“The Museum for Those Who Do Not Go to Museums.” A Cultural Exploration of the Almanac of the Unión Española de Explosivos [Spanish Explosives Union] in the Years of the Franco Regime

Abstract

Since 1900, the Maxam Group (formerly Unión Española de Explosivos) has published an annual almanac, with each edition illustrated by a Spanish painter commissioned to produce a work thematically related to the company’s activity. Focusing on what was popularly known as “the museum for those who do not go to museums” or the “explosive women calendar,” this article analyzes the iconographic program of this unique archive from a cultural and historical perspective, with special attention to the Francoist period. The dynamics of the representation of women, the tensions between bourgeois and popular culture, as well as the questions it inspires with respect to the almanac’s life in society and on the institutional level invite the reader to consider this collection, little esteemed for its artistic quality, as a complex cultural mechanism, useful for the analysis of the aesthetic continuities and discontinuities associated with Spanish modernity.