Alexandre de Riquer

137 Pages·2002·1.07 MB·English

Alexandre de Riquer
ALEXANDRE DE RIQUER
(1856 - 1920)
The British Connection in
Catalan Modernisme
By
Eliseu Trenc Ballester
&
Alan Yates
1988
THE ANGLO-CATALAN SOCIETY
THE ANGLO-CATALAN SOCIETY
OCCASIONAL PUBLICATIONS
No. 1. Salvador Giner. The Social Structure of Catalonia
(1980, reprinted 1984)
No. 2. Joan Salvat-Papasseit. Selected Poems (1982)
No. 3. David Mackay. Modern Architecture in Barcelona (1985)
No. 4. Homage to Joan Gili (1987)
No. 5. E. Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates. Alexandre de Riquer (1988)
© E. Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates
Produced and typeset by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd
Printed by A. Wheaton & Co. Ltd, Exeter
Cover design by Joan Gili
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ballester, Eliseu Trenc
Alexandre de Riquer (1856-1920): the
British connection in Catalan modernisme.
(The Anglo-Catalan Society occasional
publications, ISSN 0144-5863; 5).
1. Catalan decorative arts. Riquer,
Alexandre de, 1856-1920
I. Title II. Yates, Alan III. Series
745'.092'4
ISBN 0-905713-74-0

