The man welcoming visitors is wearing a grey raincoat, dark glasses and a thin mustache and is seated on a chair with his hands on his knees – a crude cardboard mannequin. This "spectator of spectators" sets the tone for the Museum of Forbidden Art, which opened its doors in Barcelona on Thursday, October 26. Representing both an agent of the political police and a Francoist censor, he was created by Equipo Cronica. In 1972, this group of Valencian artists placed around a hundred of them in the auditoriums, exhibition halls and concert halls of the Rencontres de Pamplona to remind national and international artists and visitors that Spain was still subject to the moral, social and political control of an authoritarian regime. One of these mannequins is now exhibited in the museum's lobby, which was designed by the Catalan collector and businessman Tatxo Benet as a refuge for creative freedom from censors of all kinds.

Within the walls of Casa Garriga Nogues, a vast modernist palace built in 1900, some 40 works by Spanish and international artists, most of them contemporary, have been brought together. There's the Lego portrait of Filippo Strozzi (the son of one of Florence's most powerful families during the Renaissance), created by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei despite the Danish firm's refusal to supply him with small bricks for his political works. Or the statue of Christ as Ronald McDonald entitled McJesus by the Finnish artist Jani Leinonen, who was attacked with smoke grenades by Christian opponents in Israel's Haifa Museum of Art. And finally, the erotic drawings in Pablo Picasso's 347 series and the scenes of misery and torture depicted in Francisco de Goya's Caprichos. What the works on display have in common is that they were subjected to political, religious or commercial censorship, social pressure and even attacks.

One of them is the photomontage Con Flores a Maria (2018) by the Spanish artist Charo Corrales, in which she appears as the Virgin Mary, gazing up at the sky, her hand in her crotch. The canvas was slashed by the knife of a visitor at an exhibition in Cordoba. "I'd like this museum to become a center for reflection on freedom of expression and to help draw an atlas of censorship," said Benet, a 66-year-old man with messy hair dressed in a gray suit.

It was in February 2018 that this former journalist, who co-founded the multimedia group Mediapro and has been collecting contemporary art for some 20 years already, began his collection of censored works by accident. That year, he bought Santiago Sierra's Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain at Madrid's contemporary art fair Arco. The title of this set of 24 photographs of individuals whose faces have been pixilated and who had been convicted of assaulting police officers, apology for terrorism or sedition, in the case of the Catalan independence leaders behind the illegal referendum of October 2017, caused such a scandal that it was withdrawn from the fair at the request of the director of the IFEMA exhibition center.

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