2—
Popular Art and Rituals
Leaving a feminist conference in Barcelona in October 1988, I stepped right into a parade going down the Rambla. Representations of President Ronald Reagan and Spanish President Felipe González looked like nans I knew from Corpus Christi and Virgin of Mercy Day celebrations. The crosses of Corpus Christi had become missiles, and the traditional eagles and bulls had become warships. There were signs that proclaimed opposition to NATO. And one demanded, "Make Art, Not War!"
Such a slogan was particularly appropriate in Barcelona, a city that for a hundred years has prided itself on its artistic traditions. Despite the many artists and artistic movements that Catalunya has produced since the Middle Ages (including its claim to have nurtured Picasso), the regional cult of art and pride in indigenous traditions really dates to the turn of the century, when so many other forms of local awareness also emerged.
Just as one who arrives in the middle of a performance may or may not understand the play, the young Picasso, who came to Barcelona in 1895, may or may not have understood that he was witnessing a community in the making. The particular new community with which Picasso would be most intimately involved had its beginnings in the Four Cats Café and Art Gallery, open from 1897 to 1903.[1] Financed by Santiago Russinyol i Prats and managed by Pere Romeu and Miquel Utrillo, the café became a kind of secular shrine, filled with objects of devotion peculiar to its own religion. There, where artists mixed with
artisans, and where Pablo Picasso had his first exhibit in 1900, the same artists who introduced avant-garde art from Paris resurrected forgotten artists like El Greco and promoted interest in ancient regional crafts such as ceramics. Popular local pastimes such as puppet shows became aesthetic rites. Not just a bastion of lost arts, the Four Cats functioned as a clearing house where budding artists like Picasso learned about the artistic trends of the time in a community free of snobbism about artistic hierarchies. Breaking with Western traditions in which the aristocracy, the high clergy, and the wealthy determined value in arts and decoration, Barcelona's new artistic movement was based on the union of bohemians and artisans and on their recognition both of the merits of past artistic styles and of crafts and entertainments popular among common people but never before considered art.
The official art of late-nineteenth-century Spain was dominated by academic and romantic historical painting. Its bastion was the Llotja Art School, where Picasso's father was a professor. Forced to matriculate, Picasso stayed only a few months before he succeeded in escaping in late 1897. For more than a decade before his quick retreat, other local artists, with an inkling that something exciting was going on abroad, had been traveling to London and Paris. They returned bearing news about art nouveau, impressionism, postimpressionism, and symbolist art. In appropriating new styles, they also developed sympathy for non-Western arts. But long before Picasso became familiar with Iberian sculpture and African masks in the early twentieth century, he and other artists throughout Europe were fascinated by the primitive within—earlier art forms and folk art from the countryside around them.[2] The exhibit of Gothic painting and sculpture at the 1888 Universal Exposition in Barcelona had already effectively challenged academic art by introducing the Catalan public to medieval religious painting and sculpture, never before treated as art.[3]
A distinction among "high," "popular," and "folk" arts had not yet come into being in turn-of-the-century Barcelona, for the latter two were not considered "art" at all. Popular entertainments such as shadow and hand puppets were certainly never regarded as art until Miquel Utrillo and Pere Romeu, fresh from Paris, reexamined puppet shows in a new light. Folk arts, including wooden carvings for churches or votive paintings produced by artisan painters to commemorate escapes from disaster, came to be considered art only after critics like Russinyol proclaimed their ability to meet his definition of the word, which was that they transform consciousness. For Santiago Russinyol, Miquel Utrillo,
and Pere Romeu, art, whatever its physical nature, had to provide a means for overcoming the lack of spirituality and the commercialism they associated with modern life in the industrial city of Barcelona.
While civic rituals imitated and transformed Catholic pageantry in the streets, artistic rituals were, as we shall see, doing the same at Russinyol's villa at Sitges, as well as creating at the Four Cats Café a new artistic community, one that Russinyol perceived in quasi-religious terms. Using art to try to direct life in Barcelona toward more spiritual goals, Russinyol attempted to establish it as the secular equivalent of religion, with artists as the high priests. To him, being an artist meant practicing "the religion of art and truth, crystallizing aspirations in work, dominating the base and profane world, and demonstrating an ideal by finding divinity in human beings."[4] Given to depression, Russinyol frequently altered his own consciousness through the use of morphine. He sought to change popular consciousness as well—through painting, through the establishment of the Four Cats Café, and, increasingly, through his work as a playwright.
