The echo of Goya in the gypsy women of Isidre Nonell

BarcelonaThe Barcelona painter Isidre Nonell (1872-1911) is considered the first countercultural artist From Catalonia, because he broke away from the prevailing trends with his characteristic portraits of Roma women. Instead of succumbing to the dominant folklorism, Nonell's portraits possess a profoundly humanist character and a sense of social critique. Collectors made him pay for it, and in 1901 his first painting exhibition at the Sala Parès was a resounding commercial failure. However, one of the reviews of that exhibition noted how Nonell drew from the tradition of great painters like Goya and Rubens.

Nonell's dialogue with Goya is revisited until January 18th with the exhibition Nonell looking at Goya of the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, fruitof the alliance of the Madrid museum with the prestigious Casacuberta Marsans Collection, which contributes seven paintings, among which two early portraits of gypsies stand out, Gypsy and Gypsy bust, both from 1901. Thus, Nonell's marginal characters are face to face with the monstrous figures in Goya's paintings The witches' sabbath and The witches, which reflect their critique of the superstitions and traditions that hinder people's development. "Both Nonell's and Goya's work bear witness to a critical awareness of social hypocrisy: both possess a moral and ethical conception of art based on the idea that the mission of painting is not only to beautify reality, but also to give visible form to human suffering and modern loneliness," states Bear Galdiano, the exhibition's curator along with collections curator Nadia Hernández. "Both artists understand painting as a form of aesthetic resistance against indifference, and this is reflected in their willingness to represent what others do not dare or do not want to see," Torres emphasizes. For Hernández, dignity is one of the keys to Nonell's portraits, although today the relationship he established with Roma women may be considered problematic: "Nonell created a pictorial universe featuring uprooted and marginalized figures whom he endowed with great dignity and beauty."

The impact of Consuelo Jiménez's death

Nonell looking at Goya This is the first presentation of the Casacuberta Marsans Collection in Madrid and Nonell's first exhibition in the city in over twenty years. Among Nonell's works are also Melancholia (1903), from his second exhibition in Barcelona;Gypsy bust(1904), an experimental oil painting on a tabletop that is noteworthy because Nonell did not use traditional ground-up techniques. As for the later ones Gypsy and AnguishThey are more colorful and luminous. Critics place them in a transitional period influenced by Noucentisme. "Perhaps this evolution can be related to the death, in 1905, of his favorite model, the gypsy Consuelo Jiménez, with whom he had a romantic relationship and who died when the shack where she lived collapsed," adds Hernández.

The exhibition also includes drawings by Nonell, such as Beggars and Wake or Burning Chapel of a cretinThese works were marked by the months the artist spent in the Boí Valley in 1896, where he encountered a community of what were then called cretins—people afflicted with goiter and suffering from severe physical deformities and mental disorders. "It was a pivotal event in his life," explains Hernández. "Contact with misery and degeneration sparked an interest in the underworld of marginalization that would ultimately shape his entire body of work." Traditionally, these drawings have been called "fried" because of their "oily" finish, Hernández points out. According to legend, they were immersed in boiling oil. This wasn't the case: the process Nonell invented incorporated traditional techniques such as charcoal, pastel, ink vaporization, and a final finish with resins.