Barcelona 1861 Aranjuez 1931

Painter, writer, collector and playwright, Santiago Rusiñol was born in Barcelona in the bosom of a family of textile industrialists from Manlleu. Despite being the heir to the family business, Rusiñol, at the age of twenty-eight, married to Lluïsa Denís and father of a daughter just a few months old, Maria, decided to take up the life of an artist to professionally devote himself to what, up until then, had been his main hobby: painting. He left to study in Paris and from his stay in the neighborhood of Montmartre, from 1889 to 1893, emerged what would be his first book, Desde el Molino (1894), a collection of articles appearing regularly in the La Vanguardia newspaper that make up, along with his chronicles of trips and monologues L’home de l’orgue (1890) and El sarau de Llotja (1891), the artist’s first contribution to the arts world. During these years, Rusiñol exhibited his work at the Paris Salons and also showed his works at the Parés Gallery in Barcelona as a clear salutary lesson. Accompanied by painter Ramon Casas, sculptor Enric Clarasó and art critic Raimon Casellas, he set out to stir the waters Barcelona’s stagnant cultural life. He participated in a project of young modernist intellectuals gathered together in the milieu of L’Avenç magazine (1889-1893) and went on to become, as of 1894, Modernism’s most visible leader. Contributing to this, besides the artist’s charismatic personality, was his capacity to develop around his own life the image of the modern artist, the priest of art and defender of art for art’s sake in a materialistic, prosaic society, and turning this image, with the support of literature and his public activity, into a myth. Inseparable from the building of this image is the relationship the painter maintained with the town of Sitges, the White Subur, Mecca of Modernism, as of 1891, the creation of Cau Ferrat as a Temple of Art, and the organizing of the provocative modernist fiestas or festivals and performances like the streamer dance or the monument to El Greco, between 1892 and 1899.
 
The pictorial and literary production from these years share the bittersweet tone and ironic or lyric distancing with which the artist’s ego confronted reality. A reality that, in the late 19th century, at the height of a positivism crisis, required new rapprochement channels that went beyond the boundaries of reason and which recovered emotion, suggestion and intuition as forms of knowledge. Programmatically responding to these assumptions, that launched Santiago Rusiñol in European symbolism, were some of the texts published in L’Avenç, especially “Els caminants de la terra” or “La suggestió del paisatge” (1893), the first prose poems in Catalan literature. In 1896, along with twenty other texts, they became a part of the book Anant pel món, the work that shaped his model of a modern artist in the image of a hypersensitive, refined, skeptical individual separated from the rest of the world, a politically committed modernist and outraged defender of poetry against the prose of modern bourgeois society. It is the voice of this artist-priest that recites Oracions (Prayers, 1897) to Beauty, that could be considered the first book of prose poems published in Spain, the voice that echoes Impresiones de Arte (Impressions of Art, 1897) collected from the articles published in La Vanguardia by the artist during his trips to Paris, Florence and Andalusia, quite the compendium of aesthetic theory, and of the repertoire of Fulls de la vida (The Leaves of Life, 1898), a collection of short narrations and prose poems from the Decadence School that constitute the great quarry of Santiago Rusiñol’s later dramatic production.

Between 1889 and 1899, Santiago Rusiñol carried out, in the flesh, the artist’s challenge of making artistic creation a channel to explore boundaries. Added to this exploration was the addiction to morphine that would determine the artist’s life and work as of 1894, the year coinciding with the creation of two of Rusiñol’s most emblematic painting, La morfina and La medalla, and the discovery of one of the quintessential themes in both Rusiñol’s painting and literature: the abandoned garden. The treatment the artist underwent to cure himself of his morphine addiction starting in 1899 and the operation performed on him which, one year later, left him with just one kidney, prevented the artist from succumbing to the abyss and caused him to enter a new creative phase, marked by his dedication to theater with an increasingly greater commercial vision and his specialization in painting gardens all over Catalonia and Spain (Mallorca, Ibiza, Valencia, Gerona, Aranjuez, Cuenca, Arbúcies), with brief but significant forays in Italy.

With the publication of the lyric poem entitled El jardí abandonat at an event with musical illustrations by Joan Gay and the publication of the Jardins d’Espanya folder, in 1903, a collection of Rusiñol’s forty best gardens accompanied by a sample of poetry by his favorite poets, Rusiñol seemed to say goodbye to art understood as an exploration of the self and begin to try out ways to reach the general public. In this respect, it is significant that a piece like L’alegria que passa, a poetic scene in one act with musical illustrations by Enric Morera, conceived within the framework of Adrià Gual’s Teatre Íntim and which debuted in the middle of an aura of refinement and avant-gardism, was the work that elevated Santiago Rusiñol to the stage of the Romea Theater, merely promoting the work’s most theatrical elements. From this moment on and until 1930, the debuts, success and controversies of Rusiñol’s theater are a part of the history of Catalan theater: Cigales i formigues (1901), Llibertat! (1901), El malalt crònic and Els jocs florals de Canprosa (1902), El pati blau, L’hèroe and El místic (1903), La lletja and El bon policia (1905), La bona gent (1906), La mare, Els savis de Vilatrista and La merienda fraternal (1907), La intel·lectual (1909), El despatriat (1912), L’auca del senyor Esteve, Gente bien (1917), among many other works that succeeded each other until Miss Barceloneta, his last.

His choice to reach the general public explains Rusiñol’s cultivation of the novel, from the experiment El poble gris (1902) to the felicitous formula that made L’auca del senyor Esteve (1907) one of the greatest novels about modern Barcelona, to the genre parodies represented by La Niña Gorda (1914), El català de La Mancha (1917) and En Josepet de Sant Celoni (1918), and the artist’s incorporation, as of 1905, in the world of the humorous magazine L’Esquella de la Torratxa and of its publisher, Antonio López. From this platform, Santiago Rusiñol fought against Noucentisme (a cultural-political movement in Catalonia from the early 19th century), put into words as of 1906 in the “Glossary” by Xènius in La Veu de Catalunya, with the creation of Xarau and of an alternative “Glossary” that began to appear from 1907 and that continued, published weekly, until 1925. From the texts in Xarau appeared a few important books by Santiago Rusiñol: Del Born al Plata (1911), the collection entitled Glossari (1912), L’illa de la calma (1913), Coses viscudes and Màximes i mals pensaments (1927).

When Santiago Rusiñol died, on June 13th 1931, in Aranjuez, for some years his image, reviled by Noucentist intellectuals, had already been rehabilitated and turned into one of the referents in the modernization and cultural normalization of 1930’s Catalonia.