50 works of art, publications and documents.

The period from the end of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century was a particularly turbulent one in Europe, as it marked an historical turning point characterized by, among other events, the Great War and its consequences, the Russian Revolution, the disappearance of old empires such as those of Turkey, Germany, Russia and Austro-Hungary, and the emergence of new political and territorial entities. In the field of art, new languages emerged that, confronting the old notions of beauty, attempted to give expression to a world in radical transformation.

Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna..., and the urban centers of Germany, first emerging and then defeated in the war (Berlin, Munich, Potsdam, Leizpig, Stuttgart, Dresden...), were the laboratories where new notions of change and expressive transformation (Cubism, expressionism...) were developed through books, magazines, manifestos and all kinds of printed material.

Archivo Lafuente brings together, under the heading «Milestones of the avant-garde», a collection of materials that is not very extensive, but of enormous importance. It consists of little more than fifty documents (books, magazines and catalogs) published in a period ranging from 1902 to 1932. These are works that do not belong to any of the «isms» or geographical areas to which other sections of the Archive are dedicated, but which marked real milestones in the development of the European avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century.

Among the most important documents gathered in this collection are Mallarmé’s poem «Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard» (Cosmopolis magazine, Paris, 1897); the Dutch architecture and art magazine Wendingen (Amsterdam, 1918-1932); the catalog Die Brücke: Ausstellung Der Künstlergruppe Brücke in Galerie Commeter Hamburg Hermannstrasse (Oldenburg, 1912), by the Die Brücke group; the books Der blaue Reiter (Munich, 1912), by Kandinsky and Franz Marc; La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913), by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay; Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich, 1912), by Kandinsky; Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis... s. v. p. (Paris, 1937), by Le Corbusier; and Rotoreliefs (1935), by Duchamp.