MEMOIRS OF A SEVILLIAN MASTER Javier de Winthuysen Editors: María Héctor Vázquez Enrique Lafuente Ferrari Teresa Winthuysen Alexander Publisher: Winthuysen Foundation, Inc. Copyright © 2008 by the Winthuysen Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United State Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Winthuysen Foundation, Inc. Library of Congress: 7006 2150 0000 9073 3186 The Winthuysen Foundation, Inc. PO Box 595 Greenbelt, MD 20768 Printed by Signature Book Printing, www.sbpbooks.com ii I dedicate this translation of the memoirs to the memory of my sister María Salud Winthuysen Sánchez without whose funds this book would have never been possible. Teresa Winthuysen Alexander iii Javier de Winthuysen—terracotta likeness, circa 1919 was done by his friend, the sculptor Jacinto Higueras Fuentes (1977-1956) Javier de Winthuysen dedicated his self-portrait which appears on the front book cover to his good friends Lolita Palatin and Jacinto Higueras. iv “Portraits and sentimental caricatures from assorted Spaniards” Juan Ramón Jimenez Javier de Winthuysen 1920 New wild bear variety, he is a bear-gardener (blond, sentimental, with a sense of humor); he is a drinker of fountains and eater of jasmine flowers soaked in anise liqueur. Eternally learning to speak cub bear language at the cavern woods’ school, perdurable child and still (like the even-now impacted wisdom teeth) has not grown his second eyes. With these paradise-like primary eyes entangled like light violets among the green eyelashes, I say he looks and looks again at our eloquent, fine, true Andalusian countryside, and finally, foretelling its color, he renders it. His hand is, as always, the left. You know the saying, one that is terrible for the comfort loving: “Once you have mastered your task with your right hand, do it with your left.” But he never knew how to make anything with his right hand. The reason why his feelings, so difficult to break through (so easy they are!), are so right, I say are so wrong, and I say, are so natural. His fields and gardens hide deeply architectural science, gracious, sensuous beings and they do not qualify as mere decorations but render thanks to the God of Seville! They are fields, gardens. In them, leaves Winthuysen his covetous eyes, dreamy, like a signature of wild blue stars and his simple translations are a caress that returns affection to the body amorous of life. It is a lover’s sight returned by golden pink Andalusia (to those who want to remember her in the eyes of its overgrown-child landscaper, of its gardener wild bear) the gratitude for having looked at her, for having given her his heart and having evoked her as so prudent, so modest, with so much filial sentiment. Españoles de Tres Mundos, 1942, Buenos Aires v PROLOGUE To write one’s memoirs imply belief in one’s self importance but to me it is not exactly like that; I know my character’s exact significance, if I have any. Nonetheless, I should not be so obstinate as to think myself better than others but rather follow the classic saying “Know thyself,” if that is knowledge, and say no more. What happened on several occasions is that, people listening to my anecdotes told me that I should write them and since I like to write, I then began this task and continued intermittently as my mood decided. Although I like to write and I have done so extensively for journalistic articles of a technical nature, I had never employed myself in writing an extensive personal account. Therefore, at first, I was not focused because I was thinking about sparse anecdotes in my life when suddenly I decided to tell my entire life story and sort of relive it as I told it to allow my memories to flow easily. From the very beginning, I have confronted a quandary. I love biographies! It is so enticing to get to know the way followed by great men who have left an incredible amount of works or who were innovators in their fields; but coming from a person as insignificant as myself, the story results in a ridiculous pretension. With this thought in mind, I advise my readers to see my writings not as a pretentious literary work but as an account of what I saw and heard during my lifetime. I do not say this having false modesty but because I think I tried to look at myself in a detached way, if that is possible. vi FOREWORD Eyewitness depositions contain certain amounts of truth. The guarantee of truth to facts depends not only on the fidelity of the account, but also on the discounting of falsity, the difficulty in observing physical facts perhaps caused by ineffectual senses, the observer’s social position and wealth at the moment of reportage, and most importantly, the personal prejudices in the spectator’s personality that weigh down his intellect at the interval of time in which the facts are accounted for. Our senses are far from being able to account for what is in front of our eyes; they are far from constituting the only mechanism of perception even if they are unique in their acuity. And so, it would not be wise to trust them completely to translate the intellectual sensation into an account of facts. For instance, if we take a snapshot of a horse jumping from below, the developed picture would make us think that the horse is up in the sky when in reality it only jumped a meter high. When we draw a foreshortened figure, its feet will appear enormous and its head reduced, or vice versa. The results will be different if we rely mainly on our vision; and this is not because from the angle of vision, perspective ceases to operate but because we have the prejudice of learned proportions that accommodate the figure to conform to a pre- established reality. This same prejudice can offer the opposite effect especially when we perceive in real life something out of the ordinary. What I mean is that veracity from an eyewitness account should not be fully trusted; neither should we rely on our seen experience and even less should we trust an account of it. Intellectual prejudice easily directs the mind to fantasies. Could we be so vain as to believe that our thoughts are even- minded for having been the subject of living and suffering? Could we say that we took into account the deforming power on our impressions from material circumstances, feelings of well-being or depression or beliefs and social political opinions? My purpose is not to judge, neither is it to present what I lived in relation to seeking sympathy or disagreement, nor to silence some or exalt others. It is simply to give an account of what I saw, in case that my relating this could contribute to further exploration. vii Even so, I am not free from putting the jumping horse in the clouds or rendering a figure with deformed head and feet. I can only say that I will try to be an impartial raconteur of my reality. viii INTRODUCTION Equanimity in reading books belongs to a special breed of readers who try to reconcile content with personal inclinations. It is out of the ordinary to find in a single literary output, like Winthuysen’s memoirs, blending the minds of two personalities born thirty years apart. On one side, we find Javier de Winthuysen y Losada and on the other, Maria Hector Vazquez, in dialogue to present the story judiciously. The figure of the Art History teacher, writer and review critic, Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, is an addition found in the manuscript as a product of circumstances within the memoirs but outside the story. All this and more appear in the Memoirs of a Sevillian Master. This is the first time that the complete narration of the memoirs appears in print. I patiently revised the digitized text, written originally in Spanish and collected basic documentation that was needed. For historical sources I sought help from those who admire the works by Winthuysen. The reader may ask why the memoirs were kept in obscurity for such a long time; when over and over, the text was quoted to signal how the introduction of the Landscape Architecture as a grand modality in twentieth- century Spain took place. It was a modality that was neither understood nor accepted by the Spanish architects up until the first half of the twentieth century. This account notes how the academy of San Fernando honored the non-religious technical interpretations presented in the story for Greco and Murillo works. It also introduces how the landscape analysis that Winthuysen proposed in Spain depended on a harsh geography diverse from the Northern France Impressionist modality that is recognizable in the great Spanish masters. The demoniac character of the author has no sympathy with those opposing what he knows to be true. The political scene governed by Spanish Catholic social norms were a hard enough imposition, as Julian Marias says in “Understanding Spain,” 1990. Perhaps if we take into account all the reality factors involved in such a difficult personality, I say “so easy,” of Javier de Winthuysen, we will find that he was not too far from the existential truth of his life. From each of the editors I mentioned, any critical writer could gather the editors’ personal data.