Cultural chronicler Joan de Sagarra dies

BarcelonaJoan de Sagarra (Paris, 1938 - Barcelona, ​​​​2025), chronicler of Barcelona in the second half of the 20th century and, especially, of life on the Catalan stages, has died at the age of 87, according to the newspaper in which he collaborated, The Vanguard. For sixty years, the son of the renowned writer Josep Maria de Sagarra (1894-1961) has cultivated his reputation as a controversial columnist and demanding critic. Among the milestones of his cultural chronicles is having baptized the Gauche Divine from the pages of the Tele/eXpres, an expression he coined to describe the progressive, well-off intellectuals and artists who inhabited the Bocaccio nightclub in the 1960s and 1970s, among whom he moved.

Born in Paris and trained in law in Barcelona and in theatre studies at the Sorbonne, Joan de Sagarra turned to journalism from the early 1960s. He wrote articles for the main media outlets of the time, such as The Universal News, The Catalan Post Office and the Tele/eXpres, dozens of film, theatre and culture magazines, and later in The Country, The World and finally to The Vanguard, where he published the last article in 2022. The books The rumbas of Joan de Sagarra (1971) and The shape of my hat (1997) collects his articles.

Sagarra was well-versed in theatrical culture—he had seen post-war theater and cinema in Paris, and had a vast literary and cultural background—and was part of the generation that renewed stage criticism. He practiced criticism that was "subjective, passionate, and partisan, which are the conditions of criticism according to Baudelaire," he said. His opinion mattered at a time when the Catalan theater scene was emerging, and he wasn't one to pontificate about icons of the era such as Boadella, Dagoll Dagom, Els Joglars, Comediants, the new Teatre Lliure—which he considered "a pearl"—and the Teatre Català de Flotats. His harsh, implacable tone had a large readership but often made the artists concerned uncomfortable. For example, he had an open confrontation with Josep Maria Flotats, who went so far as to announce that he wouldn't perform if Sagarra was in the room, to which he responded sarcastically, from another newspaper, that he was "very calm."

A regular reader of half a dozen foreign newspapers, Sagarra was one of those journalists connected with European culture, especially with artists and intellectuals of the Francophone world, with one foot in the Avignon Festival. After he abandoned theater criticism, his chronicles focused on intellectual life and the daily chronicles of the Barcelona native, in his circles of friends, always surrounded by intellectuals and politicians, with a glass of Jameson whiskey on the table.

Among his controversial actions, the son of Josep Maria de Sagarra also joined the Babel Forum, the 1990s initiative in defense of bilingualism and against the linguistic normalization of the Generalitat (Catalan government). It also included figures from the Gauche Divine (Government of Catalonia) such as Rosa Regàs and Ana Maria Moix. Before that, he had already rejected the "culturalism" promoted by the Generalitat (Catalan government) because it did not include culture produced in Spanish.

He was involved in various cultural initiatives and institutions. Between 1978 and 1979, he served as the Culture Delegate for Barcelona City Council. Among the awards he has received are the City of Barcelona Journalism Award (1998), the title of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (2006), and the National Journalism Award (2008).