Two friends who triumphed painting gypsies

BarcelonaBoth grew up in the same Barcelona neighborhood during the last third of the 19th century, studied fine arts at La Llotja, were part of the same artistic group –la Colla del Safrà– and, later, excelled in the portrait, pictorial or literary, of a parallel, vibrant, and marginalized reality, that of the Roma people. "How is it possible that such close friends were never mentioned together in the press of the time?" asks Julià Guillamon (Barcelona, 1962) in relation to two of the characters who have obsessed him for decades, the painter Isidre Nonell (Barcelona, 1872-1911) and the writer Juli Vallmitjana (Barcelona, 1873-1937). This question has led him to dedicate a magnificent 700-page essay to the two creators, written in collaboration with Joan Mar Sauqué, Nonell, Vallmitjana i els gitanos (Edicions de 1984, 2026), and to showcase the relationship between them, little studied until now, in an exhibition at the Fundació Palau de Caldes d'Estrac, which can be visited until September 27.

"I discovered Vallmitjana in the 80s, because some of his books were found at the Sant Antoni market, such as Coses vistes i coses imaginades [1906] and Sota Montjuïc [1908]", recalls Guillamon. Vallmitjana was, at that time, a forgotten author, and the first attempt at recovery – with Com comencem a patir [1908], published by Rescripta in 1989– went unnoticed. Almost fifteen years later, Edicions de 1984 made a mark with La Xava, a novel from 1910 set in the poorest areas of 20th-century Barcelona and which had the endorsement of Enric Casasses. "We are facing a top-notch, brilliant writer, and he is extremely important because he is the only one who has delved deeply into the language of the lowlifes (just as, in other works, he delves into that of the Roma people)", wrote Casasses in the prologue to the 2003 edition, and a little further on, he assured: "This truth is Vallmitjana's main characteristic: the characters' speech is true, the story he tells is true, the world he portrays is true, and even the way he portrays it is, also, true".

Immediately Casasses and Guillamon worked together on a new edition of the collection of nine stories De la raça que es perd, from 1906 (Edicions de 1984, 2005), and the good reception the book received allowed them to continue exhuming part of Vallmitjana's legacy: the unpublished late novel Albí (1932, recovered in 2007) was joined by the two volumes that gathered the author's theatre (published in 2006 and 2007) and the novel De la ciutat vella (1907, recovered in 2018). "When Edicions de 1984 began to reissue Vallmitjana, Nonell's gypsies were on the covers: at that time, one and the other were intuitively related, even though we didn't know everything we know now," assures Guillamon.

Nonell, Vallmitjana i els gitanos aims to demonstrate that the painter and the writer were friends for years, starting with life in the same neighborhood: "Vallmitjana's father had a silversmith workshop on Graciamat street – now gone. Nonell's father's noodle factory was on Sant Pere més baix street," says Guillamon. Vallmitjana, who in his literary work worked "from the most immediate reality," set De la ciutat vella in the streets and places where he moved during his youth, before the opening of Via Laietana in the early 20th century caused a large part of the neighborhood to be demolished.

From the Café de l'Infern to the summer of Boí

"One of the most amusing settings in Vallmitjana's novel is the Cafè de l'Infern, which was located on the corner of Riera de Sant Joan and Carrer de l'Infern, very close to where he lived – he explains–. Picasso and Carles Casagemas had a studio at number 17 of Riera de Sant Joan. There is an oil painting by Picasso from 1903 which shows the street at dawn. Only one light is on, that of the Cafè de l'Infern, which must have been open all night or very late." Guillamon ventures that it is likely that it was in this nocturnal and debauched atmosphere that Nonell and Vallmitjana first met. He formulates this hypothesis based on the testimony of Santiago Meléndez, who had known Nonell in the 1890s and who years later, from exile in Chile, told anecdotes to Domènec Guansé (Tarragona, 1894-Barcelona, 1978), who included them in one of the profiles of Retrats de l'exili, edited by Adesiara in 2015: "Meléndez is the only one who talks about the first painting studio Nonell had, in Riera de Sant Joan", recalls Guillamon. Guansé explains, in Retrats de l'exili, that the studio was next to "a very picturesque café called L'Infern, where they put on puppet shows on Sunday afternoons, and where Nonell often went to idle and sketch".

Vallmitjana and Nonell met a little later studying at La Llotja – the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona – and were part of the Colla del Safrà, between 1893 and 1896, along with Joaquim Mir, Ricard Canals, Ramon Pichot, and Adrià Gual. The latter recalled the group's beginnings many years later in his memoirs, Mitja vida de teatre, published posthumously in 1960 by Aedos. Of Nonell, he said he was "shy and bold at the same time" and that he "painted mud from the city's factory districts, waiting for the full lights to reveal the world of his glorious gypsy themes". He described Vallmitjana as an "enthusiast in those moments of fervent hesitation".

