Literary heritage

His literary legacy, fully current, has turned Josep Pla (1897 – 1981) into a benchmark in Catalan literature and journalism. He popularized clear, seemingly simple, folkloric literature, which described his closest surroundings. His original and extensive work (narrations, travel books, biographies, newspaper reports...) would help to Europeanise Catalan literature.

The son of a family of rural business owners in Palafrugell, he studied law at the University of Barcelona. He began working as a journalist in 1918 in Las Noticias and collaborating in media such as La Publicidad, La Veu de Catalunya, El Sol, Fígaro and the Revista de Catalunya. His profession would lead him to long stays in Madrid and different countries in Europe (France, Italy, England, Germany, the Soviet Union...). The fruit of these trips were his first books: Coses vistes and Rússia (1925).

In 1939, he definitively settled in Catalonia, almost without ever leaving Empordà. He wrote some books in Spanish: Guía de la Costa Brava (1941), Humor honesto y vago (1942) and Un señor de Barcelona (1945). Starting in 1947, he published his books in Catalan. His most fruitful time as a writer began with works such as Cadaqués (1947), El carrer estret (Premi Joanot Martorell 1951), Nocturn de primavera (1953), Les hores (1953), L’Empordanet (1954), Cartes d’Itàlia (1955) and Santiago Rusiñol i el seu temps (1955).

In 1956, Josep Pla made his first failed attempt to gather his complete works, Obres completes (Editorial Selecta), which included reprints and also unedited works such as Homenots (1958-62). In 1966, Pla would sign with the Editorial Destino publishing house to make a new compilation of his work which would start with his first unedited book: El quadern gris, one of the most important autobiographies of Catalan literature. The first Edition of the Obra Completa would include 45 volumes (around 30,000 pages). In 1973, the writer would create the Josep Pla Foundation.

The grandeur of Pla’s work can be seen as a mix between traditional language and a great verbal imaginative richness. He excels like none other at detailed, sensory description, social critique and psychological portraits. He continues to be one of the most read authors and even today he is a privileged testimony to the history of the last century.

Joan Miró (1893-1983) is considered to be one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. His unique and original style, marked by simple shapes, primary colours and experimentation with new materials, has turned him into a benchmark for many creators.

When he was just 14 years old, he started to study commerce as per the instructions of his father, who at the same time accepted having him enrolled in night classes in drawing at the La Llotja in Barcelona “as a pastime”. It was in 1911, during his stay at Mont-Roig del Camp recovering from an illness, when he firmly decided to become a painter. Neither his international fame, nor his stays in Paris, New York or Japan would alienate him ever from the countryside of the Baix Camp, the key to his artistic calling and a source of inspiration, nor from his Catalan roots.

After his first artistic stage with fauvist, expressionist and cubist influences (Retrat de nena, 1919; La masia, 1920), his stay in Paris would bring him into contact with surrealism and dadaism, and his painting would evolve and be realised from conventionalism and academicism. In his particular surrealist vision, Miró was inspired by the irrational and transformed objects and people into symbols and shapes that mixed the geometric with the organic. El carnaval d’Arlequí (1924) and El gos bordant a la lluna (1926) are very significant works.

The start of international recognition of his work, with the purchase of parts for part of the MoMA in New York in 1928, coincided with his most rebellious stage, marked by his desire to “kill” the classic idea of painting. For this entire life, he would experiment with new techniques and expressions such as collages, engravings, ceramics, tapestry, sculpture, scenography, swinging constantly between figuration and abstraction. Starting in the 60’s, we would invent a new language, where his characteristic mythology (woman, bird, star, moon and sun) would take on a very explicit meaning (L'or de l'atzur, 1967).

He fled from the public eye, often taking refuge in his study in Palma. This did not prevent Miró from expressing his rage and sensitivity for big events in his time (the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War) through his work: Natura morta del sabatot (1937) or his series Constel·lacions (1939-1941). And even his years of international recognition, with retrospectives in the most prestigious museums, did not hinder his fighting spirit. Examples include the fabrics that he burned and put holes into in 1973 in protest against the repression of Franco.

One of the best collections of the artist’s work can be found in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, which opened its doors in 1975. There are also important collections of his in the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Palma de Mallorca, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, in the MoMA and Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern Museum in London and the Moderna Museet Museum in Stockholm, among others.
 

No one was left unmoved when, at just 20 years of age, Jacint Verdaguer (1845 –1902) won his first Floral Games and went to collect his prize dressed in peasant clothing. And his rural origins would impact him throughout his life. A romantic poet, affiliated with the Restoration generation of 1874, he established rich language patterns that were half cultured and half traditional. Verdaguer is one of the biggest figures of modern Catalonia, who made the Catalan language a literary language.

