Manuel Capdevila Massana

The fishmonger La Rambla Barcelona oil on canvas painting

c.1975

Manuel Capdevila i Massana (Barcelona, ​​December 28, 1910 - April 18, 2006) was a Catalan painter and goldsmith, son of the goldsmith Joaquín Capdevila y Meya and father of the also goldsmith, Joaquim Capdevila y Gaya. In 1950 he was invited to The 1950 Pittsburgh International contest at the Carnegie Institute, Pennsylvania, where he presented the painting The Priest, which is currently part of the MNAC collection. A year later the Museum of Modern Art in Panama acquired the work Crisantemos. He was part of the Morera Prize Jury in 1953. Two years later he signed the manifesto that Alexandre Cirici drafted, creating the Institute of Industrial Design, as a member of the IDIB Management Board of Directors. At the request of Lluís Maria Güell, director of the Massana School, he assumed the creation of the Open Jewelery Classroom in 1959, from where he made students think and reflect on the new possibilities of contemporary jewelry. He establishes contacts with the Kunst Werkschule in Pforzheim, a pioneering school in the sixties for new artistic jewelry. It fosters cultural exchanges between the two pedagogy centers and in 1962 it promotes the Kunst Werkschule jewelery exhibition in Pforzheim from the Massana School. In 1961 he was invited to participate in the International Exhibition Modern Jewelery, 1890 to 1961, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London together with the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, held at Goldsmiths'Halls in the same city. In 1966 he organized in Barcelona, ​​together with Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, Antoni de Moragas and Cesáreo Rodríguez-Aguilera, the exhibition One Hundred Years of Catalan Jewelery, held at the College of Architects of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. This same year he created the Lletra d'Or Award, currently in force. It also creates the Medal of the Spanish Association of Art Critics in order to reward the work of artists. Realizes the medals awarded to Picasso, Miró, Chillida, Ortega Muñoz and Subirachs among others. However in 1967 in Munich he participates in the Internationalen Handwerkmesse in the exhibition Form und Qualität. The Barcelona Jewelers Circle offers a silver tabernacle for the chapel of the Santísimo of the Montserrat Monastery that is integrated into the altar of the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs, designed and made by Capdevila and in which his sons, Joaquín and Elisenda participated.