From ‘Xènius’ (Barcelona, 1881-Vilanova i la Geltrú, 1954) to The Voice of Catalonia (January 19, 1912). This year marks 150 years since the birth and 75 years since the death of Joaquim Torres-Garcia (Montevideo, 1874-1949), an artist closely linked to Catalonia. Image: fragment of the oil “Philosophy presented by Pal·les al Parnàs as the tenth muse” (1911) work mentioned in this review and which Ors himself had in his secretary’s office at the IEC, where it is now this picture.
Distracted passerby, know that when you enter here, you are not called to “see painting”. To “see painting” it is enough with the exhibitions, universal or others that every day offer you as much as you want, and even more, and more, to the point of suffocation, to the point of nausea , for kilometers and kilometers; and painting the fat, the juicy, the one that flatters the sensuality and smears the eyes… This inside is another business: a business of penance and purification. This is beauty, harmony, not “painting”. This is a severe and magnificent spiritual experiment. (…) Joaquim Torres-Garcia has taken his process of asceticism as far as he had to, in order to paint a naked Goddess, or “Pal·les bringing Philosophy to the Helikon, where she becomes a tenth Muse ” (image attached); but he later knew how to descend in another admirable process of sanity until he represented, already clean of any anecdotalism, the two companions, dressed in jackets and caps, who accompany a mule to the stable of a Catalan farmhouse, leaving the cart lying down, which finally cuts out two black arms, above the clouded sky. (…) Joaquim Torres-Garcia is at this point, among us, not only a high artistic figure, but a high moral figure. He has given the most humble and anonymous jobs the same uncompromising honesty as the most important. And he has tried enough and fulfilled it, this one, with total disinterest, in the shadows, in silence, in proud solitude, struggling with the worst material and moral anxieties. Such a fully painted church, such a chapel, such decoration of a private house, the work of him, would be enough for the glory of an artist. Now we ask, for this potential glory, a consecration. We ask for the solitary of today that social cooperation without which the best products of culture are miserably lost. We ask for Joaquim Torres-Garcia, idealist painter, national painter, praise and respect, walls to be filled, official commissions, security and means indispensable to an art that cannot be trusted, by its very nature, to the versatile risk of ignorant of sensations and of the rewards of the public… And we also dare to ask for the man who has suffered so much for his integrity, a little sympathy, a little joy, a little companionship of the chosen ones, of all those things , always good, but more necessary than ever, when youth is already at its peak, and when the brave fighter’s beard is already adorned with the melancholic nobility of the first white hairs.
Source: www.ara.cat
