"Santiago Rusiñol i Prats (Barcelona, 25 February 1861 - Aranjuez, Community of Madrid, 13 June 1931) was a Catalan painter, writer, collector, journalist and playwright. He was a versatile artist and one of the leaders of modernism in Catalonia. His pictorial production, with a thousand works, and literary, with a hundred titles, as well as an extensive number of articles, place him as a decisive reference in the art, literature and aesthetic ideas of the its time.
Biography
He was born in Barcelona, into a family of textile industrialists from Manlleu, where they owned the Rusiñol textile colony, also known as Can Ramissa. His father was Joan Rusiñol i Andreu and his mother, from Barcelona, Amàlia Prats i Caravent. Santiago Rusiñol appears in his registration in the civil registry with the names of Jaume (not Santiago) Jacint Lluís and was baptized in the church of Sant Cugat del Rec in Barcelona. Although he inherited the family business, his interest in the art of painting began to take shape during his adolescence. On June 19, 1886 he married Lluïsa Denís i Reverter. In the registration of the marriage in the Civil Registry of Barcelona, Rusiñol reappears with the name of Jaume. The following year his daughter, Maria Agustina, was born, but a few months later, his restless nature, his lack of interest in the family business and his desire to paint, travel and discover the world took him away from his family. Santiago handed over the management of the company to his brother Albert, a well-known businessman and politician, who later became a deputy and senator. Santiago began to travel through Catalonia and Spain, France and Italy. Travel will be a constant in the life of the artist.
In 1888, he revealed himself as a writer, regularly collaborating with articles in the newspaper La Vanguardia. In 1889 he broke off the relationship with the family, a rupture that lasted ten years; however, he kept in touch with his daughter. In 1889 he went to study in Paris, where he lived for seasons during the first half of the nineties, an important period in his creative career.
In 1893 he set up his studio in Sitges, known as the Cau Ferrat, for the collection of antique irons it contains. The town became a modernist reference point for artists, writers and musicians promoted by Rusiñol, who organizes modernist festivals, which combine theater, poetry, painting and music. At the same time, the artist consolidated his talents as a writer and from the early 1890s wrote narrative works and poems in prose. Some of his novels will be adapted to be performed in the theater, such as L'auca del senyor Esteve, written in 1907 and released a few years later.
In 1899, due to a serious illness, he was reunited with his wife. When she improved, she went to France with her and her daughter to detox from her morphine addiction. A year later, he underwent surgery that left him with only one kidney, marking a new vital stage in his career. In 1903, he was already a renowned artist and during the first decade of the twentieth century his prestige as a prolific painter and writer was consolidated, both in Barcelona and throughout Spain and Paris. He receives more awards and nominations. In France, he received official recognition in 1908, when he obtained the title of member of the Paris Salon.
From the following two decades he received great recognition, while acquiring undeniable prestige, despite the rejection of Noucentista artists and critics, in particular, the art critic Eugeni d'Ors, who wrote in the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya. In 1917, he was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government. He received his last tribute in Sitges in 1926. He died in Aranjuez in 1931. The provisional government of the Spanish Republic ordered an official funeral in Madrid, which is headed by the president, Manuel Azaña.
Rusiñol was not only an active part of the culture of his time, but also enriched him with his personality and his ideas and opinions, which he strongly defended, and which lacked neither controversy nor controversy. He was also part of the famous social gatherings of the Els Quatre Gats brewery on Carrer de Montsió in Barcelona run by Pere Romeu. Inspired by Le Chat Noir that they had known in Paris, it became the privileged setting for the ideological manifestations of the end of the century, a place of conversation but at the same time an alternative art room. A good friend of his friends, he was associated with the most prominent artistic and intellectual personalities of the time, such as Monsignor Cinto Verdaguer and Pompeu Fabra, Valle-Inclán and Benito Pérez Galdós, the musicians Enric Granados, Isaac Albéniz, Enric Morera, Erik Satie and Manuel de Falla, and painters such as Darío de Regoyos, Ignacio Zuloaga and Joaquim Mir, among many others. However, he had the longest and strongest friendship with the painter Ramon Casas and the sculptor Enric Clarasó, with whom he formed an artistic trio that lasted until his death. It should also be noted that he was the uncle and grandfather of the premature Barcelona poet Jorge Folch i Rusiñol.
