LLEI D'ART 10

From Post-Romanticism to Symbolism Naturalism was criticised by artists themselves for being restricted exclusively to observed reality. Modest Urgell found an alternative in the rehabilitation of German Romanti- cism, with which he was able to marry the artistic novelty of naturalism to a spiritual conception of landscape. Similarly, for symbolist painters landscape had to aspire to a new ide- alism, opposed to the materialism and utilitarianism of the period. One of the favoured motifs of the aforementioned paint- ers was the night. The Barbizon landscape painters had already demonstrated their interest in changes in the light at various times of day, but now both Urgell and the symbol- ists charged their landscapes with a new aura of mystery. Urgell’s twilit landscapes offered an image of Catalonia con- trasted to the bucolic world shown by Vayreda. It was not only the rural that attracted the painters’ interest: the city was also the object of nocturnal depictions, in which the hustle of docks and factories gave way to silence and melancholy. In a similar fashion, artificial lights gave build- ings and streets new, subtle shades and harmonies. One must also include the contributions of Meifrèn and Graner to Urgell’s initial role in the shift from Post-Romanticism to Symbolism in Catalonia. The Impressionist Gaze In the final decades of the 19th century one of the most pro- found transformations in the history of landscape art took place: Impressionist painters, instead of finishing their works in the studio –as was the custom, applied outdoor painting to the whole of their artistic ouput. They rejected the tra- ditional construction of landscape using a scale of shades –from light to dark– but made use of all the tones of the chromatic scale: leaving black off their palette, they created broad brushstrokes of colour. In addition to developing novel techniques, the Impression- ists were the first to introduce scenes of modern life to their canvasses. Amongst their landscapes we can find abundant representations of public parks and gardens –in fact, artists like Monet cultivated their own gardens for use as a motif in their own compositions. The influence of French Impressionism did not take long to spread to other countries, and was felt in Catalonia from 1890 onwards in the works of Casas and Rusiñol, blended with other ele- ments taken from naturalism. Meifrèn also moved towards impressionism in his latter stage, when he painted numerous views of Mallorcan gardens. New Classicism The beginning of the 20th century mar- ked the increasing number of voices in favour of classicism, such as the Greek- born Paris-based poet Jean Moréas or the artists Puvis de Chavannes and Aris- tides Maillol. The paintings of Paul Cézanne was interpreted as a return to a more structural composition after years of the predominant sensualism of the Impressionists. The first wave of Classicism was quickly eclipsed by the rise of the avant-garde. In Catalonia, however, it took hold in the Noucentisme of Eugeni d’Ors: the former being a movement that was both aesthetic and nationalist. After uncertain be- ginnings, Noucentisme found its distinctive expression in the landscapes of Sunyer, who depicted images of a structured, rational rural Catalonia in which people lived in harmony with nature. When Noucentisme began to lose strength within the artistic world in Barcelona, a new European classicism reinforced its own position: a return to order. Arising out of the need to recoup the foundational principes of Western culture after the upheaval of the First World War, the return to order was opposed to the subjectivism and artistic radicality of the avant-gardes. One of its main defenders in Catalonia was Josep de Togores, although the trend also influences the later landscapes of Sunyer, Rafael Benet and Iu Pascual. Avant-gardes The reception of the avant-garde was something of a late arrival to Catalonia. The first echoes of the French ‘-isms’ can be found in the work of the gallery owner Josep Dalmau, who organised a display of Cubist work using funds raised in Paris in 1912. However, it was not until the arrival of the First World War –coinciding with the arrival in Barcelona of artists who had fled from Paris– that painters and sculptors that were active in Catalonia used these new artistic languages. Amongst these artist one has to highlight the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García, who, together with his compatriot Rafael Barradas and Celso Legar, painted urban landscapes in a syncretist language, a mixture of Fauvism, Cubism and the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Similarly, Miró came into contact with modern artistic lan- guages towards the end of the 1910s. Supported by Dalmau in his work in Paris, Miró dedicated an important section of his work to the genre of landscapes and became –together with Dalí– a key figure in surrealism, a movement which truly took root in Catalonia in the 1930s. The influence of surrealism persisted until after the end of the Spanish Civil War via que efforts of the members of the Dau al Set group. Many of the canvasses Tàpies, Cuixart and Ponç created towards the end of the 1940s are in fact landscapes of the unconscious. Their negation of the external reality displays the critical distance between their au- thors and Francoism. Théodore Rousseau. La cabaña de los carboneros en el bosque de Fontainebleau/ The Charcoal burner’s cabin in the forest of Fontainebleau . c. 1855. Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, en depósito en/ on deposit in Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza 105