The son of a modest teacher and peasant from Folgueroles (Osona), he entered the Seminary of Vic in 1855. He would become a priest in a small rural parish in Osona, but he left it when he took ill and moved to Barcelona. There he would meet the Marquis of Comillas, who would make him the priest of the family and later the alms chaplain. In this period (1877-93), during which he lived in the Palau Moja and regularly attended the highest social events, he wrote two of his most important poems: L’Atlàntida (1877) and Canigó (1886), the most genuine expression of his work.

Ultimately, a spiritual crisis, diagnosed as insanity, led him to leave the Comillas family and Barcelona. This was a direct affront to the Marquis and the church authorities, who sent him to La Gleva (Osona) where he dedicated two years to writing. The work Flors del Calvari (1896), with great dramatism, alternates personal justification with the most scathing attacks against his enemies. He spent his later years as a beneficiary to the church of Betlem, in Barcelona.

This work comes from two sources, longing and dreams, but done through more or less jointed storylines and material taken directly from life in the countryside (Pàtria, 1888). A large part of his religious poems are legends or traditional allegories (Montserrat, 1880). Other poems of his are more personal (Els Idil·lis i cants místics, 1879), Aires del Montseny, 1901). He also published come fictional books: Excursions i viatges (1887) and Rondalles (1905).

Verdarguer’s writing has been set to music by different composers (L’emigrant, 1894) and translated to a large number of learned languages.

Poet, playwright and novelist, Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) is considered, along with Josep Pla and Josep Maria de Sagarra, as one of the revivalists of the nineteenth-century forms of Catalan prose. He himself described his work as a "meditation on death". As a member of the generation '36, he focused not only on a death and individual spirituality, but also on the collective. He sang like no other of the defeat and the hope of a Catalonia subject to social and political tensions.

The son of a notary, he divided his childhood between Barcelona and Arenys de Mar. This village in the Maresme region was his "little homeland" and appears mythicised in his work as Sinera (Arenys backwards). He studied law and ancient history while he was making his first forays into literature (El doctor Rip o Laia). Before the outbreak of the Civil War, he published collections of short stories Aspectes (1934) and Ariadna al laberint grotesc and Miratge a Citerea (1935), works which confirmed him as the most original story-teller of his generation. He followed this with Letizia i altres proses (1937) and the play Antígona (1939), about fratricidal war and compassion for the defeated.

His first volume of poetry, Cementiri de Sinera, was not published until 1946. Along with the play Primera història d’Esther (1948), it marked the beginning of his popularity in the post-war period. Recognition came with La pell de Brau (1960), an allegory critical of the Spain of the post-war period and its intransigence with the different peoples of the Iberian Peninsula. It used the myth of Sepharad and went on to become a symbol of the anti-Franco struggle.

As of 1968, on the occasion of the publication of his complete works, Espriu revised his entire literary output and rewrote many of his works, particularly those of his early years. His last works were the play Una altra Fedra si us plau… (1978), the volume of prose, Les roques i el mar, el blau (1981), the poem D’una vella i encerclada terra (1979) and a collection of poetry Per a la bona gent (1984). Translated into various languages, Espriu's work has won international recognition.

Joan Maragall (1860-1911) represents the arrival the modern age in Catalan literature. He inherited the rhetoric of the Catalan Renaixença and, little by little, stripped it of its frills. The simplicity and spontaneity of the language marked his largely poetic work, although his prose works, newspaper articles and translations, mainly of German authors such as Goethe, Nietzsche and Novalis, are also significant.

Aged 14, he began his apprenticeship in the family industry. In 1879, after a fierce argument with his father, he left the factory to enter the Faculty of Law. In this way he was rebelling against the bourgeoisie which he considered mediocre, conservative and unrefined. Even so, his status as a bourgeois heir allowed him to lead a relaxed and bohemian life. In 1886, a family economic crisis turned his world upside down and drove him to put his life back on track, both professionally and personally. Thus, in 1890 he went to work at the Diario de Barcelona newspaper and a year later he married Clara Noble.

From 1892 Maragall became the symbol of the new winds of modernity that were shaking Barcelona and the guide for the bourgeoisie, who he tried to stir up on several occasions. His poetry went through several stages, but always influenced by two currents: vitalism, with its Nietzschean, roots, and decadentism. At the same time he strengthened that direct and simple lyricism, expressive and sincere and, with which he sang of the landscape, customs and festivals, myths and heroes of Catalonia, and the love of his wife and friends. Poesies (Poems, 1895) was his first book, in which his popular poem La vaca cega is found.
He contributed to the revival of Catalanism through popular genres (his second book Visions i Cants (Visions and Songs, 1900) clearly shows this) and also through his incisive journalistic articles. At the same time he made an effort to promote the language.

