Between 1918 and 1939, Europe’s political fractures forced artists to choose between utopia and refuge: in the Soviet sphere, art was recruited to build a new world, while in Catalonia and Spain it often became a shelter for identity, memory, and survival. Paris—bohemian, porous, and fiercely international—became the key relay point where these languages of cubism, constructivism, and surrealism collided, conversed, and occasionally fused. This article traces those intersections and divergences, from émigré bridges like Olga Sacharoff to the charged symmetry of 1937, when the Soviet pavilion faced Spain’s Guernica.
Text by Angie Afifi
The interwar period of the last century was a time when the world was literally coming apart at the seams and art was trying to find new ways to breathe in this chaos. The First World War had just ended, the October Revolution had overturned Russia, then came the crash of 1929, fascism was gaining strength, and by the end of the decade the approach of another major war could already be felt. In this whirlwind the Soviet avant garde and Catalan and more broadly Spanish art from 1918 to 1939 developed in parallel, sometimes intersecting, sometimes pushing away from one another. Soviet artists often saw art as a tool for building a new world, while Catalan and Spanish artists frequently sought refuge in art. Some through new figuration, some through surrealism, some clung to tradition, and others broke with it completely. What is striking is that the most important link for all of them turned out to be Paris, a place where creative people gathered while escaping revolutions, dictatorships, and wars.
Imagine the roaring 1920s, when Paris became the true capital of the avant garde. Cheap living, freedom, cafés and bistros where people could argue for hours about form and color, literature, philosophy, and politics. After 1917 artists from what was the former Russian Empire such as Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) and many others poured in. Some fled the Bolsheviks, others arrived simply to see what was happening in this incredible bohemian and free atmosphere. On the other side were Spaniards and Catalans such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Joan Miró (1893-1983), Juan Gris (1887-1927). Later came those escaping Primo de Rivera and then the Civil War of 1936 to 1939. Imagine sitting in the famous café La Rotonde in Montparnasse, where all the artists of that time gathered. You could sit for hours with a cup of coffee, watch someone sketch on a napkin, overhear conversations at neighbouring tables, discuss new exhibitions. Ideas were simply in the air and even if you never spoke personally with Picasso or Chagall you still absorbed them through this shared atmosphere. Take the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. The Soviet pavilion with its constructivist works stood opposite the Spanish one where Picasso’s tour de force ‘Guernica’ was hanging. Two antifascist statements standing side by side.
The Soviet avant-garde until around 1932, before it was crushed by socialist realism, was infused with the idea of radically remaking the world through art. Malevich called Black Square and suprematism as a whole the zero point of art, the moment when painting frees itself completely from depicting objects and conveys only pure feeling. Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) and Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) in constructivism insisted that art must be useful, for the masses, for industry. El Lissitzky (1890-1941) with his prouns built a bridge between painting and architecture. All of this was radically abstract, aimed at breaking the old world and erecting a new one. At the same time many of them looked toward Paris. Malevich saw the cubism of Picasso and Gris, Lissitzky worked with the Bauhaus and carried constructivist ideas across Europe.
As for Catalan art of that time, it was also full of complexity and contradictions, and the exhibition Figuraciones entre guerras 1914 to 1945 held at Sala Parés in Barcelona from December 4, 2025 to February 7, 2026 reflected this clearly. The exhibition gathered works that illustrated the tension between tradition and new approaches. On one side Noucentisme, a revival of Catalan culture, classical harmony, and national self awareness, and on the other modernism pushing toward experimentation, breaking old canons, and searching for entirely new forms.
Josep de Togores (1893-1970), the Russian Catalan Olga Sacharoff (1881-1967), Manolo Hugué (1872-1945), Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949), Juan Gris (1887-1927), Joaquim Sunyer (1874-1956) and many others searched for these new figurations, meaning fresh ways of depicting people, objects, and the surrounding world. They began with the influence of Cézanne, his approach to form through color and volume without rigid perspective, experimented with cubism where everything is broken into geometric facets and shown from several angles at once, and moved into surrealism, portraying figures as subconscious and fantastical. Some captured human drama, especially during the Civil War years, while others retreated into a poetic distance from reality.
Could these worlds really intersect. It turns out they could and quite vividly. Take Olga Sacharoff. Born in Tiflis, now Tbilisi, in the Russian Empire, she received her artistic education at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and emigrated to Barcelona in 1915. Her post impressionist figuration with cubist elements formed a direct bridge between the Russian school and the Catalan context. She literally introduced cubism into Catalan art and even during the Franco years received the Gold Medal of Barcelona in 1964. A classic migrant trajectory. Paris as a transit point, then adaptation to a new home.
Joan Miró, a Catalan, intersected in Paris not only with key surrealist figures such as André Breton (1896-1966) and Max Ernst (1891-1976) but also with Russian émigrés like Marc Chagall. His surrealism with organic almost biological forms was a reaction to chaos, an attempt to retreat into the subconscious as a refuge. Miró’s automatism resonates with the idea of liberating form often associated with the Soviet avant garde of that time, and his antifascist works such as Help Spain from 1937 also echo Soviet antifascism.
Joaquín Torres García is another voice that cannot be overlooked. Uruguayan by origin, he lived in Barcelona from 1891 to 1917. He developed universal constructivism, a style based on geometric forms and abstract structures that combined elements of Russian constructivism of the 1920s with a metaphysical and spiritual dimension characteristic of his work. His pictograms and abstract constructions can be seen as a synthesis of tradition and modernism filtered through the Parisian experience where he encountered both cubists and constructivists.
Another important artist whose works were shown at the Sala Parés exhibition was Juan Gris, a Spaniard who lived in Paris from 1906 and played a major role in the development of cubism. Gris was one of the brightest representatives of synthetic cubism, a phase when artists moved away from fragmenting form into separate pieces as in analytic cubism and began working with more unified compositions, often using ready made elements such as newspapers, scraps of paper, and textures, bringing collage into cubism. His work strongly influenced the later development of modernism including Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), and pop artists such as Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997).
Yet what is most interesting is that despite all these intersections no single unified style emerged. Why did this happen. It seems that different contexts and origins played a decisive role. Each had their own tasks. The Soviet avant garde was utilitarian and utopian, while Catalan art often became escapist or nationally inflected, where the figure served as a way to preserve identity in chaos. Modernism in this sense became polyphonic. Cézanne acted as a shared ancestor, cubism provided a language for dismantling reality, and surrealism offered a language for diving into the subconscious. Paris undoubtedly intensified the exchange of ideas but did not erase differences. On the contrary it highlighted individuality and the choice of a personal artistic language, which itself became an act of resistance to circumstances and to the pressure of the surrounding world.