Santiago Russinyol
Had Russinyol been a character in one of his own plays he could not have been any more colorful. Born in 1861 into a wealthy family of textile manufacturers, he was orphaned in youth and raised by his grandparents. Whereas his brother, Albert Russinyol, took over the family business, exploited his workers, initiated a major labor struggle in 1909, and helped to found the Catalan nationalist Regionalist League, Santiago was an entirely different type.[5] A maverick, he outraged his grandparents by deciding to become a painter. To their consternation, he took painting lessons from Tomás Moragas, Barcelona's leading watercolorist, and then, in 1878, moved to Paris with his life-long friend Ramón Casas.[6]
Two prosperous young men, Russinyol and Casas were always eager for artistic adventures of all kinds. They had traveled through Catalunya by wagon in the 1870s, and it was probably during these trips that Russinyol first became seriously acquainted with popular village entertainments and indigenous artists. Now the artistic revolution going on in Paris drew them irresistibly. They attended the Gervex Academy, and Russinyol worked with Puvis de Chavannes and Eugène Carrière. They
shared a room above the Moulin de la Galette, the bohemian nightclub in Montmartre that was a Mecca for the young avant-garde of Paris. By mingling with painters and musicians like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Erik Satie, Russinyol and Casas absorbed the most radical ideas of the new French artistic pioneers.[7] Russinyol, moreover, became Catalunya's prophet of the new art by reporting on creative developments for various Barcelona newspapers. Together, too, he and Casas, by returning for a joint exhibit at the Parés Gallery in 1890, helped to carry the message of avant-garde art back to Barcelona. Constantly expanding his own artistic skills, Russinyol began writing monologues in 1890, and by 1891 he was turning out full plays. Even more than painting, the theater may have provided Russinyol with the sense of community that he seemed to crave. In every endeavor, he was a showman.
Russinyol inherited a large part of his wealth in the nineties, and he commissioned the Catalan nationalist architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch to build him a villa at Sitges, about twenty miles south of Barcelona. In the eighties, Russinyol had begun buying up Catalan antiques, among them wrought-iron Visigothic crowns, keys, candlesticks, and iron work from church grilles, appreciating their rough, earthy, raw quality. Unlike Castilian blacksmiths, who worked iron in the same intricate patterns as silversmiths and goldsmiths, Catalan artisans liked and respected the material's own particular character. Russinyol did too, and he built the Sitges house to serve as a reliquary for these craftspeople's work.[8] Nicknamed the House of Iron, the villa became an emblem of the kind of artistic community that Russinyol hoped to create.
In 1892, 1893, and 1894, Russinyol periodically drew the cream of Barcelona's artistic community to what he called "modernist" festivals in Sitges. The first Modernist Festival, in 1892, included a folk opera commissioned by Russinyol for the occasion, to demonstrate that peasant life was a suitable subject for art. The next year saw the performance of a Catalan translation of Maurice Maeterlinck's first play, L'intruse .[9]
Then, on November 9, 1894, Russinyol adapted ritual practices from Barcelona's holiday celebrations to what one journalist called a "spectacle of civic religion" honoring art.[10] The villagers in Sitges prepared for the event as they would for a Catholic festival. Along the route of the planned procession, people decorated their balconies and windows. The parade itself began at the Sitges station, where Barcelona's leading artists were greeted by a receiving committee with Lluís Lambarta and Pere Romeu on horseback in the lead, holding a Catalan flag
aloft. The artists then joined the quasi-religious procession, made up of Russinyol, the city officials, and the two mounted escorts.[11]
It was common in religious processions for people to carry effigies or relics, and the same was true of the artistic pageant at Sitges, in which avant-garde artists Ricard Canals, Ramón Casas, Joaquim Mir, and others known for their agnosticism or outright anticlericalism carried two tabernacles containing El Greco paintings, one of Saint Mary Magdalene, the other of Saint Peter. Catalan interest in El Greco dated to Santiago Russinyol's purchase of two works by the painter from a junk shop in Paris, discovered by his friend the artist Ignacio Zuloaga.[12] Russinyol's delighted response to the El Grecos, with their metallic colors and elongated bodies, reflected his appreciation for what was distinctive in popular folk art. Underrated and neglected for over three hundred years, El Greco's style was as new to Russinyol and his friends in Barcelona as that of Paul Gauguin and other avant-garde artists they had learned to appreciate in Paris. In fact, the local people in Sitges seem to have thought for a long time that El Greco was a contemporary artist whom Russinyol was trying to help.[13]
After the El Grecos were paraded through the street on that November 9, the 150 writers and artists invited from Barcelona lunched under tents on the beach. Following the meal, they retired to the main hall, where Russinyol himself launched a series of lectures and poetry readings. Outlining his religion of aesthetics, he railed against modern life, which, he said, offers "everything for the miserable flesh and nothing for the noble spirit." He attacked the old aristocracy, "which ruled through force," and modern society, which "exalts science and material life," has destroyed religion, and "will destroy artistic sensibility unless artists and writers take up the challenge and substitute the worship of art for religion and science."[14] "Balanced between sentiment and childish energy," in the words of a local journalist, Russinyol became the leader of the "party of religion and art" in Barcelona.[15]
The Four Cats Café
Sitges was too far from the city to serve as the main cathedral of the new religion of art. For that purpose, Russinyol, Casas, and Utrillo created the Four Cats Café, hiring Pere Romeu to assist Utrillo in managing it. Close to the Plaza of Catalunya, the café, art gallery,
puppet theater, and beer hall occupied the ground floor of a small apartment building designed by Puig i Cadafalch (see map 1). On the sign at the entrance to the café was a picture of some mischievous cats attributed to the young Picasso.[16] The name Four Cats had two sources. One was a Catalan saying, "No one's here but us four cats"—meaning a gang. The other source was undoubtedly the Chat Noir, the famous Parisian café where Miquel Utrillo and Pere Romeu had begun their artistic careers manipulating shadow puppets.
