Alexandre de Riquer ALEXANDRE DE RIQUER (1856 - 1920) The British Connection in Catalan Modernisme By Eliseu Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates 1988 THE ANGLO-CATALAN SOCIETY THE ANGLO-CATALAN SOCIETY OCCASIONAL PUBLICATIONS No. 1. Salvador Giner. The Social Structure of Catalonia (1980, reprinted 1984) No. 2. Joan Salvat-Papasseit. Selected Poems (1982) No. 3. David Mackay. Modern Architecture in Barcelona (1985) No. 4. Homage to Joan Gili (1987) No. 5. E. Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates. Alexandre de Riquer (1988) © E. Trenc Ballester & Alan Yates Produced and typeset by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Printed by A. Wheaton & Co. Ltd, Exeter Cover design by Joan Gili British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ballester, Eliseu Trenc Alexandre de Riquer (1856-1920): the British connection in Catalan modernisme. (The Anglo-Catalan Society occasional publications, ISSN 0144-5863; 5). 1. Catalan decorative arts. Riquer, Alexandre de, 1856-1920 I. Title II. Yates, Alan III. Series 745'.092'4 ISBN 0-905713-74-0 PREFACE The origins of the present publica- tion were in an article by Eliseu Trenc Ballester, 'Alexandre de Riquer, ambassadeur de l'art anglais et nord-américain en Catalogne', which appeared in Volume XVIII (1982) of the Melanges de la Casa Velazquez, pp. 311-359. It was a documentary study of the important influence that certain tendencies in British art and artistic ideas of the nineteenth century exercised in the crucial and productive phase of cultural development in Catalonia over the turn of the century, the phenomenon known as Catalan Modernisme. What the article highlighted was the role of Alexandre de Riquer in this process. The nature and interest of the subject commended themselves naturally to the editorial committee of the Anglo-Catalan Society's Occasional Publications, at a time when the collection was in its infancy and when its objectives and range were just being clearly defined. E.T., for some time a participator in the Society's affairs, agreed to the proposal that his original piece be expanded and modified to the characteristics of the ACSOP series. This involved building around the original research article a set of chapters to place Alexandre de Riquer's life and work in their cultural context, to supply a relatively detailed biography and to give an account of his literary production. The latter was felt to require a sizeable proportion of space, because of the access which his writing supplies to certain key traits of the important creative movement in which he was involved. The original project thus grew in scope and in size. There was, from the start, a collaborative aspect to the operation, insofar as E.T.'s original text and then drafts of other chapters were being 8 Alexandre de Riquer translated from the French by various members of the Anglo- Catalan Society. A.Y.'s role in this increased as the work took on definitive shape, and the point was reached where joint authorship was felt to reflect input to and responsibility for the product. Some signs of a division of labour are to be seen in the text published here, but this monograph is offered by its authors as the result of a common effort: the finished version was hammered out in a series of joint work-sessions held in Sheffield, Paris and Toulouse. Both the subject, then, and the circumstances in which this little book was produced are fully consonant with the stated objectives of the ACSOP collection and, more widely, with the collective spirit of the Anglo-Catalan Society. The present tide appears at a time when international appreciation of the singular character and quality of modern Catalan culture is markedly, and gratifyingly, on the increase. The currently fashionable image of the city of Barcelona itself has contributed to awareness of how crucial and how productive in the consolidation of the modern Catalan cultural identity were the decades spanning the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fin-de-siècle recovery of a splendid gothic inheritance is written in the streets and buildings of the capital. Our present historical awareness of the making of contemporary Catalonia focuses naturally upon the turn of the century and upon the phenomenon of Modernisme which brought to a head nineteenth-century processes of national revival. The life and work of Alexandre de Riquer are here studied as representative of central features of this complex and fertile phase of cultural evolution. The 'British connection' in our subject is one such feature which we here endeavour to show in true perspective and in relation to the underlying dynamics—with its achievements and its frustrations— of Modernisme. In a basically biographical approach, the broad lines emerge portraying a man of the nineteenth century whose vision of a new era was crossed with contradictions of an inherited past and was severely stressed by the incipient crises of the twentieth century. His words and his images remain, though, as monuments to