In 1895, when "Vallmitjana was 22 years old and had started frequenting artistic circles, a upheaval occurred – Guillamon recalls –. His father sent him to the Boí spa, which he had acquired thanks to a public auction." Young Vallmitjana had to spend the winter in the Pyrenees to take charge of the facilities. "I imagine Vallmitjana as Jack Torrance from The Shining, surrounded by snow, in the mountains, increasingly insane", we read in the essay. In the summer of 1896, Vallmitjana found a temporary solution to his problem: "He invited two of his painter friends, Nonell and Canals, to the spa to work a bit and have as much fun as they could". During those months, they became interested in immortalizing some of the region's neighbors affected by cretinism, a form of hypothyroidism resulting from inbreeding that causes developmental delays, both physical and mental. "A cruel chronicler of the miseries that nature and society engender, undoubtedly those unfortunate idiots, condemned to a deformity that is not lacking in picturesque features, must have hurt the illustrator's imagination – one could read in La Vanguardia in the autumn of that year, when Nonell's works were first exhibited –. (...) From the world of the grotesque, the ugly, the stinking, one can extract types of artistic beauty, imperishable and universal".

The money they earned in Boí, partly served Canals and Nonell to pay for their first trip to Paris in 1897, which changed their lives. That same year was also decisive for Vallmitjana, but for another reason: on April 18th, his father committed suicide. "We have all cried for you; we all mourn the void you have left; our cheerful faces have turned into a symbol of sadness", the son wrote in La Renaixensa the same year. Vallmitjana had to carry on the family workshop and let go of his ambition to paint pictures, although he soon began to paint them in writing.

Sell paintings and fill venues

"When, in 1900, Nonell had to return to Barcelona from Paris ill with syphilis, he felt like a failed painter –comments Guillamon–. Vallmitjana changed his life: now he is a silversmith, married and with a daughter." Nevertheless, the passion of the two friends for the underworld will remain and will become one of the axes of their works, especially through the representation of gypsies. "Nobody took them very seriously for a few years –states Guillamon–. Neither of them are modernists. Alexandre Plana, who was a friend of both, placed Nonell in the Almanac of the Noucentistes, because he considered that his paintings were not just representations of gypsies, but works of art".

Nonell did not manage to sell his paintings until a year before his death. It was in 1910, when at the exhibition at Faianç Català he sold paintings to "rich buyers" such as lawyers Amadeu Hurtado and Pere Milà, and collector Lluís Plandiura; also to "artists" such as painters Ramon Casas and Miquel Utrillo, the writer Josep Pous i Pagès, and the philosopher Francesc Pujols. "It was a success of the circle, in which a number of educated and influential people bought Nonell's paintings as a proclamation," says Guillamon. "It did not have immediate continuity, because when he died in 1911, his paintings ended up in the family's noodle factory, and there they remained for years, until, from a posthumous exhibition in 1923, a positive trend was created around his art and its impact grew."

The case of Vallmitjana was different: in five years he went from having his books printed – which he initially signed as J.V. Colominas – to enjoying immense theatrical success thanks to the play The Zin-Calo (1911). "After Guimerà, he was the most performed Catalan playwright with The Zincali –comments Guillamon–. The work is a Romeo and Juliet among nomadic gypsies and sedentary gypsies. Although today it is difficult to follow due to the slang, it has the ability to detect a constant in the history of humanity, the debate between nomadism and sedentarism, and to explain it through an impossible love story between two young people". At the Barcelona premiere in January 1911, Margarida Xirgu played the role of the young gypsy woman.

"Vallmitjana was an incontinent author, and the success of Els zin-calós spurred him to write a lot – says Guillamon–. In 1911 alone, he premiered six more works, including Muntanyes blanques, El corb and En Terregada, about a rogue troublemaker who also appears in Sota Montjuïc". In the book, Guillamon delves into the diversity of Nonell's and Vallmitjana's approach to the Roma world: "Nonell's Roma women are noble and beautiful. Fallen on hard times, if you will, but their gesture reflects humanity and tragic nobility". Vallmitjana, on the other hand, goes in a different direction: "His Roma are capricious and eccentric".

In addition to dedicating himself to artistic creation and having shared a close friendship for years, Nonell and Vallmitjana also had in common a difficult character that was, in part, what eventually drove them apart. In the still unpublished Lletres al meu fill David, written in the 1930s, Juli Vallmitjana highlights his "very exalted genius": he attributes it to his "nerves" and "to the urge that both had" to excite him. Of Isidre Nonell, Artur Bladé Desumvila writes to Francesc Pujols per ell mateix (Pòrtic, 1967) that he "couldn't stand painters at all": of the "ultra-academic" Brull, he criticizes "that he paints with a condom"; he laughs at Domènec Carles because, despite being "more elegant" than him, he doesn't "sleep with so many women".

"They argued over something trivial – assures Guillamon–. In Coses vistes i imaginades, Vallmitjana mentions a marine newt and Nonell corrects him because they are freshwater animals. Vallmitjana takes it badly: a close friend has rubbed that error in his face". Shortly after, Vallmitjana got revenge on Nonell in De la ciutat vella (1907), where he ridiculed him through the character of the painter Grassa, whom he accuses of repeating himself. From then on, the two friends drifted apart. "The separation between Nonell and Vallmitjana must have caused a stir, and it splashed into the circles of friends of both – comments Guillamon–. They were so pissed off that Vallmitjana, when Nonell died on February 21, 1911, didn't dedicate a single line to him in the press, even though he wrote there often".