Although shadow puppetry now seems exotic, it was a popular entertainment in late-nineteenth-century Paris and Barcelona. More than any other popular art, it represented a blend of sound and illusion, much in the vein of movies and music videos today. Shadow puppet theater resembled cinema in other ways as well. Sometimes lewd, puppetry was not considered cultivated—though, like film, it could be arty. Unlike stage plays, shadow puppet acts were seen on a white screen in a darkened room, thus promoting the dreamlike state that morphine users like Russinyol sought, a sense of totality. Then, too, the experience of drifting into a fantasy world structured by images projected onto a screen was shared with a larger public—another parallel with the movies.[17]
From the early nineteenth century on, shadow puppetry had been popular in Barcelona.[18] The screen, slicked down with oil or water to make it translucent, was usually set up in a large apartment or loft. The "actors" were heavy cardboard figures mounted on wooden bases. Wire strings attached to movable heads and joints enabled the jumping-jack characters to engage in swordplay, coy manipulations of fans or handkerchiefs, or broad head movements. More refined action was inhibited by the fact that the audience was seeing everything in silhouette.[19] Lanterns in which lime was burned provided illumination (limelight) until finally, at the end of the nineteenth century in places like the Four Cats, electricity could provide the steady stream of light that brought scenery and characters into sharp relief.[20]
The plays varied. At first, little comedies focused on dramatic moments like lion hunts and falling bridges, but the audiences tired of such scenes, and so, gradually, narratives emerged.[21] Romantic stories of love and death based on popular legends appeared in shadow puppet plays performed in Catalan in the 1830s; then farces with their bawdy overtones—so popular in legitimate Castilian-language theater—entered the repertoire, as well as presentations of such popular entertainments
as bullfighting (prefiguring Picasso's ink-blot toreadors of almost one hundred years later).[22]
Pere Romeu and Miquel Utrillo brought to life Russinyol's dream of using aesthetic experiences to create a sense of artistic community. Pere Romeu—puppeteer, auto mechanic, roller-skating rink operator, gym owner, cabaret proprietor, and sportsman—was just the kind of artistic entrepreneur Russinyol was looking for to guide the project. Lincolnesque in both height and homeliness, he was also short-tempered and brusque.[23] He looked like a habitué of the Parisian Latin Quarter; according to the visiting Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, "he had a long face surrounded by stringy black hair, below which was a huge tie that trumpeted its loud colors to shock the bourgeoisie."[24] He was a late-nineteenth-century bohemian who believed that his life was an attack on bourgeois materialist values and that he was born to make art.
Romeu seems to have come alive in Paris when he was in his early twenties. He took Toulouse-Lautrec's friend and subject, the cabaret manager Aristide Bruant, as a model for the role he hoped to play in promoting artistic entertainment, bringing together avant-garde crafts-people and artists and providing an atmosphere where art could flourish amid popular entertainments.[25] In the meantime, he found work in cafés, where he developed his skills as a puppeteer. In the mid-eighties in Paris, he met Miquel Utrillo at the Chat Noir. Utrillo, one of the few avant-garde Catalan artists actually born in Barcelona, was a lifelong folklorist. He sometimes performed Catalan dances like the cirici in Parisian cafés, seeking to acquaint audiences with folk dances that he found both beautiful and strange. More of a student and scholar than Romeu, Utrillo had been trained as an engineer, and he went to Paris to work at the Institut National Agronomique. But his heart was in cabarets. He worked with Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, the socialist illustrator who contributed drawings to the Chat noir , the journal published by the cabaret. It was through a job as correspondent for the Barcelona newspaper Vanguardia , however, that Utrillo managed to support himself in Paris between 1889 and 1893. He had an affair during this time with artist Suzanne Valandon and may have fathered her son, the painter Maurice Utrillo, to whom he gave his name.
Utrillo's technological skills and his artistic interests drew him to shadow puppetry, with which he must have been familiar from his childhood. In 1891, he enticed the composer Erik Satie into providing
music for a puppet show he was producing in the basement of the nightclub Auberge du Clou.[26] As a trained engineer, Utrillo was an expert at special effects. He knew "how to bring together art and science as brothers, to obtain rare contrasts of color with changing effects of light," Russinyol reported.[27]
Utrillo and Romeu traveled with Léon-Charles Marot's Théâtre des Ombres Parisiennes to the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago, where the shadow puppet plays "Le virtuose" and "Une page d'amour" by Steinlen and "La conquête de la lune" by Miquel Utrillo were scheduled.[28] When the fair closed, Utrillo went on to Cuba and then New York, where he again worked on puppet shows for a while before his return to Barcelona in 1895. Romeu, for his part, traveled to New York and San Francisco, making contacts with puppeteers along the way. He returned to Barcelona and participated in the Modernist Festival that Russinyol organized in Sitges in 1894.[29] Three years later, in 1897, he and Utrillo helped to found the Four Cats, where they almost immediately launched shadow puppet performances.