the vision that is now being positively revalued as our own century draws to a close. Preface The work of Riquer, in the recent renewal of interest of Catalan Modernisme, has been the subject of scholarly critical and historical attention. The English connection was disclosed and investigated in M. McCarthy's unpublished doctoral dissertation (Catalan 'Modernisme' and English Cultural Movements of the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge 1973). M.A. Cerdà i Surroca pays him generous attention in her Els Pre-rafaelites a Catalunya. Una literatura i uns símbols (Barcelona 1981). She and E.T. were principal contributors to the commemorative volume of studies (Alexandre de Riquer. L'home, l'artista, el poeta) published in Calaf (1978), while E.T. supplied text for the catalogue published on the occasion of a major exhibition of Riquer's work (Barcelona 1985). Specialised studies of both the art (notably Cirici, Ràfols, Fontbona) and the literature of Modernisme (Castellanos) accord due attention to Riquer. The foregoing, however, tend understandably to see his work as belonging to either the field of the visual arts or, to a lesser extent, to that of literature. The present publication is the first attempt to present a unified view of his life and work, in which both the literary and the visual aspects are viewed as complementary, within a biographical frame. For reasons already expressed, it is fitting that this should be published in English, and in the uniform of the ACSOP series. While the following pages direct a steady spotlight upon Catalan Modernisme, they include also a sidelight upon the pervasive influence of contemporary British art movements. 10 Alexandre de Riquer We wish to record here our gratitude to Dominic Keown, Susi Serrarols and John Devlin, for their cooperation in the early stages of preparing the text; to Pauline Climpson and her colleagues at Sheffield Academic Press, for the patience, good taste and profession- alism which they have devoted to steering this publication through all the processes of production. Grateful acknowledgement is also made of continuing financial support for the ACSOP series from the Instituto de España in London, and of a generous grant for the present title from the Fundació Congrés de Cultura Catalana. E.T. A.Y. Sheffield 17/vi/1988 CHAPTER I CATALAN MODERNISME (1888-1911) The term Modernisme has very particular and extensive connota- tions for the development of society and culture in modern Catalonia. It refers to a two- fold process occurring in the Principality (and secondarily in Valencia and the Balearic Islands) during the two crucial decades spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within a continuing surge of social transformation there emerged together impulses for the explicit modernisation of a culture considered archaic, pedestrian and provincial—Catalan culture as it had taken shape during the nineteenth-century revival movement of the Renaixença—and for the creation of a specifically national art. Both motives were intertwined, and related to a complex social ferment. Associated with the growth of political Catalanism, awareness increased that only by becoming cosmopolitan and abreast of the latest advances abroad would Catalan culture shake off its provincial complexion, thus to attain a higher degree of differentiation and independence from perceived deficiencies in the official Spanish-Castilian culture centred in Madrid. Most of the key-notes are sounded, and the external colouring revealed, in this altogether typical passage from an article by Juan Gay on the composer D'Indy, published in the journal Luz for November 1898: ... Let us have the Strausses, the D'Indys, the Chaussons, the Debussys in music; let us have all modern literary works of whatever tendencies; let us have affiches and sentimental mood- paintings, and let all of us together put movement into art, so that it is seen to be alive, it being of no matter that they dub us modernistes or whatever, as long as our actions signify advancement for our Catalonia. If we are mistaken in our tendencies, we shall 12 Alexandre de Riquer have lost nothing: we shall have gone through an artistic revolution [our emphasis], which will eventually establish the true way, towards which we shall direct our steps. What is called for now is much artistic agitation, to allow us to begin to escape from the materialism which engulfs us, by giving as idealised a cast as possible to our existence. As is clearly expressed here, the opening up of Catalonia to contemporary European culture was essential to a project of collective affirmation and renovation. What this is fin-de-siècle Europe offered was an apparently stable political model of bourgeois nationhood, and a beguiling array of artistic options related to profound changes in taste, sensibility and fashion. One thus understands why eclecticism was the watchword of Catalan Modernisme: the outwards scan validated the complementary inwards gaze, the urgent enquiry about selfhood, personal and collective.