About the catalogue

In 1993, Montserrat Farré Raventós, daughter of Miquel Farré i Albagés, culminated what was to be her lifelong project: the publication of the book Miquel Farré, pintor, a complete and extensive catalogue of his work and biography.

The project of producing the book became a monumental task, especially regarding the location, cataloguing, and photographic recording of his paintings. That prior labor has proved to be the irreplaceable seed required to make this catalogue germinate.

One might say that the fertilizer for this seed has been the confluence of various concerns. The desire of people deeply connected to the Catalan art world, determined to give visibility to Farré's oeuvre. The commitment of mural art professionals toward preserving and transmitting the artist's knowledge of the fresco technique—an artistic asset of immense value. The eagerness of his grandchildren to take the promotion of his work a step further, aware that the next generation will unlikely have the motivation to do so. And, why not, also the desire of those enamored with his paintings to share them with anyone who finds joy in the beauty of art.

Initially, the project aimed, on the one hand, to open an Instagram account to gradually post the works there, bit by bit and with a touch of flair, and, on the other, to develop the catalogue in a digital format using little more than a spreadsheet.

But what about the data? We had it in the book, but transcribing it by hand and tabulating it correctly represented a monumental task. And one exposed to errors.

To prepare the book, Montserrat Farré had to create a database to input all available information for each work. We are talking about 1993, a time when computer devices barely have a few KB of memory and data storage relies on consumables called floppy disks. As it turned out, Montserrat's floppies had survived. The question was: after 30 years, had the data contained within them survived too?

We are in the spring of 2021. We need to access the contents of the floppies, but readers for these media formats ceased production 25 years ago. Furthermore, if we find a functioning relic to read them, we will have to find a way to connect it to a modern computer. And, assuming we succeed, accessing the data, hope it isn’t corrupted, and successfully read it and make it compatible with a contemporary format. In short, a mountain to climb.

Fortunately, there are characters like Terry Stewart, a New Zealander whose mission seems to be keeping the oldest computer devices in service today. Based on the explanations we sent him via email, Terry told us that he could probably extract the data... by sending him the floppies, of course! No sooner said than done; to keep a long story short, we shipped everything over there, and a few weeks later Terry sent us back an Excel file with all the book's information perfectly tabulated, work by work, column by column. Speechless.

Another asset that had survived to this day was the color transparencies and negatives resulting from photographing, between 1991 and 1992, all of Farré's known work, everything flawlessly numbered and catalogued. This has allowed us to digitalize them and make them accessible here in high resolution.

With that, we had everything we needed to build the catalogue... or almost everything. Because from the initial idea—a simple catalogue in a spreadsheet format—we quickly moved to wanting a proper, fully fledged management environment. Which is to say, diving into the deep end, with scarce knowledge of the existing possibilities. But, as with every decision along this path, something led us to the right solution.

For the management, preservation, and organization of all this information, we have relied on CollectiveAccess, a free and open-source software of international reference in the field of museum and archival cataloguing. This platform has allowed us to design a tailored description system adapted to the specific needs of the artwork, guaranteeing technical rigor and data accessibility. A true find.

It would be long to explain, but opting for high-performance software like this implies a considerable learning curve and, more importantly, many decisions on key aspects regarding the cataloguing of the works. You will find the result of this effort in the search and filtering tools, as well as in the relationships between works, works and entities, or entities and entities. We encourage you to contact us if you identify any areas for improvement in this regard.

This catalogue is far from complete, and our commitment is for it to be a living space. From time to time, new works by Miquel Farré surface, which we authenticate and incorporate into the catalogue. We continue to digitalize and catalogue writings, personal photographs, and other objects from his legacy, discovering new stories and connections. We enjoy tracking down the locations of his paintings, displaying both representations side by side, and we periodically publish different perspectives and curiosities about his work. We are passionate about the work and life of Miquel Farré, and we enormously enjoy dedicating time and affection to it.

Welcome to this journey through the art of Miquel Farré i Albagés.