PREFACE
The origins of the present publica-
tion were in an article by Eliseu
Trenc Ballester, 'Alexandre de
Riquer, ambassadeur de l'art
anglais et nord-américain en
Catalogne', which appeared in
Volume XVIII (1982) of the
Melanges de la Casa Velazquez, pp. 311-359. It was a documentary
study of the important influence that certain tendencies in British art
and artistic ideas of the nineteenth century exercised in the crucial
and productive phase of cultural development in Catalonia over the
turn of the century, the phenomenon known as Catalan Modernisme.
What the article highlighted was the role of Alexandre de Riquer in
this process. The nature and interest of the subject commended
themselves naturally to the editorial committee of the Anglo-Catalan
Society's Occasional Publications, at a time when the collection was
in its infancy and when its objectives and range were just being
clearly defined.
E.T., for some time a participator in the Society's affairs, agreed to
the proposal that his original piece be expanded and modified to the
characteristics of the ACSOP series. This involved building around
the original research article a set of chapters to place Alexandre de
Riquer's life and work in their cultural context, to supply a relatively
detailed biography and to give an account of his literary production.
The latter was felt to require a sizeable proportion of space, because
of the access which his writing supplies to certain key traits of the
important creative movement in which he was involved.
The original project thus grew in scope and in size. There was,
from the start, a collaborative aspect to the operation, insofar as
E.T.'s original text and then drafts of other chapters were being
8 Alexandre de Riquer
translated from the French by various members of the Anglo-
Catalan Society. A.Y.'s role in this increased as the work took on
definitive shape, and the point was reached where joint authorship
was felt to reflect input to and responsibility for the product. Some
signs of a division of labour are to be seen in the text published here,
but this monograph is offered by its authors as the result of a
common effort: the finished version was hammered out in a series of
joint work-sessions held in Sheffield, Paris and Toulouse. Both the
subject, then, and the circumstances in which this little book was
produced are fully consonant with the stated objectives of the
ACSOP collection and, more widely, with the collective spirit of the
Anglo-Catalan Society.
The present tide appears at a time when international appreciation
of the singular character and quality of modern Catalan culture is
markedly, and gratifyingly, on the increase. The currently fashionable
image of the city of Barcelona itself has contributed to awareness of
how crucial and how productive in the consolidation of the modern
Catalan cultural identity were the decades spanning the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fin-de-siècle recovery of a
splendid gothic inheritance is written in the streets and buildings of
the capital. Our present historical awareness of the making of
contemporary Catalonia focuses naturally upon the turn of the
century and upon the phenomenon of Modernisme which brought to
a head nineteenth-century processes of national revival. The life and
work of Alexandre de Riquer are here studied as representative of
central features of this complex and fertile phase of cultural
evolution. The 'British connection' in our subject is one such feature
which we here endeavour to show in true perspective and in relation to
the underlying dynamics—with its achievements and its frustrations—
of Modernisme. In a basically biographical approach, the broad lines
emerge portraying a man of the nineteenth century whose vision of a
new era was crossed with contradictions of an inherited past and was
severely stressed by the incipient crises of the twentieth century. His
words and his images remain, though, as monuments to the vision
that is now being positively revalued as our own century draws to a
close.
Preface
The work of Riquer, in the recent renewal of interest of Catalan
Modernisme, has been the subject of scholarly critical and historical
attention. The English connection was disclosed and investigated in
M. McCarthy's unpublished doctoral dissertation (Catalan 'Modernisme'
and English Cultural Movements of the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge
1973). M.A. Cerdà i Surroca pays him generous attention in her Els
Pre-rafaelites a Catalunya. Una literatura i uns símbols (Barcelona
1981). She and E.T. were principal contributors to the commemorative
volume of studies (Alexandre de Riquer. L'home, l'artista, el poeta)
published in Calaf (1978), while E.T. supplied text for the catalogue
published on the occasion of a major exhibition of Riquer's work
(Barcelona 1985). Specialised studies of both the art (notably Cirici,
Ràfols, Fontbona) and the literature of Modernisme (Castellanos)
accord due attention to Riquer. The foregoing, however, tend
understandably to see his work as belonging to either the field of the
visual arts or, to a lesser extent, to that of literature. The present
publication is the first attempt to present a unified view of his life and
work, in which both the literary and the visual aspects are viewed as
complementary, within a biographical frame. For reasons already
expressed, it is fitting that this should be published in English, and in
the uniform of the ACSOP series. While the following pages direct a
steady spotlight upon Catalan Modernisme, they include also a
sidelight upon the pervasive influence of contemporary British art
movements.
10 Alexandre de Riquer
We wish to record here our gratitude to Dominic Keown, Susi
Serrarols and John Devlin, for their cooperation in the early stages of
preparing the text; to Pauline Climpson and her colleagues at
Sheffield Academic Press, for the patience, good taste and profession-
alism which they have devoted to steering this publication through
all the processes of production. Grateful acknowledgement is also
made of continuing financial support for the ACSOP series from the
Instituto de España in London, and of a generous grant for the
present title from the Fundació Congrés de Cultura Catalana.
E.T.
A.Y.
Sheffield
17/vi/1988
CHAPTER I
CATALAN MODERNISME (1888-1911)
The term Modernisme has very
particular and extensive connota-
tions for the development of
society and culture in modern
Catalonia. It refers to a two-
fold process occurring in the
Principality (and secondarily in Valencia and the Balearic Islands)
during the two crucial decades spanning the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Within a continuing surge of social transformation
there emerged together impulses for the explicit modernisation of a
culture considered archaic, pedestrian and provincial—Catalan
culture as it had taken shape during the nineteenth-century revival
movement of the Renaixença—and for the creation of a specifically
national art. Both motives were intertwined, and related to a
complex social ferment. Associated with the growth of political
Catalanism, awareness increased that only by becoming cosmopolitan
and abreast of the latest advances abroad would Catalan culture
shake off its provincial complexion, thus to attain a higher degree of
differentiation and independence from perceived deficiencies in the
official Spanish-Castilian culture centred in Madrid. Most of the
key-notes are sounded, and the external colouring revealed, in this
altogether typical passage from an article by Juan Gay on the
composer D'Indy, published in the journal Luz for November
1898:
... Let us have the Strausses, the D'Indys, the Chaussons, the
Debussys in music; let us have all modern literary works of
whatever tendencies; let us have affiches and sentimental mood-
paintings, and let all of us together put movement into art, so that
it is seen to be alive, it being of no matter that they dub us
modernistes or whatever, as long as our actions signify advancement
for our Catalonia. If we are mistaken in our tendencies, we shall
12 Alexandre de Riquer
have lost nothing: we shall have gone through an artistic revolution
[our emphasis], which will eventually establish the true way,
towards which we shall direct our steps. What is called for now is
much artistic agitation, to allow us to begin to escape from the
materialism which engulfs us, by giving as idealised a cast as
possible to our existence.
As is clearly expressed here, the opening up of Catalonia to
contemporary European culture was essential to a project of
collective affirmation and renovation. What this is fin-de-siècle
Europe offered was an apparently stable political model of bourgeois
nationhood, and a beguiling array of artistic options related to
profound changes in taste, sensibility and fashion. One thus
understands why eclecticism was the watchword of Catalan
Modernisme: the outwards scan validated the complementary
inwards gaze, the urgent enquiry about selfhood, personal and
collective. A notion of 'cultural revolution', strongly imprinted in
Gay's message, expresses the close relationship between the artistic
and the social dimensions of the whole cycle.
A first stage in this process was the partial assimilation of
Naturalism in literature and the plastic arts, mainly by the critics J.
Sardà and J. Yxart, the novelist Narcís Oller and the painters
Santiago Rusinol and Ramon Casas, during the decade 1883-1893.
This was the period in which the impressive journal L'Avenç
operated as a rallying-point and catalyst of progressive intellectual
currents applied to the particular circumstances of Catalan culture.
In the early phase of Modernisme, the scientific and positivistic
connotations of Naturalism, even without its more radical philosophical
and social import, offered a provocative challenge to stale conven-
tionalism and predominantly romantic conservatism. The strongest
impetus of the movement, however, was generated under a different
aesthetic sign, in a development dating from the crucial year of 1893.
It was from this point that Modernisme moved on from having a
fairly wide and general sense of cultural renovation, as formulated in
L'Avenç, to acquire a more specific definition and programme. There
emerged a concerted, assertive literary and artistic movement, led by
the multi-talented Rusinol and the critic-author Raimon Casellas,
which, although short-lived as a coherently concentrated force,
redefined the terms of creativity and of its social relevance. Again as
can be detected in the passage quoted above, this entailed a radical
critique of contemporary Catalan society, charged with philistinism