Jose Antonio Mesa Beltran

Documental study concerning the two institutions assigned to the preservation and return of the artistic heritage in the province of Jaen during the Civil War and Postwar. On the one hand, Delegated Board of Confiscation, Protection and Salvage of Artistic Patrimony, and on the other hand, the Defence Service of National Artistic Heritage. The documentation kept (files) allows us an approximation of the activities of both institutions through of their memories, inventories, official letters, reports, etc. This information allows us to understand the scope of protected heritage during the Civil War, which it includes privates collections, ecclesiastical properties, those of the provincial museum, plus the transfer of artistic assets outside the country’s borders to protect them.

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the public exhibition in cinemas (January 4, 1943) of the newsreels and documentaries “NO-DO”, in our case related to the province of Jaen. We propose the analysis of those news programs included in the first two years of the birth of the Spanish producer company. These cinematographic programs establish the advertisement models of the regime for 30 years in the cinema. The study allows us to review the relationship between the cinema and the iconography presented by the dictatorship, which has as it is ideological base the precepts of the “national movement”. Under this form of thought, with a hard control by the dictatorial state, the newsreels becomes a key tool at the base of the discourse of economic progress, social and political action of the Franco regime.

Documentary study focused on cultural policies undertaken in safeguarding of the artistic treasure of the province of Jaen during the Spanish civil war. With this we will try to reconstruct the conservation measures initiated by the Popular Fronts and the Delegated Board of the Artistic Treasure of Jaen.

Among the municipalities controlled by the Popular Front we will highlight the interventions carried out in the heritage cities of Baeza and Ubeda. Both cities excelled by the exchange of measures in the protection of the artistic objects and in the quality of the saved objects. So we will document the intervention of the Treasury Boards of both the provincial and central.

One of the measures for the conservation of these artistic assets of the cities of Baeza and Ubeda, carried out by their Popular Fronts, is the creation of museums in the main monuments of their cities. The objective is to keep and teach the seized objects of temples and palaces for to the enjoyment of its citizens.