13 pictures about the 'joie de vivre' of a holiday
An exhibition, with materials from the Gomis Archive, showing different leisure activities of the first third of the 20th century
Festive traditions, dances (aplecs), beach scenes, and a variety of outdoor sports are some of the topics portrayed in the 13 photographs from the first third of the last century that can now be seen in the lobby of the Fundació Joan Miró. They belong to the Gomis Archive held at the National Archive of Catalonia. Some of the pictures were taken by Joaquim Gomis (1902-1991); others were captured by his father, whose name is also Joaquim Gomis, and another one by his wife, Odette Cherbonnier. The exhibition is titled Broken Games, about the outbreak of the Civil War and how all that idle atmosphere reflected in the pictures was broken by it. In fact, if you walk through the exhibition in the recommended order, the last image, from 1936, captures some bathers in a Swiss lake, as the Gomis family moved there when the war started. In the program, certain parallelism is made between those times and the present as to how a forceful and unexpected event — today, the pandemic — can change the day-to-day lives of the whole society.
The sample, curated by Martina Millà, will be available until September 12. The selected photographs are just a small part of what you can find at the Gomis Archive, which is composed of around 70.000 images and complementary documentation, such as letters, press clippings, books and catalogues. Joaquim Gomis was a businessman, art promoter, photographer, collector and, between 1972 and 1975, the president of the Fundació Joan Miró. The Fundació manages the rights of the archive.
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