The people whom Pere Romeu attracted to the café were bohemian artists, a few of them independently wealthy but most lower middle class. They came largely from artisanal families ranging from noodle and button makers, who lived above their shops, to jewelers and iron-mongers. There was the tailor Benet Soler Vidal, nicknamed "Scraps," who traded suits and pants to young dandies like Picasso in exchange for individual and family portraits. Juli González, whose whole family were wrought-iron workers responsible for balconies, door knockers, lamp posts, and gates patterned on ancient motifs, also frequented the Four Cats, as did the jeweler Lluís Bonnin. González moved to Paris and became a sculptor; Bonnin, who tried his hand as an illustrator and a painter, moved to Nice in 1900, where he remained a jeweler. Other habitués were Julià Pi and his father, Juli, who doubled as a messenger for the borough of Gracia when he was not creating the plays for hand puppets that he and his son performed together at theaters and cafés.[30]
Utrillo, Romeu, and Russinyol promoted the integration of avant-garde Parisian art with popular art at the Four Cats and to that end launched a shadow puppet theater there in December 1897. The first performance of the sombras artísticas , artistic shadow theater, used sets designed by Utrillo and Ramón Pitxot. Two more programs were presented before April 1898, when the shadow plays were discontinued.[31] Although shadow puppets, as Utrillo and Romeu conceived them, created a total theater of the senses, blending music, movement, and paint-
ing, they proved no match for silent films, which began to open in Barcelona in the late 1890s.
Hand Puppets
Far more popular than shadow puppets were realistic hand puppets, a popular entertainment of peasants and working-class people throughout Catalunya. Introduced to the Four Cats in 1898, they played a significant role in keeping the café open until 1903. With different, more ribald and bawdy roots in the folk culture of the countryside than shadow puppets, hand puppets appealed to a much larger, less sophisticated audience. In fact, puppet theaters permeated the working-class district near Citadel Park, especially along Princess Street at the edge of the Gothic Quarter. There were many theaters near the Rambla of Catalunya, near the Plaza of Catalunya, on Sadurni Street, and on Robador Street, in the old political and cultural centers of Barcelona.
Besides the theaters devoted entirely to hand puppet productions, intended for the whole family and performed with music in the Catalan language, some cafés presented puppet plays as well. The puppet café district centered on Robador Street and Saint John's Flats, a block away from the Four Cats—which, to a certain extent, vied for attention with its more plebeian competitors.
The Four Cats played an important role in reintroducing artists to the popular art of hand puppetry. Rubén Darío, understanding no Catalan, had plenty of time to reflect on the ambience around the puppet show at the Four Cats when, in 1898, he visited the café at Russinyol's invitation:
The bocks of beer circulated to the high-pitched sound of the puppets. Naturally, puppets at the Four Cats spoke in Catalan, and I could hardly understand what was going on in the play. The story was of local interest, and it must have been swell considering how hard the audience was laughing. I couldn't understand what the characters were saying, but they carried sticks as in Molière's plays, and the military was subjected to ridicule. The set designs were truly beautiful. It is clear that whoever designed the miniature theater did so with love and care.[32]
The puppet theater was like a civic rite in a small space and became a metaphor for the community that the founders of the Four Cats hoped
to create. Many artists, Ramón Casas chief among them, contributed to the impression that the Four Cats was a magical world in which everyday life was transformed into something beautiful and sublime, in part by means of puppetry. Dissolving the distinction between reality and illusion, Casas and Utrillo depicted Romeu as a puppet actor on the ceramic decorations they designed for their modernista -style puppet stage in 1898. These show a modern woman striding through a field of iris, being greeted by familiar characters from Catalan hand puppet shows. Among the spirited denizens of this world are the Devil, a member of the Civil Guard, and Pere Romeu himself, decked out in the anima , or inner glove, that serves as the puppet's body under its outer layers of costumes.[33] Here, then, Casas and Utrillo were using the traditional Catalan craft of ceramics to express modern themes in a modernista style.
As Casas's 1898 poster for the puppet theater indicates, the puppets became the emblem of the Four Cats (plate 1). In the ad, Casas showed himself to be a master of the Japanese-style, flattened patterns characteristic of prints then being produced in France. Another source for the flattening may have been the folk paintings that hung on church altars all over Barcelona. The poster casts Pere Romeu in his role as puppeteer. Against a gray background like those that Whistler was making famous in Paris, he is portrayed with his hair worn long in bohemian fashion, falling from beneath his broad-brimmed hat. As puppet master, Romeu has turned into a dark puppet with fixed hands. In the lower right triangle of the poster is depicted the chief puppet used in the shows that puppeteer Juli Pi gave from 1898 until the café closed in 1903. With his regular features, short hair, and red blouse, the painted puppet is representative of the sort of realistic hand puppet used in late-nineteenth-century Barcelona. Above the figures at the top of the poster are the words Puchinell-lis , which strictly speaking means marionettes, though these were hand puppets.