Pictorial work
He studied in the workshop of the painter Tomàs Moragas, where he learned drawing and various techniques, such as oil and watercolor. He had his first exhibition at the Sala Parés, in Barcelona, in 1879, in a group exhibition; he participated with a small painting of the interior of a studio with the figure of a model. Here he met the painter Joaquim Vayreda, who specialized in landscape. This inspired Rusiñol to explore the representation of nature, not to copy it, but to interpret it, as the painter from Olot does. It adopts this theme as opposed to historical themes, which at the time were fashionable.
But at this time he was also interested in the human figure, in keeping with the tastes of the time. The tendency for literary themes is represented in the painting Fausto, and the taste for the exotic, in the work Peregrino, which he exhibited in the Sala Parés in 1880. It should be mentioned that this will be the gallery in Barcelona where he would usually exhibit in the throughout life.
In 1882 he took part in the first exhibition of the Sabadell Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1883 he discovered the urban landscape from the paintings of Joan Roig i Soler, of a technical perfection and an interpretive freedom that impressed him. This motivated him to paint Port of Barcelona, and then he made other compositions of old Barcelona, such as Racó de Santa Maria del Mar (1885) or La plaça del Born (1885). Rusiñol evolved, but remained interested in realism, and during the years 1887 and 1888 he added characters to the landscape. Paint scenes related to work and corners of the urban landscape with characters in natural attitudes or doing daily tasks. Good examples are Pedrera de Montjuïc or Cargolada. These works, which he exhibits at the Parés Gallery, are described as naturalistic and, in general, have a good acceptance from critics.
Painting and natural spaces of Catalan geography are linked throughout Rusiñol's life. There are several escapades of the artist in the jungle town of Arbúcies and around Montseny. The relationship between Rusiñol and Arbúcies is reflected in numerous paintings.
In 1888 he was significant for Rusiñol's career, because he had his first solo exhibition in the Parés room, began to publish articles in the newspaper La Vanguardia, exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon and participated in the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona. . During this time he became interested in the real human figure, not the literary one of the early years. He began to paint portraits, such as that of his friend Ramon Casas. In search of modernity, he wanted to capture the dignity of figures; the compositions are simpler and give less importance to the secondary elements.
Rusiñol and Paris
Rusiñol's restless temperament and his desire to learn, on the one hand, and the conformist atmosphere of Barcelona and the murmurs about his person, on the other, pushed him to leave, around the autumn of 1889, in Paris, a city he had already met during his honeymoon, in 1886.
There he met his friends, the journalist Miquel Utrillo, the engraver Ramon Canudas and his close friend Enric Clarasó, with whom he shared a house in Montmartre. Later, Ramon Casas was added, until 1892-93. Rusiñol visited exhibitions, studied painting at the Société de la Palette and came into contact with the artistic environment of the city: Rusiñol set out to taste the bohemian life in his flesh.
He studied new subjects that describe the atmosphere of the suburbs, cabarets and nightclubs of Paris, such as Café dels incoherents and Interior of a café in Montmartre, in which he captures sad and distant figures. In other paintings he painted scenes of urban and interior spaces imbued with a feeling of loneliness and melancholy: Carrer de Montmartre, El patio de mi casa or El parc del Moulin de la Galette, made in 1890. He worked outdoors, tending to synthesize the model and capture the atmosphere of the spaces it represented. Rusiñol continued to be interested in portraiture and painted his friends Utrillo, Clarasó and Canudas, and characters such as Erik Satie.
