In 2019, the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), recently plagued by unrest with the restitution of Sijena’s paintings and the conflict between its director, Pepe Serra, and the former director of the Reina Sofía, Manuel Borja-Villel, dedicated a … superb anthology Oriol Maspons (Barcelona, 1928-2013)entitled “Useful Photography”, which covers his entire career: portraits, fashion, advertising… In 2011, two years before his death, he deposited his photographic archives there, with some 7,000 photographs on paper, negatives and other media. The museum has acquired two hundred images.
Oriol Maspons. ‘TBO-Children in the Barceloneta (Barcelona)’
Much more modest, the Academy of Fine Arts exhibits, until April 12 2026, in its permanent room dedicated to photography on the third floor (it is small, but there are plans to enlarge it), a dozen photographs by Maspons from his collection, acquired, according to indications, in 2006 at the expense of the The legacy of the Guitar. An inheritance with which the institution planned to acquire a large painting by Goya (“The Countess of Chinchón”, “Marianito”), but whose operations were thwarted. The director of the Academy, Tomás Marco, explains to ABC that after the disappointments from these failed purchasesthey use these funds to purchase other works, such as these photographs. But he points out that there is still money left over from this inheritance.
Publio López Mondéjar, academic and photohistorian, remembers that he went to Barcelona a long time ago to see Oriol Maspons, whom he wanted to include in one of his books: “He took me on motorbike rides around the city, we went to Tibidabo, he showed me some beautiful models… But he hadn’t shown me any of his photographs. We ate with Miseries and told him to show them to me. I didn’t know where he had them. They were huddled together, waiting to be discovered.
Oriol Maspons. ‘English tourists on the Costa Brava (Calella)’
Maspons’ photographs, warns López Mondéjar, “are of that Spain of penance, school and missala poor Spain that Maspons and Massats travel through. So, in the exhibition they hang the image of two children reading comics in the Barceloneta, of a gypsy family in La Mancha, of the streets of Somorrostro in Barcelona, of bullfighting, or of two English tourists with one (several) drinks too many, giving it their all, in a winery in Calella (Costa Brava). “Their portraits are missing, but they will arrive. He was an extraordinary portraitist. It was also a great fashion photographer. “He worked in a Barcelona before Madrid, which was not as nationalist as today.” In addition, as usual, elements from the Pedro Melero/Marisa Llorente collection are displayed in a display case in the center of the room, such as the covers of books that he illustrated with his photographs: “Poet in New York”, by Lorca, or “The City and the Dogs”, by Vargas Llosa.
Oriol Maspons. ‘Nomadic family of gypsies (La Mancha)’
“He was one of the most active and influential photographers in the Barcelona Schoolof which he was one of the most eminent members”, says López Mondéjar. In 1953, he went to Paris, where he met Robert Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï. “For nearly half a century, he continued to work for the press, publishers, film studios and emerging advertising agencies. He always did it in one intuitive wayfar from any aesthetic discipline, always showing the most dissonant aspects of reality. He was able to find the beauty in the most varied areas of the world of late Francoism and the thresholds of democracy. He was able to leave us a complete and dazzling image of these years of penance.
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