of films such as Operación Nicolai or Tierra y Libertad.
The exhibition catalogue will feature texts by the Catalan researcher Pelai Pagés of Catalonia University, linked to the Andreu Nin Foundation and a POUM specialist, Wilebaldo Solano, a former POUM leader and currently President of the Andreu Nin Foundation and, in representation of the Andreu Nin Foundation, a text by Pello Perdociáin on Eugenio Granells POUM militancy. The publication will also include texts by the art critic and surrealist creator Eugenio Castro (who will speak about the relationship between Trotskyism and surrealism) and the prestigious research journalist Dolors Genovés on the research process behind the documentary Operación Nicolai, which deals with Stalinist repression against the figure of Andreu Nin. The researcher Dionisio Pereiras contribution appears in the section devoted to Galicia. Completing the publication is a section of political articles by Eugenio Granell.
The exhibition is divided into a series of sections setting out the history of the political party, which disappeared in the eighties, by means of documentation from different sources: Barcelona Universitys Pavelló de la Répública Library, the University of Santiago de Compostelas Historical Archive, documentation from the Galician Inter-University Project to recover the historical memory in Galicia (As vítimas, os Nomes e Voces e os lugares), documentary legacies by Amparo Segarra and Eugenio Granell, and by Jeanne and Joaquín Maurín (kept in Pennsylvanias Bryn Mawr College) and numerous contributions from public documentation: in A Coruñas military archive, Lugos provincial archive, the Catalan archive Arxiu Comarcal del Baix Penedés (in El Vendrell, Andreu Nins hometown). We will also have an extensive range of private documentation: such as that belonging to Wilebaldo Solano and Pelai Pagés, to Fernández Mazas (managed by the artist José Manuel Bouzas), personal archives of the Galician researchers Dionisio Pereira, Enrique Acuña, Xurxo Martínez Crespo and Gustavo Docampo, as well as documentation belonging to José María Lafuente (son of the POUM militant Agustín Lafuente) or personal legacies kept in the Fundación 10 de Marzo de Santiago de Compostela, an institution that has also collaborated in this project.
Structure of the Exhibition: The exhibition is divided into the following sections:
1. Documentation dealing with political parties that would later belong to the Workers Party of Marxist Unification: Workers Bloc and Communist Left.
2. Bibliographic selection of publications about the POUM and Trotskyism in general, from the period before the civil war and the war period.
3. Selection of documents dealing with militants of the International Brigades, and even books published by them.
4. Section devoted to the essential figure of Andreu Nin.
5. Section devoted to the POUM leader Joaquín Maurín.
6. Section devoted to Eugenio Granells militancy.
7. Section dealing with the POUM in Galicia.
8. Section about the activity of the Andreu Nin Foundation and Wilebaldo Solano.
Completing the exhibition is the aforementioned selection of plastic work (Eugenio Granell, Mario Granell, Arturo Souto, Andrés Colombo, Vlady Serge, Frank Cappa…) as well as photographs of party members, posters and audiovisual material.
Series of Talks The series of conferences, designed to complete the exhibition, will begin on October 16 (in the Granell Foundation at 8 pm) with the talk Los heterodoxos del comunismo gallego 1931-1936 by Dionisio Pereira; on October 22 (at 7.30 pm in the Teatro Principal) the screening of Ken Loachs film Tierra y Libertad will be preceded by a talk by the films historical adviser, the well-known British historian Andy Durgam. On October 30 (in the Eugenio Granell Foundation at 8 pm), Eugenio Castro will deliver the talk Eugenio F. Granell: conciencia política de la libertad de creación. In November there will be a conference about the POUM by the historian Pelai Pagés, El POUM: Un partido para la revolución, in the Granell Foundation at 8 pm (November 14) and finally, on January 14, we will have a screening (also in the Teatro Principal at 7.30 pm) of the documentary Operación Nicolai, introduced by the director Dolors Genovés herself.
EUGENIO GRANELL AND THE POUM
Eugenio Granells relationship with the POUM and the Andreu Nin Foundation is well known since, as the institution itself acknowledges in recognition of the artist, he was one of its founders. Granell was an active member of the POUM from his youth onwards, collaborating actively as editor of the newspaper El Combatiente Rojo, until the party disappeared in the eighties, although his anti-Stalinist militancy would accompany him until the end of his days. The POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) was established in Barcelona on September 29, 1935, during the Second Republic, as a result of the unification between the Trotskyite Communist Left of Spain (ICE) and the communist Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC). Andreu Nin, founder of ICE, and Joaquín Maurín, founder of BOC, were the main POUM leaders. Although the party was characterised by a revolutionary Marxist stance, it enjoyed great internal plurality. It was one of the parties that signed the Popular Front electoral agreement at the beginning of 1936 and, after the civil war, both its leaders and militants had to go into exile like the members of the other republican parties. In 1947 Wilebano Solano became the POUMs new secretary-general, based in Paris, and he began publishing its periodical La Batalla again. The party evolved towards a social-democratic tendency, becoming one of the founding political groups of the Socialist Party of Catalonia years later. Following several splits in the seventies, and after the death of Franco, the POUMs historical role was promoted by young anti-Franco militants. The lack of electoral representation in the first free elections under democracy led to its disappearance in 1980. It is important to highlight the fact that Spanish and Catalan social-democracy lay claim to the memory of the POUM as their own; thanks to the Andreu Nin Foundation, established in 1987 to disseminate the memory of the anti-Stalinist left and fight the consequences of totalitarianisms, the partys revolutionary Marxist message is still alive, since it claims to be a continuation of the POUM.