Little by little, he rejected the aesthetic possibilities of modernisme and reflected on his own creative experience through the simplification of the themes, metre, linguistic resources and rhetoric. This is what is known as the "theory" of the living word (sketched in 1903 in Elogi de la paraula (In praise of words) and elaborated on in 1909 with Elogi de la poesia (In praise of poetry). The poems of Enllà (Over There, 1906) offered the best example of this.

The last stage of Maragall’s career is the most intimate and peaceful. In Seqüències (Sequences, 1911) he brought some thematic cycles to a close, such as that of Count Arnau, and started another, that of the "Cant espiritual" or spiritual songs, in which he expressed his reflections on man and religion. Nausica was published posthumously. His work is preserved in manuscript in the Joan Maragall Archive.

"Man of Letters" is a soubriquet that fits Carles Riba i Bracons (1893-1959) perfectly: he was a poet, critic, storyteller and translator, as well as an academic.

Educated under the influence of the Glosari of Eugeni d'Ors, like all those of his generation, he went through a first noucentista period. From a formal perspective, the Primer llibre d’Estances (First Book of Stanzas, 1919) is an example of this but, from the conceptual point of view, these early poems have an introspective intent which already hints at Riba’s literary personality.
What he shared with the noucentistes was the firm conviction that, as an intellectual, he had a "duty" to contribute to the construction of the country. Thus, part of his professional career (which includes his work as a translator, critic and university professor) was aimed at educating the public culturally.

Riba translated modern authors such as Gottfried Keller and Hölderlin, and classical authors such as Virgil, Xenophon, Plutarch, Homer and Sophocles. In 1922, he began his collaboration with the Fundació Bernat Metge (Bernat Metge Foundation), created at that time by Francesc Cambó, which strengthened his humanist vocation for studying the Greek and Latin classics. He was also a member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Institute of Catalan Studies) and President of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (Institute of Catalan Letters).

While his reputation as a translator and professor grew, in the early nineteen-twenties, Riba entered a phase of poetic crisis. At that time his work was considered somewhat obscure. It was through his contact with the philologist Karl Vossler (1922) and particularly with the poet Paul Valéry (1924) which started him on the road of post-symbolist poetry. His Segon llibre d’Estances (Second Book of Stanzas, 1929-1930) and Tres suites (Three Suites 1930-1935) date from this time. However, Riba's poetry continued to have a deeply personal aspect that differed from the majority of the leading poets of the time.

His activity did not stop during the Civil War, where he gave his explicit support to the republican cause. The first two sections of the Del joc i del foc (Of Games and Fire) date from this time. With the arrival of the nationalist forces in 1939, Riba and his family (his wife Clementina Arderiu and their three children) were exiled to France, where he wrote one of his most famous works, Elegies de Bierville.

After the war, Riba continued working as a writer and translator and, in addition, became a representative of Catalan culture at various national and international conferences.

Jacint Verdaguer, author of L'Atlàntida and Canigó, and one of the great architects of the revival of Catalan as a literary language, lived part of his childhood in the current Verdaguer House-Museum in Folgueroles. Opened in 1967, it is one of the oldest literary museums in Catalonia.

The house is from the 17th century and is divided into ground floor (originally intended for the agricultural tools), first floor, attic and a courtyard at the rear. It is located at 7, Carrer Major in Folgueroles, next to Cal Doctor (no. 9). When the young Verdaguer lived there, the two houses formed a single building.

The project dates back to the early 20th century, when the idea arose of creating a museum in Folgueroles dedicated to the memory of Verdaguer. The collection - brought together by the Association Amics de Verdaguer (Friends of Verdaguer Association) with the advice of Eduard Junyent and Josep M. Garrut (curators of the MEV - Epsicopal Museum of Vic, and the MHCB - Barcelona City History Museum, respectively) - is arranged into three sections: biographical, with items that belonged to the poet; ethnographical, with various objects of everyday life (on the first floor, the domestic rooms of a mid-19th century house have been preserved); and the artistic, with pieces by artists such as Duran fields, Pahissa and Perejaume. Preserved in the library, are some 800 items among which are books, periodicals, graphical, sound and audiovisual materials.