The avant-garde artists of Barcelona associated with the Four Cats viewed the puppeteers as pure showmen who were rooted in folk culture. And they were right. At country fairs, it was common for the traveling puppeteer simply to throw a cape over his head, lift his arms, and perform his puppet show wherever the crowds gathered (figure 3). In the city of Barcelona, puppet shows had by the 1860s become a popular family entertainment enjoyed by the city's new immigrants and people of all classes. They were beloved theatrical events that, for the price of a cup of coffee, anyone could enjoy.[34]
Image not available.
Fig. 3.
Puppeteer Juli Pi demonstrating his technique.
Courtesy of the Institut Municipal d'Història, Casa de l'Ardiaca, Barcelona.
Puppet shows, like street pageants, were communal rituals that reaffirmed shared traditions. Audiences in turn-of-the-century Barcelona knew the plots and characters of most of the puppet plays and probably derived pleasure and reassurance from their predictability, much as they did from the constancy of civic and religious rituals. The ubiquitous protagonists, Tofol and Titella, both had long histories in European theater dating back to the sixteenth-century commedia dell'arte. That earlier improvised comedy's Christofi Pulcinella became Punch in England, Hanswurst in Germany, Cristoval Polchinella in Spain, and Cristofol or Tofol in Catalunya.[35]
Like so many of Barcelona's immigrants, Tofol was a peasant, a classic bumpkin, natural and naive rather than stupid. He was also the classic sly peasant, always sensitive to matters concerning his own world. Tofol bore up under all his misfortunes and usually outsmarted his enemies, as often through his witlessness as through guile. Tofol "[suffered] all injuries, even those meant for others. . . . If the Devil [tried] to land a blow on Titella, you [could] be sure that Tofol [would] arrive just in time to receive it. He [could be identified] by his short black beard and the vacant expression on his face."[36]
Titella, the other male lead in Catalan puppet shows, was not as feisty or violent as his counterparts Guignol in Lyon or Kaspar in Germany.[37] Titella often had a boyish, ruffian quality immediately recognizable in Barcelona's newspaper boys and in the kids who collected trolley tickets. Tough on the outside, Titella was basically a good soul and, despite mishaps, frequently came out on top.[38] He usually outsmarted those around him by his humor and fast talk. It is culturally significant that, like many of the new immigrants, he spoke Catalan mixed with Castilianisms.[39]
As in myths and children's stories, the plots of the puppet plays were both repetitive and infinitely various. Titles point to numerous categories: there were the sentimental stories "Rose the Blind Girl" or "The Lost Daughter"; for bawdy comedy, "The Cave of the Moorish King" or "The Soldier and the Servant Maid" would do; for straight comedy, there was "The Servant with the Beret" or "Braying for the Lost Donkey"; and the political twist could be had with "The Incendiaries."[40] Because puppet shows reflected popular consciousness, the repertoire was quite sexist. Two recurrent female characters were featured. One was Marieta, a Judy figure, who was always tired owing to her difficult life. Her condition did not warrant viewers' sympathy, however, since part of her trouble came from deceiving her husband or some other
male who depended on her.[41] She frequently interacted with an older woman called La Cascarria—who could be anyone from her mother-in-law to the maid. This character sometimes assumed the aspect of the menacing, witchlike Celestina, the traditional Spanish figure of the uncontrollable postmenopausal woman.[42] Puppet shows mirrored political culture in Barcelona; in some ways, then, they were radical, but in others reactionary—just as the city itself was.
In that puppet plays helped to cement the artistic community, it comes as no surprise that Russinyol actively promoted puppet shows and other traditional arts. In his 1911 play The Prodigious Puppet , a comic melodrama about Tofol's marriage to a countess who betrayed him, human actors assumed the stereotyped roles of puppets. But since Tofol always triumphs despite his troubles, it was certain from the beginning—as in any melodrama—that the story would have a happy ending of the kind poor people could not necessarily expect in their own lives.[43] Even though puppet theater, unlike the lives of common people, was rather predictable, the indomitability of puppet heroes and heroines as they repeatedly battled the same forces gave their real-life counterparts courage in facing their own misfortunes.
