Sculpture Journal

Abstract

This article analyses the relocation of Spanish sculptors to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, and explores how they created their artistic identity while negotiating between an international system dominated by the Paris Salons and their local audience. Sixty-eight Spanish sculptors, among whom were Miguel Blay y Fábrega, José Clará, Joaquim Claret, Augusto Agero and Julio Gónzalez, participated in the Salons between 1880 and 1914. Spanish sculptors integrated into the Parisian milieu through social networks, artistic training at the Ecole des beaux-arts, and working in French masters’ studios in the académies libres. The transnational career of Miguel Blay y Fábrega, an active participant in the Salons and a major figure of the modernism movement, serves as a lens through which to consider the Paris ‘Salon culture’ as a transnational environment of artistic exchanges in which artists exchanged ideas, appropriated sculptural motifs and competed against each other.