Joan Maragall was one of the leading figures of modernista poetry, though he also wrote prose. He produced more than 450 texts, including articles, essays, speeches, biographical sketches and prologues. The whole of his documentary legacy is in the Joan Maragall Archive, a documentation centre located in his final residence, in the district of Sant Gervasi in Barcelona.  Currently this building also serves as a House-Museum, allowing one to see the most intimate sides of one of the great names of the Catalan Renaixença.

The Joan Maragall Archive brings together a significant documentary collection about the figure and work of the poet and about Modernisme as a whole. It was founded in 1911, after the death of Maragall, at the behest of his widow. In 1993, the centre was given over to the Biblioteca de Catalunya (National Library of Catalonia).

Students of the work of Maragall will find a complete collection of manuscript works, among which there is extensive correspondence. The archive also maintains the personal library of the poet with a thousand volumes and has all of the editions of his works. In addition to the documentary collection itself, there is the library of criticism of the work of the writer, original scores of his poems, the iconographic collection and some 10,000 press clippings.

Although the building underwent modifications after its refurbishment in 1957, various objects of the poet and his family are preserved here. Visitors can tour the entrance hall, the great hall, the dining room, the study and two bedrooms, in which you will find the original furnishings, as well as photographs and works of art by modernista artists such as Rusiñol and Casas.

Joan Brossa (1919-1998) was a restless artist, one who was interested in various artistic disciplines. While it is true that he was a poet, he was not limited to the classical forms and worked with visual poems, object poems and urban poems. In addition, this hard-to-catalogue, avant-garde artist worked in a multitude of disciplines: music, theatre, film, and even magic. However, he remained virtually unknown until 1970, when he published Poesia rasa.

The opening salvo of his career came in 1948, when he participated in the founding of the legendary Dau al Set magazine, a publication that involved Surrealism being fully adopted into the artistic and literary terrain. The book Romanços del dragolí (1948) comes from this period, a work which embodied his irony and humour. He also began to write for the stage along Dadaist lines, as well as two screenplays and even a ballet.

In the 1950s, Brossa's poetry increasingly reflected the social issues, political reportage and Marxist theory. The results of this change in direction were the publications Em va fer Joan Brossa (1950), Catalunya i selva (1953) and the ten books of sapphic odes. His theatre was equally committed, with popular forms such as the 'quadre de costumes' (sketches of manners): Cortina de muralles and Or i sal are examples of these.

From the 1960s, the visual became increasingly important in the work of Brossa. The poet manipulated objects to represent the concept (visual poems). And thus, collaboration with visual artists became inevitable. He worked with Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró. However, Brossa never stopped writing poetry. His Els entra-i-surts del poeta. Roda de llibres (1969-75), short and playful poems, are from this period.

It was after the death of Franco that the popularity of the artist grew unceasingly: awards and honours, a retrospective exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation and wide international exposure. His work began to have a physical presence in Barcelona, with some visual poems made concrete, such as Barcino (1991-1994), in front of the Cathedral of Barcelona, and also with the opening of the Brossa Espai Escènic creation space.

The artist always tried to ensure that his lyricism remained grounded. Frankness, irony and even sarcasm were some of the tools he used to achieve this. After his death his legacy passed to the Joan Brossa Foundation, the custody of which was given over to MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art).

Joan Brossa, poet, playwright and visual artist, was above all a lover of art in all its forms. He experimented with different genres and, throughout his life, accumulated lots of related documentation. Such were the mountains of papers and different materials accumulated in his first studio in Carrer Balmes that he had to rent a second studio to continue storing his "little treasures".

In 1999, a year after the death of the artist and following his wishes, the Fundació Joan Brossa (Joan Brossa Foundation) was created to safeguard his documentary legacy and to make it as widely known as possible, placing an emphasis on its interdisciplinary character. The Foundation promotes the research, editing, reissue, translation, representation, and exhibitions of the work of Brossa.

Among the Foundation's assets there is the library of Joan Brossa, made up of about 6,000 books, numerous magazines and exhibition catalogues. These are in addition to the personal archive of the poet, composed of about 52,000 documents of various types such as manuscripts of his artistic and literary work, facsimiles, galley proofs, correspondence, posters, press clippings, photographs, etc. Joan Brossa's art collection also belongs to the Foundation, among which there are his own works, as well as works by artists such as Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies.

In 2012, custody of the collection, the archive and the library was given over to MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art) to ensure its conservation and allow it to be made more widely-known. Three years later, the headquarters of the Foundation was moved - which had been in La Seca Espai Brossa - to the first floor of the MACBA Study Centre.