ARTIUM, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art presents the exhibition The Gamarra family goes to the cinema. Films in Vitoria in the forties and fifties, a golden era for showing films, in which Vitoria, with a population of scarcely 50,000 inhabitants, had seven large cinemas. Based on the bequest made by the family of Jesús Gamarra to ARTIUM of one thousand programmes of the type handed out to cinemagoers at that time, the exhibition takes a sentimental and artistic look at some of the images engraved in the memory of spectators during the period of dictatorship and autocracy in which the seventh art represented one of the few opportunities to escape from reality and to enter other imaginable worlds. Publicity boards, murals, posters, programmes, photographs of the stars of the era and a small selection of works from the ARTIUM Collection form an exhibition that dedicates a chapter to the artists who created those images and especially to José Luis González de Viñaspre, the only publicity board illustrator in Vitoria-Gasteiz. The Gamarra family goes to the cinema is a production of ARTIUM with the sponsorship of the newspaper El Correo.

North Gallery
From October 18 2007 to February 24 2008

During the autocratic and grey years following the Spanish Civil War, a family from Vitoria, led by the father, Jesús Gamarra, were regular visitors to the town's cinemas. Like many other Basque and Spanish families of that time, the Gamarra family sought in the cinema a fleeting encounter with art, beauty and emotions, as well as a momentary escape from the oppressive reality of their day-to-day lives. Cinemas were places where they could discover other imaginable worlds and escape from reality.

Their interest in the cinema began in the thirties and the frequency of their visits increased gradually until, in the mid-forties, they would see the two or three films every week. The regularity of their visits reached its peak in the early fifties and remained steady until the middle of that decade and began to fall in the early sixties.

This development mirrored that of the domestic economy of average Spanish families, during a time when it was necessary to adapt the salary of the pater familiae to basic requirements, when little money was available for entertainment. This was the case until the first signs of economic growth appeared (development plans promoted by the Franco government) in the fifties when the pressure was taken off private economies and more resources were allocated to amusement and leisure. This development also had a lot to do with the improvement and enlargement of cinemas in Vitoria-Gasteiz:

1. in 1945 the Ideal Cinema (inaugurated in 1925) was refurbished,
2. in 1947 the Teatro Florida (inaugurated in 1926 as the Salón General, previously known as the Teatro Circo, or La Barraca, inaugurated in 1896) was refurbished,
3. in 1951, the Gran Cinema Vesa was inaugurated,
4. in 1955, the Teatro Amaya was opened and, finally,
5. in 1959, the Cine Samaniego was inaugurated,

in addition to those already existing at the time, for example, the Nuevo Teatro or Teatro Principal (inaugurated in 1918) and Teatro del Príncipe (opened in 1925).

Jesús Gamarra worked as a cashier in a branch of the Banco Central on Calle Dato, and during those years he and his children saw more than 1000 films, most of the films shown in Vitorian at that time. As was the custom at that time, on entering the cinema, spectators were given a programme, on one side of which an image was printed showing the main characters and/events in the film they were about to see, and the other contained descriptions in just a few lines of the main characters and actors, where the film was being shown, from what date and the timetable. A few lines were added about the storyline of the film in order to awake in the interest of spectators. After the film, these programmes usually ended up in the wastepaper basket.

Nevertheless, and he was the exception, Jesús Gamarra kept the programmes of all the films he saw. His descendants, driven by their love both of their father and the cinema, have kept this priceless collection until today. At the beginning of this year, 2007, in a display of generosity, they donated their collection to ARTIUM of Alava.

Based on this set of documents that portray the sentimental, artistic and cultural memory of an era in the history of Vitoria, the Vitoria of our parents, ARTIUM has prepared an exhibition that recreates the films seen by the inhabitants of the city during a time in which films, posters and programmes were the only connection most people had with the world of art. An art representative of the 20th century, child of industry and designed for mass consumption, halfway between «great art» and « popular art», during a time when the inhabitants of the city lacked the means to familiarise themselves with other art forms .

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