Puppets and Culture
Puppeteers served as archetypes for liberated artists living outside society and free from its constraints. Retaining the aura of traveling players who were at liberty to say and do as they pleased, they seemed to be magicians who could manipulate reality.[44] And because hand puppets appeared under bright lights, the lilliputian "actors" with their naturalistic faces seemed to represent an alternative reality, an illusion that Catalan puppeteers' skills only enhanced. Their tricks were legion. In "The Police Search," a play taken from the theater, a leading character was a knife grinder, who actually used his trundle and so made the familiar noise associated with the knife grinders found on Barcelona's streets. Catalan puppets also got out of bed and put on shoes, or rode horses that they dismounted on stage. One of the puppets in the Theater Museum in Barcelona is a picador from the bullfight, complete with mount.[45]
Puppeteers like Juli Pi and his son Julià were craftspeople, play-wrights, actors, and impresarios. Although Pi earned his living as a mes-
senger, he was the author of more than one hundred puppet plays and creator of over 150 puppets. In keeping with his place as a theatrical personality, "he wore wide and puffy pants, pointy shoes, and a musketeer's beard"—the bohemian actor's costume.[46] With the aid only of his son, Pi was able to mount full plays. When he needed additional support he used hired hands, including those of Picasso's lifelong friend the sculptor Manuel Martínez Hugué, known as Manolo.[47]
Juli Pi learned the craft of puppetry when as a youth he started attending the puppet shows on Carmen Street presented by Joaquim Saez. By the time Pi was fifteen, in 1867, he already had a concession to perform his own shows in a café on Migdia Street.[48] He and another puppeteer, Isidro Busquets, followed in the footsteps of the distinguished puppeteer Federicu, who had changed the repertoire by adding representations of popular novels like The Count of Monte Cristo to the farces that had previously dominated the puppet theater.[49]
Busquets and Pi then went further. Instead of using the primitive puppets that consisted of wooden heads and cloth bodies, they commissioned new puppets with wooden heads, shoulders, and midriffs carved from a single piece of wood. Cardboard arms passed through holes in the wood, ending in wooden hands. The puppeteer's three middle fingers would be slipped inside the torso and head, while the thumb and pinky moved the arms. Attached to the torso was an inner glove known as the anima that enabled the puppeteer to create the illusion of a moving body under the outer garment. The puppets were given glass eyes and real hair for their mustaches, beards, and hairdos.[50]
At least subliminally, the hand puppets of Barcelona resembled religious statues, for they were made by the same artisans.[51] Breaking with the commedia dell'arte tradition of giving puppets exaggeratedly caricatured faces, artisans fashioned their Catalan puppets with the same realistic expressions they gave to both devotional objects and gegants .[52] As we have seen, civic rites, religious celebrations, and artistic rituals borrowed characters and performances from one another. The consequent repetition of familiar patterns undoubtedly contributed to a sense of continuity and tradition in religion, social relations, and art.
Just as people called on the saints whether they were believers or not, they also turned to the puppet plays for insights into their own lives. Throughout history, puppet plays reflected and commented on psychological dilemmas. In the late Middle Ages, Dominican friars put on puppet shows to promote fears of Judgment. Chief among their actors
were the Devil and Death, and as late as the turn of the century, the Devil and Death always made ritual appearances at the end of every Catalan puppet play.[53] After the requisite happy ending, when Titella and others were celebrating, in came Death and the Devil.[54] Rather than being allies, however, the two were antagonists. Audiences usually favored Death, who spoke Catalan, over the Devil, who used Castilian.[55]
Fights, the resolution of misunderstandings, and the triumph of good over evil after violent interludes were part of the excitement and dynamic force in traditional puppet theater. Before the resolution, violence must cleanse the scene. Thus, in puppet theater as in terrorist attacks on public celebrations, violence plays a ritualized part. The symbolism of puppet theater, moreover, leaves little doubt about puppet politics. Two stock sets of figures in turn-of-the-century puppet theater were members of the Civil Guard and the municipal police, known as the urbanas . Like the Devil, the urbanas wore red capes and spoke Castilian. Also like the Devil, the urban guards and police often wielded sticks. But neither the Devil nor the authorities ever defeated Titella, the Catalan hero. At the end of a typical late-nineteenth-century show, either the puppets sang or a musical instrument played the "Dance of Tururut," a word meaning roughly, "That's All, Folks." It went as follows:
In the dance of tururut
He who squeals, he who squeals;
In the dance of tururut,
He who squeals has been hit.[56]
Vicariously sharing the experiences of the puppets, viewers became a community of Tofols. But ties in and around the artistic community were as fragile as political unity in the city. The personal experience of Pere Romeu is reason enough to question how successful the Four Cats was in completing its mission of overcoming materialism and especially material need.
