Maruja Mallo
Carlos Maside
Arturo Soto
Manuel Colmeiro
Candido Fernandez Mazas
Manuel Torres
Luis Huici
Alvaro Cebreiro
Francisco Miguel
Manuel Mendez
Anxel Johan
Xose' Eiroa
Santiago Bonome
Cristino Mallo
Angel Ferrant
Jose' Suarez
Carlos Velo
Antonio Bonet Correa
A Stellar Moment for Galician Culture. The exhibition corresponds to twenty years from 1916 to 1936. The chronological boundaries of this show are not a matter of chance nor have they been chosen randomly. They are the consequence of a careful reflection on the rhythm established in Galicia by a series of cultural facts and historical events. Curator Antonio Bonet Correa
Curator: Antonio Bonet Correa
A Stellar Moment for Galician Culture by Antonio Bonet Correa
The exhibition A Galicia moderna corresponds to two decades from
the first third of the 20th century, that is, the twenty years from 1916
to 1936. The chronological boundaries of this exhibition are not a matter
of chance nor have they been chosen randomly. They are the consequence of
a careful reflection on the rhythm established in Galicia by a series of
cultural facts and historical events. It was in 1919 that the first
Irmandade de Amigos da Fala, a nationalist linguistic association, which
was soon extended to other Galician cities and towns and eventually
became, twelve years later in 1931, the nationalist party Partido
Galeguista, was founded in Corunna. The date that closes the exhibition
in 1936, year when the Spanish Civil War started, interrupting, in a
traumatic and terrible manner, the political process and of moral
regeneration, destroying the brilliant intellectual and artistic activity
of an essential and decisive period for Galicia.
The same as in different Spanish regions, especially those
located in peripheral areas but with their own cultural system, Galicia
started a collective and operational process whereby the country had to
be rescued from the utmost depression and stagnation. From the
nineteenth-century regionalism of our Galician Rexurdimento, Galicia went
into nationalism, thanks to the foundation of the Irmandades da Fala,
with the aim of achieving a Statute of Autonomy, which certainly
reignited Galicia' cultural and political life.
Castelao' work undoubtedly was the one that most profoundly
satirised the most old-fashioned Galician society, which objected to the
regeneration the reformists from the Xeracian Nós were longing for. Son
of a poor fisherman from Rianxo, who was forced to emigrate to America,
Castelao, who lived from 5 to 10 in Argentina, when his family returned
to Galicia went to high school in Pontevedra - the good town - and then
he went to Santiago de Compostela to study Medicine, although he would
never work as a doctor. Painter, caricaturist, writer and dramatist, he
was a man endowed with a political instinct, which led him to be a member
of Parliament in Madrid and one of the main pillars of the Galician
nationalist movement.
In painting, the so-called Os Novos, including Maruja Mallo, Carlos
Maside, Arturo Soto, Manuel Colmeiro, Candido Fernandez Mazas, Manuel
Torres or the youngest of them all José Otero, 'Laxeiro', just to mention
some of the most remarkable figures, constituted a brilliant
constellation which, with their works, broke with the naturalism and
endogamous Modernist picturesqueness of their Galician predecessors. LuÃÂs
Seoane, who made drawings and posters before 1936, would later develop,
in his Buenos Aires exile, the aesthetics of Os Novos. The illustrators
and drawers Luis Huici, Alvaro Cebreiro, Francisco Miguel, Manuel Méndez
or Anxel Johan, the same as painters, with their collaborations with
publishing houses, magazines and newspapers contribute to creating a
style, which will be soon extended to publicity ads, shop signs and
consumption products. Sculptors Xosé Eiroa, Santiago Bonome, Cristino
Mallo and Angel Ferrant - this last one linked to Galicia through his
summer holidays in Betanzos and his friendship with Viqueira - create
projects in compliance with the new aesthetics. It is interesting to
observe that all of these artists hover between post-Cubist New
Objectivity and German Expressionism, and their almost exclusive and
recurring themes: the world of the rural Galicia and the landscape, the
masks and the oscillation between the idyllic and the poetic and the
pathetic situation of a resigned and muffled tragedy. We should also
highlight its renovating formal aspect, which was denominated by art
critic Antón Castro the 'granite aesthetics'. What is undoubted is that
Os Novos established a new guideline and with their endeavour to recover
figurativeness they became a classic reference in the plastic
interpretation of Galicia.
