The commemoration of 1914 sets out to highlight a decisive moment in the history of Spain, Europe and the world. A moment that tends to be referred to in universal history sources as marking a change of model, the permanent end of the Ancien Régime and the appearance of a new society that emerged from the upheaval and changes such as the Russian revolution of October 1917, or the scientific revolution that the theory of general relativity and quantum theory brought during those years. A world that was changing and of which intellectuals and creators such as J.M. Keynes, James Joyce, Walter Gropius, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mies van der Rohe, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, among others, were witnesses and agents, and in which many discoveries and new ideas arose that were decisive to subsequent generations, but also a world that was suddenly rocked by the terrible economic recession of the end of the second decade of the century and by the totalitarian fascist, Nazi and Soviet movements that ushered in the following decade and led to the outbreak of the Second World War, the post war and, in the case of Spain, the lengthy decades of the Franco regime and exile.
This exhibition is intended to show how those years were a crossroads for Spanish culture, which was rapidly undergoing internationalisation and in which the modernising project promoted since 1876 by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza played a decisive role.
This exhibition is intended to show how those years were a crossroads for Spanish culture, which was rapidly undergoing internationalisation and in which the modernising project promoted since 1876 by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza played a decisive role.