Romeu seems to have been a tragicomical character, though it is unclear whether he made himself an object of derision simply to attract attention. At any rate, as the clown in his own café spectacle, he set the tone of irreverence that was to characterize the modern community he and Russinyol were trying to create. Artists like Casas and Picasso, who both prepared postcards, ads, handbills, and posters for the Four Cats, often used Romeu's features, just as Toulouse-Lautrec abstracted the
hats and scarves of Aristide Bruant. According to Russinyol, Romeu "dreamed of castles in the sky." When the Four Cats closed in 1903, he managed a roller-skating rink and then a garage. Despite his enthusiasm for bikes and automobiles, he could not have been happy so far away from the entertainment business. When Romeu died of natural causes in 1908 Russinyol commented that, "accustomed to drinking the happy wine of the inn," Romeu had "had to turn to gas at the garage—and it killed him!"[57]
Utrillo fared much better. After the Four Cats closed, he earned his living as a journalist, art critic, and folklorist. Anything but academic art interested him. In 1907, he published the first study of El Greco written in modern times. From 1921 to 1929, he was involved in the creation of the Spanish Village on Montjuich. A showcase for folk art and regional architecture from all over Spain, the village housed votive paintings and puppets as well as other popular artifacts. This museum-fairground at the top of the city was a highlight of the Barcelona Exposition of 1929 and remains to this day a testament to Utrillo's interest in popular and folk traditions. Just before his death in 1934, Utrillo helped launch the Museum of Catalan Art and showed Picasso around the new museum. Here, examples of Catalan paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts dating back to ancient times were gathered together for the first time under one roof. The Museum of Catalan Art was virtually next door to the Spanish Village, and together they transformed Montjuich into a mountain of Catalan culture (see map 1).
Miracle Paintings
Russinyol, who was delighted by all but academic art, frequently drew the public's attention to popular customs and folk arts. Some of the few remaining accounts of traditional artistic life in Barcelona at the turn of the century appear in Russinyol's plays and essays. His gift was in showing that common crafts could be highly creative and that creativity was not the exclusive province of a few artists who signed their paintings. His respect for craftspeople (though tinged with irony) and his love for the ritual magic of everyday life came through in a variety of his plays.
One figure to whom he called attention in his comic play The Painter
of Miracles was the frequently anonymous craftsman who made objects of devotion and votive art, including "miracle paintings." In real life, when political, social, and personal disasters befell local people, they had long turned to these skilled artisans, who would depict scenes that buyers described. The resultant paintings, which were to be hung on church altars, served as tokens of thanks to a Madonna or saint presumed to have intervened to assure that a bad situation did not become worse.[58]
Russinyol's Painter of Miracles portrays the lives of a votive painter named Bartomeu and his moralistic friend Peipoc. Bartomeu, father of six children under the age of nine, paints on commission for his living. Peipoc claims that Bartomeu dabbles in magic. A notary asks Bartomeu to paint a picture to help prevent the discovery of his bigamy. Another customer, a policeman, does not like the painting he has ordered. A fish bone had lodged in his throat; a miracle had saved him, and he wanted to acknowledge it. His wife thought the circumstances were not sufficiently heroic and commissioned instead a painting that portrays him under attack by bandits. Enter Alcibiades, an atheist. An electromagnetic belt cured his ailment; not wishing to leave the medical miracle unacknowledged, he wants a painting to donate to his Masonic lodge, about which he is quite mysterious. The notary comes into an unexpected inheritance, shares it with Bartomeu, and helps save the children from starvation. Bartomeu thinks the windfall is due to a miracle and plans to commemorate it with a painting.[59]
Alcibiades probably reflects Russinyol's own ironic skepticism toward the magical religious aspects of votive painting, along with his appreciation of the importance of these works. This appreciation was evidently shared by C. Gumá, a popular republican writer who composed a ditty entitled "The Sculptor of Saints." In it, the sculptor says: "How wonderful to be a sculptor of saints! The glory of poets and painters is very fleeting, the number of people who see them minimal. . . . Their chief works may be applauded and celebrated, but our creations are treated better: They are adored."[60]
Before Vatican II forbade the use of votive paintings and objects as a superstitious practice for which there was no basis in doctrine, churches throughout Barcelona were laden with miracle paintings and wax or metal body parts. Jumbled together without apparent design, the objects and paintings transformed altars into precursors of abstract, even cubist, sculpture. The mixture of naive religious votive paintings, de-
votional objects, and signed paintings provided a visual metaphor for the blend of high and popular art that Russinyol helped shape in Barcelona.
In the miracle paintings, anonymous artists recorded the collective fears and experiences of common people and transformed them into popular art.[61] Commissioning the paintings was something of a communal ritual, and the miracle paintings really were collaborative works between the artist and purchaser. Like medieval patrons of the arts who demanded that their portraits appear in religious paintings they were donating to churches, those who commissioned miracle paintings dictated how they wanted themselves or an incident portrayed. They described objects that had to be included and the saints to be thanked or implored for good results.
Like Persian miniatures, the miracle paintings showed a series of events all taking place in the same frame. Whatever had happened to inspire their commissioning, the paintings are quite literal. A person might lie ill in one room while, in another room, someone else kneels in prayer. The saint or Madonna to whom prayers are addressed might appear in a corner or on a cloud above a representation of the accident or illness he or she has helped to overcome. Although many of the paintings were merely cartoons in which a scene was roughly outlined and colors were minimal, others were impressive abstract primitive paintings with people and objects schematized into brightly colored patterns. Still others, with their shading and use of perspective, recalled the work of trained artists.
