"Saved Art" is a fascinating exhibition that offers the necessary coordinates to visually understand the protection and safeguarding policy carried out by the Republican Government during the Civil War, thanks to the intervention of the “International Committee for the Safeguarding of Spanish Art Treasures” in February 1939.

The exhibition, organised by the State Agency for Cultural Commemorations (SECC) and commissioned by Arturo Colorado Castellary, will be installed outdoors opposite the Prado Museum (Central Boulevard Paseo del Prado) and will be open to the public from 25 January to 21 March 2010. Its programme is included in "The Europe of Culture" cycle, including an institutional ceremony and congress, and forms part of the cultural program for the occasion of the Spanish Presidency of the EU.

The exhibition has been created with a creative and innovative design for the visitor to feel immersed in the dramatic circumstances surrounding this task and the dangers and difficulties the members of the Artistic Treasure Committee and International Committee had to face. Several different shaped and sized packages are spread around the exhibition area, recreating the atmosphere and landscape of the war, with vehicles and posters from the time, sand bags, and so on, in addition to ambient sound and songs from that time.

These packages let us see life sized reproductions of the most representative works saved and, at the same time, they form the bases for the graphic and documentary information exhibition that brings together a hundred photographs from the era, accompanied by plans, maps, posters and other documents.

The exhibition is finished off with an interactive area on the phases of the evacuation, with video and digital slide show that show some of the saved works.

The visitor can chronologically follow the details of how the works of arts were saved, first from Madrid to Ampurdán, passing through Valencia, thanks to the Republic's Artistic Treasury Committee's protection policy, as well as the gestation of the International Committee for Safeguarding Spanish Art Treasures, the dramatic circumstances of the Figueras Agreement with the bombing of the area and the difficult journey to France from the Ampurdán.

The third part recreates the journey from Perpignan to Geneva, the inventory of the saved works, the exhibition held in this Swiss city and the return to Spain in September 1939. The exhibition ends with an epilogue on the historical debt contracted with all the Spanish people or foreign nationals who fought during the war to safeguard Spain's artistic heritage.

"Saved Art" is a travelling exhibition as it is also scheduled to be held in Valencia (April-May), Barcelona (June-July) and Figueras (August-September).

• "Saved Art" camps outside the Prado Museum