The creation of a Catalan visual language in the first third of the 20th century: A strategy for cultural survival.

Globalization is not new. Around the turn of the twentieth century many regional cultures were threatened with extinction, largely due to a long period of European colonial expansion and an industrial revolution that had replaced locally crafted works with mass produced goods. Languages were often suppressed by colonial educational systems, or for political reasons.

I will develop a detailed case study of a European culture that was challenged yet eventually survived in tact: Catalonia, the Catalan-speaking region of the eastern Pyrenees and Iberian peninsula became an independent kingdom in the late tenth century, with its own body of law throughout the middle ages. Despite increasing pressure from the kingdom of Castile, Catalonia entered the twentieth-century with considerable autonomous rights, only to have its language, culture, and laws suppressed under General Franco in 1939 (Montagut). We will see that its culture has indeed survived, in large measure I believe because visual language is inherently subversive.

Three crucial stages of cultural development emerged in Catalonia in the twentieth century:

1) The port city of Barcelona went through a period of rapid but planned growth, giving scope for architects and designers to create an inspiring modern urban setting. After a phase of eclectic internationalism in the late nineteenth century, two generations of Catalan artists, including the architects Josep Puig i Cadalfach and Antonio Gaudi, the sculptor Pablo Gargallo, and the painters Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, and Salvador Dali, created new styles that spear-headed modernism. In the same years, Catalan scholars focused intently on medieval culture – the arts and language of Catalania from the 10th to the 15th century -- and the indigenous Romanesque style made known by art historians was a particularly powerful inspiration to the avant-garde artists.

2) A period of political strife in the 1930’s culminated in the Civil War of 1936-39 and the military dictatorship of Franco. After 1939 the Catalan language was suppressed and with it some of the institutions that had supported cultural studies. Some artists went into voluntary exile, some stayed and clandestinely concentrated on the continuation of national Catalan modes of expression. In the 1960s art historians maintained an international focus on the medieval roots of Catalan culture.

3) After the demise of the Franco regime, in 1976, the central government of Spain evolved a more benign policy toward Catalonia, granting it autonomy in 1979. The language of the University of Barcelona is once more Catalan, and construction resumed on Gaudi’s great unfinished masterwork, the Barcelona Church of Sagrada Familia. And once more there has been a burgeoning of publications on Catalan medieval art, and also new studies of the Catalanicity of the modern artists.

I will briefly expand on these three historical moments, with appropriate visual examples. At the end I will suggest ways in which this historical model may be relevant to cultures that are struggling to exist today.

1) First, the work of Catalan artists and cultural historians in the period 1880-1927.
The period opens with the architectural works of Puig i Cadafalch and Gaudi, the one a student of medieval architecture who espoused an historicist style, the other more freely inspired by medieval monuments (Caviness 1986 & 1989; Mackay 13-71). Meanwhile the Catalan language was still used in schools and for legal documents (Anguera), and scholars were becoming interested in the medieval architecture of the ancient region of Catalonia (Brutails).

Three major “cultural events” mark the year 1907: 1. The Institut d’Estudis Catalans was founded to promote “scholarly research, Catalan culture, and openness to the outside world” (L’Institut, 5, 7, 8). Many of its publications up to 1936 were concerned with Catalan philology, but the section for archeological history instigated a major work on Catalan wall paintings by Josep Pijoan (published only in 1948), and a detailed survey of Romanesque architecture in the region by Puig i Cadafalch (1908-1918). He went on to make his famous claim that the monuments of ca. 1000, from the very beginnings of Catalan autonomy, constituted the “first Romanesque art” (1928 & 1930). Thus, in an age that put great store on originality and innovation, these rustic churches gained an avant-garde appeal.
2 – also in 1907, plans were begun for the great Romanesque and Gothic Museums on Montjuic, Barcelona. These house many of the wall paintings that could not be preserved in remote churches.
3. The third momentous event 0f 1907 was Picasso’s completion in Paris of his famous abstract painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He had been inspired by the medieval paintings of his adopted homeland, and echoed the dramatic staring eyes, sharp features, and the shifting angled views of faces and bodies. Like Gaudi’s fantastic structures, Picasso’s visual experiments eliminated all trace of a quasi-classical training in favor of more strident and expressive forms that resonate with the Romanesque without being historicist. The other fulcrum was between the evocation of tradition and adherence to radically new principles. Thus we can speak of a Catalan visual language that re-established a cultural tradition leading to the creation of the great painting of ‘Guernica’ in 1937, and to the present completion of the church of the Sagrada Familia.

Yet, much as this history now seems inextricably entwined, in fact the painters and sculptors were not members of the Institut; and they spent long formative periods outside Spain when it was under its first military dictatorship (1914-1925; Montagut, 39). Picasso and Braque invented cubism side by side in Paris. Yet I believe Mirò, also in Paris in the 1920s, turned to the Spanish Apocalypse manuscripts for inspiration when he wanted to create a new fantasy world (Xerri).