In 1922, the manifesto Mais ala! by the poet Manuel Antonio and the
drawer Alvaro Cebreiro; the creation, in 1923, in Santiago de Compostela,
of the Seminario de Estudos Galegos, and in 1924, the publication in Lugo
of the Ronsel magazine, directed by Evaristo Correa Calderón, are
examples of the irruption of a new avant-garde generation. Literature and
plastic arts, closely linked to magazines like Nós and Alfar, experience
a brilliant development at that time. The poets and writers Manuel
Antonio, Luis Amado Carballo, José Otero EspasandÃÂn and the brothers
Eduardo and Rafael Dieste are the main figures of the so-called 1925
Generation, with a clear and decided renovating will. With foreign
influences and contacts, such as the Portuguese Teixeira de Pascoães,
they all created means of expression, which were unknown up to then.
During the Republic, these are followed by neo-troubadour poets like
Alvaro Cunqueiro and FermÃÂn Bouza-Brey or the independent Ricardo
Carballo Calero. All of them published books or collaborated in the
aforementioned magazines, which, in the case of Cristal, Resol, Papel de
Color, Yunque or Guión, were illustrated with drawings, woodcuts and
linocuts by the artists of parallel aesthetic interests.
In the remaining forms of artistic expression, Galicia was also
impelled by a renovating spirit. We are referring to photography, cinema,
theatre, music and ballet. The way in which photographers like José
Suarez or José MarÃÂa Massó and film makers like Carlos Velo, who borrows
from Eisenstein in his documentary La ciudad y el campo or the film O
carro e o home by the ethnographer XaquÃÂn Lorenzo, 'Xocas', kept in
stride with the avant-garde is awesome and of an axiomatic evidence. The
anthropological sense, which encouraged the investigations and
publications of the university students pertaining to the Seminario de
Estudos Galegos, was joined by the formal will of a new vision, the
assembly of what seized by an eye whose aim was to reduce reality to its
essential, even abstract, elements. In theatre, like in the poetry rooted
in the tradition of the collections of old songs, the medieval legends
and the historicism of pieces of work like O Mariscal, by Antón Villar
Ponte and Ramón Cabanillas, we should highlight the dramatic plays of the
'Art Theatre', such as those written by Otero Pedrayo at
Castelao'
request, who dreamt of seeing on Galician stages plays like the ones he
saw in the Russian Theatre of Paris. In this regard, we should not forget
that in 1929, the Aguilar Publishing House released a volume titled
Teatro Grotesco Ruso, with short plays written by Gogol, Tolstoy and
Andreiev, which we know was very interesting for the Basque architect and
photographer Aizpúrua and other avant-gardists from other regions in
Spain. Vicente Risco, who wrote in 1921 TeorÃÂa y -Estórea do drama
(Anacos que poideran servir pros galegos qu'scriben pra escea),
supported the idea of founding a cultural system in which humour and
myths were merged together. In the correlation of Galician arts and
humanities, masks and disguises go hand in hand with the grotesque and
the dramatic. In the popular sphere, the Carnivals in VerÃÂn are a
paradigm of our assertion. We could also add Camilo DÃÂaz Baliño' stage
designs and the book by Eugenio Montes Estética de la muiñeira, from 1922
the ballet promoted by Jesús Bal, composer and musicologist, who wrote in
1924 the book Hacia el ballet gallego. The masks made by Castelao for the
stage performance of Os vellos non deben de namorarse close in a symbolic
manner one of the last panels of our exhibition.
An essential chapter is that of architecture and urbanism. In the
19th century, Galician cities and villages had hardly had a really modern
development. In the early 20th century, Vigo and Corunna experienced an
urban expansion, which in Ourense and even Lugo, involved a considerable
change in the physiognomy of the urban landscape due to the new
architecture. The eclectic stone buildings in Vigo or the Banco Pastor
building in Corunna wanted to look similar to the American skyscrapers
and the Art Deco and rationalist buildings wanted to change the city'
layout completely.
That world, where everything seemed brand spanking new,
suddenly went dim and after the tough years of the Civil War, turned into
a long petrified night, in which, however, there were some survivors in
the inner exile and also from the exile of the 'emigrant Galicia', who
testified the great hope and brightness that had had one of the most
splendorous, fertile and fecund moments in Galicia' culture and art.
Extracts from the text that Antonio Bonet Correa, curator of the
exhibition, wrote for the catalogue of the show.
Image: Alphonso R. Castelao, Estudo de testa. Debuxo a lápiz, papel, 14,5 x 12 cm.
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea
First Floor and basement
Valle Inclan s/n 15704 Santiago de Compostela