Dies at 90 years old Josep Maria Cadena, scholar of the Catalan press and promoter of 'Avui'
He worked as a journalist, art critic, and scholar of satirical press, among other facets
BarcelonaHe didn't write for ’ARA, but readers knew him well in this newspaper: followers of Miquel Ferreres's cartoons often found him drawn in the jokes, accompanied by his colleague Josep Pernau, observing human and social miseries with elegant perplexity. Pernau died in 2011 and now it is Josep Maria Cadena who leaves the Catalan press orphaned of a benchmark, whether as an active journalist, as a promoter of media and institutions in the field, as an art critic, or as a tenacious scholar of the country's titles, especially if they were satirical. His monographs on Catalan cartoonists – Opisso, Junceda, Apa, Perich... – are essential canonical works for approaching these authors.
“I am a survivor, but not immortal,” he used to say recently to anyone who approached him to listen to one of his many anecdotes. Born in Barcelona ten months before the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1935, he began working at the EFE Agency and then at Diario de Barcelona. It was the 1960s and even then he began to seek the union between journalism and humor with the section Gente de pluma y lápiz. Meanwhile, he was looking for a way to organize the journalistic sector towards the end of Francoism. And so he founded the Democratic Group of Journalists, in addition to being part of the boards of directors of the former Association of the Press of Barcelona and, subsequently, those of the current College of Journalists of Catalonia.
In the 1970s, he launched the newspaper Avui: his was the signature in which permission was requested to make what would be the first newspaper in Catalan. Of course, even though he was to be the first director, one day Josep Faulí tells him in the corridors of Diario de Barcelona in his last period, before being signed byFurthermore, he was also director of Hoja del lunes in its last period, before being hired by El Periódico de Catalunya as editor-in-chief, and also writing articles as an art critic until 2010. More than three thousand artists passed under his expert judgment. Among the awards he received are the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1996 and the Ciutat de Barcelona in 1995, the Mañé i Flaquer of journalism in 1972, or the Premi Nacional de Cultura of the CoNCA in 2015.
Representing a journalism that, lacking Google, relied above all on its own culture, readings, and memory, Josep Maria Cadena was aware that his was a dying breed. “In the newspapers where I worked, they sometimes said ‘ask Cadena,’ because they didn’t know,” he recounted, very shrewdly, in a recent interview in the magazine of the College of Journalists, published a few months ago. “I, on the other hand, knew who many people were. And sometimes I also knew things that were better left unsaid. Like some radio announcers who were given an apartment. I ran away from that. I never wanted to get paid extra from the newspapers. That didn't happen much before, because they tempted you, but I never sold myself. And that makes me feel good.”