During 1890, he had a large exhibition in the Parés room together with Casas and Clarasó. It was the first time that the three friends exhibited together, and they would repeat it many times until the year of Rusiñol's death. Rusiñol and Casas' paintings were very well received by the press.It is considered that, with this exhibition, modernism burst into Catalan painting. A year later, they received the unconditional support of Raimon Casellas, art critic for L'Avenç and La Vanguardia, who thought that his painting was the best in the state. During this stage, Rusiñol's interest in contemporary life was inherited from Impressionism, as well as verisimilitude and some compositional solutions, but he uses neither the brushstroke nor the chromaticism of this style. The light and atmosphere of the paintings made in Paris contrast with those of Sitges and other places of the same period. The works created during his stay in Montmartre until 1893 are a legacy that documents the life of the city.
The discovery of Sitges
In the autumn of 1891, he embarked on a trip to Vilanova i la Geltrú with the painter Eliseu Meifrè to visit the Víctor Balaguer Museum. When he was passing through Sitges he was recognized by Rossend Bartes, who stopped him and invited him to dinner. He stayed there for a month and a half. In love with the village and the friendliness of the people, he decided it was the place where he needed to take root.
He befriended the luminist painters, who revealed to him the intensity of the Mediterranean light. Rusiñol was fascinated by the corners of the town and composed the first paintings of courtyards; among others, the blue courtyards, painted between 1891 and 1893, which he would spread and make famous. In these scenes he exhibits the chromatic richness of spaces and objects, but without stridency; it avoids the light intensity that the luminists seek to represent in favor of a more nuanced light. He also made numerous drawings of characters --friends and neighbors--, which he captured in everyday attitudes in the squares, streets, courtyards and cafes.
After this short stay he returned to Paris, but in the middle of 1892 he was again in the village. Rusiñol turned Sitges into the center where the aspirations of vital and artistic renewal in Catalonia, of writers, musicians, plastic artists and intellectuals converged. He organized the first modernist festival, with a large exhibition of paintings as an alternative to official and academic art. [38] This first festival will be followed by four more, the last in 1899. They were designed as a turning point for the modernization and Europeanization of Catalan culture in all its aspects.
In 1893, Rusiñol bought a house in Sitges, where he installed his studio and his collection of works of art, antiques and iron objects, which give the place its name, known as the Cau Ferrat. and the town became the Mecca of modernism. Between 1893 and 1894, Rusiñol's new aesthetic sense was outlined, imbued with the ideas of the symbolist tendency, which shaped his sense of modernity. A good example is the second modernist festival, in 1893, during which he organized a concert of symbolist music and performed the play La intrusa, by Maurice Maeterlinck, directed by Rusiñol i Casas, with great public success. and criticism. Although the artist's painting was still naturalistic, it initiated a change influenced by interest in Belgian and French European symbolism. In this sense, he fully embraced the doctrine of art for art's sake, which makes the artist a priest, and art a religion. The symbolism is evident, above all, in his literary work.
The symbolist influence
At the end of 1893, he returned to Paris and changed his house in Montmartre for a flat in the Quai Bourbon district, in the city center.
There lived a different atmosphere, more elegant and alien to the poverty of Montmartre. Rusiñol believed that art is an expression of feelings and an aesthetic emotion; thus, with these premises, he became more and more immersed in a subjective and symbolist painting that expresses the deepest feelings.
During 1894 he traveled to Italy, where he copied works by Giotto and other primitive painters. He studied the works of other masters of painting, and that same year he bought two original pieces from El Greco, which had great artistic consequences for him and his friend Zuloaga. The artist admired the Mannerist master and copied his paintings. The impression he had received was so strong and the recognition he professed for his pictorial legacy that a few years later he dedicated a monument to him, installed in the town of Sitges.
