In the summer of 1896, a very young Isidre Nonell, 24 years old, traveled by mule to the Caldes de Boí spa, owned by the family of his friend Juli Vallmitjana, future chronicler of the suburbs of Montjuïc, who accompanied him on his expedition. to the sanctuary of the thermal springs together with the painter Ricard Canals. What he will find in that lost corner of the Pyrenees will not only mean a before and after in the artist’s career –until then a more or less conventional painter of landscapes, suburbs and patios–, but will also turn the evolution of Catalan art upside down. By chance, Nonell comes into contact with goiter patients and the cretin community, the latter made up of deformed beings who suffered from dwarfism and mental disorders, the result of inbreeding produced by the isolation in which they lived in those valleys. And from there Nonell is another Nonell. Suddenly, she begins to take an interest in the disadvantaged and stigmatized groups of society, the poor, the misery of those who live on the margins, reversing the stereotypical image that had been given of her until then, without judging, stripping her of folklorism and endowing it with a totally new –and highly provocative– language that bothers and produces a strong rejection in the society of the time.
‘Cretina de Boí’ (1896-1897)
‘Cretins’ 1896-1898, belonging to a private collection in Girona
‘Cretina de Boí’
Nonell returns from Boí with a folder full of sketches and that same year, in October, he holds his first solo exhibition in the exhibition hall of The vanguard , a space open until one in the morning that the newspaper in which the artist collaborated as an illustrator had opened at its headquarters on the Rambla four years earlier. The artist shows there for the first time his series of the cretins together with the originals that he had published on the pages of The vanguard since 1894. “It is a practically unprecedented subject that only artists such as Velázquez, Ribera or Goya had dealt with in an episodic way. In fact, when he exhibited them in Paris a year later, they caused quite a stir. Critics, probably because of that chauvinistic thing about the French, spoke of a Goya modernized, as if it were an imitation or an imitation of Goya’s iconography ”, points out Francesc Quílez, who together with Eduard Vallès is curator of the great exhibition that the MNAC had planned for 2020 and that due to the pandemic has remained postponed and turned into a book, Nonell. Visions from the margins , which highlights “the absolutely countercultural proposal that Nonell presented to the society of his time.”
His proposal is located on the periphery of the system, goes radically against bourgeois tastes and makes an amendment to the totality of the art of his time.
“It goes radically against bourgeois tastes and, in fact, makes an amendment to the totality of the art of its time. He appears at the peak of Modernisme, but his work goes against the sweeter version of the dominant modernist current; that hedonistic current of Paris that satisfies the aesthetic needs of the bourgeoisie and the clientele for which it works. He is situated on the periphery of the system, he goes on his own, he is an authentic outsider . His exhibitions at the Sala Parés in 1902 and 1903 were two resounding failures. He could have chosen to choose another path, but no, he persists in his personal program with an inner strength that impresses ”, point out the curators.
La Anunciata ‘Charcoal drawing published in’ La Vanguardia ‘on January 1, 1897, a Christmas theme starring cretins and vagabonds in which Nonell advances what will later become his world
Nonell had anticipated what would later become his pictorial world in The Announced , a charcoal drawing with a Christmas theme published in The vanguard on January 1, 1897. An angel announces the good news to a group of cretins, crippled, old and bad people living in an industrial suburb with threatening chimneys in the background. “Now it’s hard to imagine but it had a huge subversive point for the time,” says Vallès, and Quílez adds that, in addition to being anticlerical, it represented “an attack on that paternalism that the bourgeoisie adopted before the poorest and the working class itself. It was a city in which inequalities increased as it grew. The bourgeoisie looked at him from the side and what he does is put a mirror in front of him. And, of course, that is uncomfortable, they experience it as a provocation and reject it ”.
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Barracks. Nonell returned again and again to the theme of the barracks, surely the homes of some of his models, like this one in Somorrostro photographed by Ballell
During the next few years, until 1907, he will dedicate himself almost entirely to painting gypsy women, a subject that is not new, but which he subverts, from his own condition of declassified, rescuing them from the folkloric vision and endowing them with a certain dignity. He shows them in an attitude of utter desolation, dejected, curled up in themselves. “He felt more comfortable in this world than in the artistic system,” says Vallès, who nevertheless asks for caution when stating, as has always been said, that he had a sentimental relationship with Consuelo Jiménez, his favorite model. , died in 1905, at the age of 17, when a brutal hurricane wind knocked down a wall near the barrack where she lived with her grandmother.
‘Rest’, by Isidre Nonell
At the end of his short life (he died of typhus at the age of 38), Nonell painted humble still lifes and during the last months of his life he was able to enjoy the taste of triumph: in the Faianç Català exhibition he sold thirty works. “He had great defenders like Utrillo or Junyent Vidal, young artists like Picasso and Casagemas who admired him. The market did not respect him, many critics did not either, but although they disapproved of his language, the orientation of his work, they never questioned his talent ”, they point out. And they conclude: “He was a true modern artist.” And, in a way, he is also an anti-artist, with a great disbelief regarding the romantic figure of the creator, not at all egomaniacal, and the proof of this is that he practically never portrays himself and when he does it is in the form of caricatures on the back of his plays”.
Self-caricature by Isidre Nonell, 1909
New research
The myth of ‘fried’ drawings
The book has contributions from Glòria Escala, Francesc Fontbona, Ricard Mas, Núria Pedragosa, Ruth Bagan, Carme Ramells and Núria Oriols. These last two, from the Department of Conservation and Restoration of the National Museum, shed light on the so-called ‘fried’ drawings, works on paper or cardboard whose glazed and amber appearance caused admiration and circulated the legend that he poured oil on them to final coating mode or even frying them in a pan. A still enduring myth, despite the fact that recent studies have already rejected that possibility, and that chemical analyzes are conclusive. Not a trace of oil. Instead, by way of varnishing, the artist superimposed a layer of shellac, a resin obtained from the secretion of an insect (coccus laca) whose characteristics and orange chromaticism gave the drawings the appearance of aged paint. This and other contributions will be the subject of a scientific conference on the figure of Nonell that will take place on April 26 at the MNAC.
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