![]() An introductory panel described the period as a time of huge economic growth, far-reaching social changes, and great political turmoil. Visitors in Valencia approached the exhibition area through a Gothic cloister, where a door led to the darkened gallery of the first section, “Self-Portraits” (fig. With some variations in hanging, the arrangement at the CaixaForum in Barcelona maintained the design of the first installation in Valencia, where the show opened in April 2011 at the Centro del Carmen, a cultural center in a restored convent in the heart of the old city (fig. Artists of various nationalities mingled and freely crossed borders between thematic sections. Changing styles and impulses from each succeeding literary and artistic ism were quietly pointed out in wall texts, but the show was neither conceived on stale evolutionary principles nor organized chronologically. The painters ranged in age from Giovanni Boldini, Marie Bracquemond, Hans Makart, and others born in the 1840s to Egon Schiele, the youngest and shortest lived, a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. Three generations of artists made the works on display. Belle Epoque, a tag invented in retrospect, has become so laden with nostalgia or irony that one of the organizers called it in his catalogue preface “an epitaph for an era.” Selecting nearly eighty portraits by some forty artists, the curators gave new life to the decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century, populating the walls with a vivid assembly of figures and countenances. In introductory remarks for the opening at the second venue in Barcelona, Llorens explained his desire to revise clichés about a period buried under a label so derogatory that historians hesitate to use it. Rather than exploit the familiar, however, the exhibition aimed at using portraiture to restore a context for the crucial period from the end of the Franco-Prussian War to the end of World War I. Tomàs Llorens, co-curator of the show with his son, Boye Llorens, deliberately included the commonplace phrase “Belle Epoque” in the title (fig. ![]() The stunning exhibition Portraits of the Belle Epoque in 2011 resulted from the first collaboration between the Consortium of Museums of the Valencian Community and “la Caixa” Foundation in Barcelona. Leopold Museum, Vienna Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait, 1914. 28, “Crisis”: Egon Schiele, The Poet, 1911.
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