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Writer, art critic and key man in the cultural field in Barcelona, Alexandre Cirici was one of the principal drivers of the creation of an contemporary art museum in the city and probably the man that knows more about Antoni Gaudí´s workIn 1972 Cirici gained the Premi Josep Pla (award), with the work El Temps Barrat, the second installment of his memoirs, still in draft. In this biography, written with his own precision in all his works, he discusses his university years, during the Second Republic and the Universitat Autònoma (Autonomous University) of Barcelona.
As art critic, his merit is recognised as having being one of the re-discoverers, at the end of the '70's, from the then very forgotten architect
Antoni Gaudí, that with time has been converted in the most emblematic persona of art in the city.
La Rambla is the "fifth essence of Barcelona, it´s mutable beauty is unique in all the seasons of the year".
The precedents of the current
MNAC go back 1959, when Cirici Pellicer defended the need to create a museum of contemporary art in the city. Between 1960 and 1963, Cirici, together with Cesáreo Rodríguez Aguilera, headed a group that started assembling a collection that would be the base of the future museum, provisionally installed in the dome of the Cinema Coliseum, place transferred by the FAD.
From the beginning, Cirici was supporting that the Museum should be a projection platform of the art of his time. It started a series of exhibitions – twenty-three in whole – with Catalan artists and of other origins, between that they emphasise Moisès Villèlia, Antoni Bonet, Angel Ferrant, Jean Fautrier...
His bet for the contemporary art ran into the antipathy of the authorities of the moment and with the mentality of a civil society who, with some marked exceptions, was still very opposed to the new artistic expressions. In February, 1963, the celebration of the exhibition 'The art and the peace', with a clear political tone anti-regime, put in evidence the existing limits of permissiveness, frustrating the initial project of what came to be the current
MNAC.