2) The second stage I outlined at the beginning was the troubled period of the 30’s to the end of the Franco era in 1976.
Picasso and Mirò were back in Barcelona in the early 1930s, and patronized by a group of friends of the new arts (Amigos de las Artes Nuevas; (Rodríguez-Aguilera 145). But Picasso’s great painting Guernica was an outcry against the violence of bombing a civilian population in the Civil War. It was shown in the Republican Spanish pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, a building designed by Josep Lluis Sert and Luis Lacasa (Mackay 112-113). At the same time, Paris hosted an exhibition of medieval Catalan art ( L’Art catalan ). The artist refused to allow Guernica to go back to Franco’s Spain, and it stayed in the United States until about 1980: Franco’s troops entered Barcelona in 1939, the Institut d’Estudis Catalans was suppressed and its National Catalan library renamed the Bibliothec Central, the language could no longer be used for instruction or scholarly publication.
There were, of course, various nodes of resistance. The members of the Institut began to hold cladestine meetings in 1942 and eventually to publish again ( L’Institut 16-18). The Abbey of Montserrat, which had a strong Catalan identity before the Civil War, rallied people around the cult of the medieval statue of the black Madonna (Massot 81-159). Art historians elsewhere continued to recogniz the importance of Catalan art, especially Romanesque painting (Cook, Durliat, Gudiol, Hermann). Edouard Junyent brought out a two-volume study of Catalan Romanesque in French in 1960-61, and also in 1961 the Conseil de l’Europe patronized a great exhibition of Romanesque art in Barcelona and Santiago, acknowledging the region as the cradle of that style. Ainaud de Lasarte may have subtly ensured that Spain is not in the index, by listing works under the province of their origin instead. A great many items were from Catalonia, with far fewer from Huesca, Aragon and Castile ( L’Art Roman 59-110, 587).
The following year, the Museum of Modern Art was founded in Barcelona (Rodríguez-Aguilera 130). Artists seem to have been freer to meet – and even to publish in Catalan –than the formal institutions. They formed an Agrupacion de Artistas Actuales in 1956 (Rodríguez-Aguilera 81). In 1961, the painter Joan Vila-Grau (son of the painter Antoni Vila Arrufat) formed another group, consisting of, artists critics and eventually churchmen with an interest in ecclesiastical arts (Vélez; see also Fundació Cultural, Juliàn, and Jackson). The Cantonada went on to publish a review called Qüestions d’Art , the first art magazine published in Catalan since the Civil War, and Mirò donated an unpublished print for the cover and a poster in 1971 (see illus.). The same year an article by Pere Busquets and Cèsar Martinell explored the possibility of completing Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. I am grateful to my long-time friend Joan Vila-Grau for his thoughts on this movement: The goals of La Cantonada were to continue the great modern tradition of Catalan art, but at the time they had to phrase this as “Mediterranean style.” At the same time, they studied Romanesque and Gothic art “since these periods marked the formation of Catalonia as a nation, and here are our Catalan roots” (Vila-Grau, letter).

3) The third phase of cultural survival, or rather revival and reflection, began in 1976. Joan Vila-Grau is now completing the stained glass windows for the Sagrada Familia (Vila-Grau, 2006). As a contributor to the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi volumes that present the medieval windows of Catalonia, and as an artist who has always worked in contemporary styles in a variety of media, his sensitivity spans both eras. The immense windows of Santa Maria de Mar and the Cathedral of Barcelona provide a reference for the interaction of light and color even in these non-figural designs. Vila-Grau is thoroughly familiar with Gaudi’s notes and plans, in so far as they survived the Civil War, and aims to fulfill Gaudi’s wish that “The church of the Sagrada Familia wil be luminous … It will be the temple of harmonious light.”

Meanwhile art historians have continued to proclaim and enrich the view of the medieval county of Catalonia (including Roussillon, now in France) as the cradle of Romanesue around 1000 (Minne-Sève & Kergall, 12-21). Since the 1990s, a multi-volume history of Catalan art provides a narrative from the eleventh to the twentieth century (Miralles), and another extensive series charts the continuity of Catalan culture (Gabriel). The contributions of the avant-garde of Catalonia have attracted much analysis; Edouard Resina Bertram argued in 1997 that avant-garde artists launched a frontal attack against artistic globalization (p. 232). The political conditions of modern cultural production are now open to critical scrutiny (Barral i Altet; Oliveras).

Conclusions: For a regional culture to survive deliberate suppression it helps if there has been an extraordinarily productive generation immediately before – laying the foundations to preserve the language, and producing enduring visual statements that anchor and define the culture. And it clearly helps to have these visual traditions textualized by art historians. Secondly, the logo-centric attitudes of politicians are apt to regard language difference as a challenge to national hegemonies, yet overlook the equally evident visual languages that also define cultures. Hence, ironically, the scholarly, philological and historical bent of the IEC in the period 1907-86, which distanced it from practicing artists, proved to be an asset to the survival of consciously Catalan artistic modes of expression.
In view of the symbiotic relationship of art history and artistic creativity that I have uncovered, it is ironic that in recent years Gaspar Coll i Rosell, professor of art history at the University of Barcelona, has had to wage a campaign to save the discipline ( www.elmundo.es ).
Yet it may be that minority and even national cultures only find devout adherents in times of ideological and political conflict. It is notable that after the end of the Cold War neither the US nor Russia commit the same resources as before to cultural production. I have suggested some ways in which regional cultures can survive under adverse pressure, but survival in a time of benign global merging may be more difficult.