During this new stage, the tendency towards subjectivism gradually moved him away from landscaping and from customary and everyday scenes. The observation of the external was transformed into psychological penetration to capture and represent the mood of the models, whether of joy or suffering. Previous paintings such as Enfermo y enfermero (1890) or Casa de empeños already staged the dramas of life: illness, poverty, death, but it was still a distant, more objective and realistic vision. Now it was proposed to portray the feelings, and convey to the viewer what transpired the model, despite the difficulty involved in trying to represent the complexity of human feelings.However, Rusiñol was a poet, and this is exemplified in paintings such as The Last Recipe (1893-94), Romantic Novel (1894) and Morphine (1894). The subject of this last work directly affects the artist, who knew the effects of the narcotic, as he had taken it to alleviate the pain he was suffering, which led him to addiction. The style he developed reflects a certain influence of James McNeill Whistler and also the knowledge he has about the work of Diego Velázquez when implementing compositional solutions or resources such as the elimination of spatial references, the representation of mirrors. and the self-portrait, as shown in the paintings Portrait of a Ladybug or Portrait of a Woman.
In the middle of 1895, Rusinyol decided to leave his Parisian residence for good and moved to Cau Ferrat. Between 1896 and 1897, he produced some symbolist paintings that take on a mystical character. This is expressed in a series of paintings he paints in various places on the mountain of Montserrat. They are nature paintings and portraits of monks in which the feeling and mood of the artist can be appreciated, with such significant titles as Ecstasy, Paroxysm of a Novice or Novice at the Foot of the Cross.
Rusiñol explored symbolism until 1903, in both pictorial and literary production, but during this period he also worked on a theme that practically defines the last thirty years of his professional and vital career: gardens.
The Rusynian gardens
During the 1890s, Rusiñol began the subject of gardens. If we take into account the scenes of flower-painted courtyards in Sitges, there is already a precedent in his career for the artist to look at nature from a different perspective. In 1895, he traveled to Granada and spent a season there, where he became fully involved in symbolist painting. He painted the Alhambra, the Generalife and some gardens and carmines in Granada. In contact with Pepe Riquelme's theater company he painted the Portrait of Pepe Riquelme and the Portrait of Maria Riquelme. In the following years he painted gardens in various Spanish towns and cities: Aranjuez, Granada, Tarragona, Sitges, Girona and Barcelona. Rusiñol's garden painting, begun in Granada in 1895, covers a long chronological period that extends to the end of the artist's life, but presents several stages and cycles. One of the first is that of the abandoned garden, which he painted in Víznar, near Granada in 1898, and inspired the eponymous symbolist play. Solitude, melancholy, the contrast of light and colors, the different visions of garden spaces, the structure of gardens, symmetry and perspective and the lyrical introspection transferred to painting form an intense and interesting period that transcends various scenarios.
In 1899, he exhibited the series of paintings in Paris at the Art Nouveau Gallery, the most important at the time specializing in symbolism and nabi. The exhibition will be inaugurated under the title Jardins de l'Espagne. This was Rusiñol's first and only solo exhibition in Paris, and was very well received by critics and the public. The paintings represent an unprecedented Spain and the international press echoed them. Rusiñol achieved success and recognition. In 1900 he exhibited the series Jardines de España in the Sala Parés, with the same success as in Paris. At this time, he obtained the recognition of the Barcelona bourgeoisie, which considered him one of the most important artists of the time. In 1903, he published the book Jardins d'Espanya, a work that originated during his stay in Mallorca between 1901 and 1903, accompanied by texts by Mallorcan and Catalan poets. Later he made another exhibition in the Parés room with paintings of landscapes and gardens of Mallorca. Although Rusiñol is considered to be the painter of the gardens during the first three decades of the twentieth century, his painting has important derivations towards landscaping, especially in the pictorial work made in Mallorca, Girona or Cuenca.
The symbolist vision of the gardens of Rusiñol influenced in Literature (poetry and prosa) and contemporary Spanish music. A friend of Manuel de Falla, with whom he shared his love for the gardens of Granada, he housed the composer at the Cau Ferrat to complete the Noches de los jardines de España suite in 1915."
