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Santiago Rusiñol i Prats was born in Barcelona in 1861 and died seventy years later in Aranjuez, while he was painting the gardens of this city near Madrid. He finished his life painting, the same artistic activity with the one that began his creative trajectory when he was twenty years old.
For then, Rusiñol was a young man of the Catalan bourgeois who had already decided to devote himself to the art to the detriment of the family business: the textile industry. His delivery to the art was entire. Rusiñol, precursor of the Catalan modernism, assumed the figure of modern artist with all his consequences. Along with the painter
Ramon Casas, Rusiñol covered Catalonia in car in search of beautiful places to paint, experience of which his first literary texts were born.
In these trips, Rusiñol and Casas were protagonists of multiple eccentric anecdotes who have happened to be a part of the imaginary popular Catalan. For example, it is explained that once, being in the market of the village of Breda, two friends bought quite a position of selling of ceramics for, soon and before the stupor of the passers-by, to break the whole choice of pans and dishes. In another occasion, Rusiñol tried without success to sell five-peseta coins to four pesetas before the suspicion of the people.
Be as it is, in 1888 he left to Paris. From there he would send La Vanguardia chronicles under the epigraph "Cartas desde el Molino" (Letters from the Mill) with a style mixing the dandy-like character of Oscar Wilde and the Bohemian life of Charles Baudelaire. Back to Catalonia, he founded in Sitges Cau Ferrat, an authentic modernist center where concerts were held, as well as conferences and the festivals Fiestas Modernistas, which now we would call performances. In Cau Ferrat, whose similar one in Barcelona would be the brewery and cabaret
Els Quatre Gats - also founded by him, amongst others-, a meeting spot for intellectuals and artists, the opposite to the decadent romanticism and the stagnation of the culture and the Catalan bourgeoisie, who understood art as a religion and absolute adoration of beauty, under the maxim of "the art for the art".
The first dramas of the author were brief monologues publicised in the magazine L'Avenç between 1890 and 1892. In 1891 he published his first important piece, 'L'alegria que passa', and five years later " Anant pel món " and " Prayers ", collection of poems in prose to the Baudelaire style in which his painter's facet is evident and the abandonment of the folk literature of his first texts. The incursion of Santiago Rusiñol to the theater world coincided with a personal stage with health problems. They extirpated a kidney and it was submitted to a remedy of demorphinisation . Some critics make sure that this fact marked a change of course of Rusiñol’s work.
From his recovery, he specialised in the painting of gardens and theater, with works that were repeating the same formulae. This characteristic turned him into an author of fashion between the public but into an author despised between the critics and the people of literature. Undoubtedly his work "Els Jocs Florals de Canprosa" helped; a parody of the institution dels Jocs Florals and of the conservative Catalan nationalists sectors. Rusiñol also moved away from the new generations of writers like Josep Carner and
Eugeni d'Ors, as well as from the new movement that was arising in opposition to the modernism: the noucentisme. It was precisely, the pages of the magazine Catalunya, directed by the poet Josep Carner where appeared one of the first critiques towards the position tackled by the playwright.
Nevertheless, Rusiñol always maintained his strong personality and his ingenious irony and arrogance. From 1907 until 1927 he wrote in the humorous magazine L'Esquella de la Torratxa a few parody articles under the pseudonym "Xarau" that there was answering to the Glosari of "Xènius" (
Eugeni d'Ors) of Veu de Catalunya.
The change of Rusiñol has been explained in some occasions through two versions – two novelised and dramatised - his most well-known work: "L'auca of the senyor Esteve". In 1907 the novel appeared and in 1917 the stage-play. In the first one "Senyor Esteve" symbolises the bourgeois opposite to the modern artist and in the second one, less sarcastic, in a personage who was adding the tenderness in his character up to the point of turning into an alter ego of the same Rusiñol.
Works:Of his most well-known work, "L'Auca of the senyor Esteve", there are editions in Hermes publishing, Ediciones Selecta-Catalònia y Edicions 62, and a translation in Castilian of 1962: "Las aleluyas del señor Esteve" (The hallelujahs of mister Esteve), trad: Ricard Salvat, Occitan Publishing house, Barcelona, 1962.
- Obres Completes (3 volúmenes), Edicions Selecta-Catalònia
- Santiago Rusiñol, "L'alegria que passa. El jardí abandonat”, Edicions Proa, 2001
- Santiago Rusiñol, "La niña gorda", Quaderns Crema, Barcelona, 1991
- Santiago Rusiñol, "El poble gris", Edicions Selecta-Catalònia, Barcelona
To study in depth his biography:- Margarida Casacuberta. "Santiago Rusiñol: vida, literatura i mite", Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, Barcelona, 1997.
- Josep Pla, "Santiago Rusiñol i el seu temps", dentro "Obra completa" (vol. XIV), ed. Destino, Barcelona, 1970.
Where to find his works: Gothsland Gallery