Up to the end of the nineteenth century, miracle paintings frequently portrayed collective experiences. When the Madrid government bombed Barcelona's harbor in 1842 in a tax dispute, residents who lived nearby but escaped unscathed collectively purchased a painting for the Madonna of the Narrow Wall and for Saint Tecla, a local saint. The Madonna they honored was the patron of the nearby rural area of Selva del Camp, while Saint Tecla had great prominence in Tarragona Province to the south, one of the places in Catalunya from which migrants to Barcelona came.[62]
Sanctuaries on the edge of the city, in what are now Barcelona subway stops, gradually replaced far-off hermitages as points of attraction for urban workers. Job opportunities for artisan painters increased as people sought them out for miracle paintings to place in these local shrines. The shrines of Our Lady of Coll and the Virgin of Bonanova became the two leading urban pilgrimage sites at the turn of the cen-
tury. In 1903, when people living on the lower part of the Horta and Sagrera roads in the industrial section of Saint Martin of Provence escaped injury after a trolley jumped its tracks and ran down the street, the neighborhood took up a collection for a painting to give in gratitude to the sanctuary of the Mother of God at Coll.[63]
The urban saint to whom immigrants to the city most often gave their allegiance was the Virgin of Bonanova, whose shrine stood on a northwestern peak of Barcelona. When a fire struck a piano factory on Ponent Street, neighbors organized a bucket brigade until the fire engines came and saved the factory. The owner, thankful for their help, for the lack of damage, and for the fact that no one was hurt, commissioned a miracle painting for the Virgin of Bonanova (plate 2).[64] This Madonna also won the gratitude of a man who was not injured when a cauldron exploded in the machine shop in which he was working on Amalia Street. The man could have been killed but did not die, a mercy he thought he owed to the Virgin of Bonanova, to whom he had a picture dedicated.[65]
Urban life had other perils for which miracle painters could provide solace. For example, when a female servant on New Street ate some poisoned cheese meant for a rat, she did not die—an occasion that inspired a miracle painting in which a rat loomed large. A sausage fiend on Robador Street ate as much sausage as he could, which earned him the nickname Miguel of the botifarra (Catalan-style sausage). He always ate the hottest sausages he could find and finally developed a stomach ailment blamed on his excesses. He vowed to the Virgin of Bonanova that if she cured him, he would change his eating habits. He did indeed recover, and in gratitude he had a miracle painting made for her with a botifarra sausage on it. But alas, his passion for sausages returned, and despite pleas for the intercession of the Madonna, he died of his stomach ailment.[66]
Personal life in the city could be more insecure than in the countryside; miracle painters were thus partly therapists who listened to people's problems and gave them relief from their pain through art. For example, one Barcelona woman, whose lover promised to marry her as soon as he returned from America, was disappointed when he disappeared without a trace. She went to a painter, explained her problem, and secured an offering to the Madonna of Bonanova to speed his return. Another woman was luckier. When her husband gave up his mistress, stopped having affairs, and agreed to return to her, she commissioned a painting in celebration. A woman whose son was passionately
involved with a young woman she did not trust ordered a painting for the Virgin of Bonanova to assure that the son's girlfriend keep her promise to marry him.[67]
Even Picasso painted at least one miracle painting while he was in Barcelona, and he may have drawn on their sense of whimsy and their haphazard composition later in life. When Miquel Utrillo escaped injury in a road accident in 1899 or 1900, Picasso spoofed a miracle painting for his friend (plate 3). Following the typical pattern, it consists of a narrative of the accident with the image of a generic Madonna (possibly the Virgin of Mercy) in the upper left-hand corner.
Conclusion
Russinyol and the artists around him, though benefiting from industrial development in Barcelona, blamed technology and science for the shallowness of cultural life in the city. Enriching culture by highlighting a variety of artistic forms from Visigothic ironwork, to medieval Catalan painting and El Greco's works, to French avant-garde art, puppets, and miracle paintings, they helped to create new forms of communal identity. Through the construction of civic rites, following a strategy similar to that unconsciously pursued by Catalan nationalists and leftists, the artists of the Four Cats divorced popular religious arts and entertainments from organized religion, all the while treating them as devotional objects or rituals in themselves: in short, they borrowed the popular religious forms to suit new functions. Even if the instructions for the set design of Russinyol's play The Prodigious Puppet had not compared its colors to those in votive paintings, there would be no question that Russinyol was attempting to use puppet spectacles as aesthetic substitutes for religious practices.
With their immediacy and vitality, puppet shows and miracle paintings captured the imagination of the late-nineteenth-century artistic vanguard in Barcelona. The founders of the Four Cats were relatively self-conscious in their use of theatrical rituals to persuade people in Barcelona—and in Sitges—of the existence and importance of a common religion of art. The Modernist Festivals and puppet theater were only two means by which they chose to accomplish this.
As political groups increasingly used Catholic-style pageants to win over the city's population, some Four Cats artists attempted to recast
old popular cultural forms in order to create a community of people who noticed and valued art of all kinds. In the process, they educated participants about the richness of folk culture, providing a source of images and patterns that contemporary urban artists could use. Picasso's humorous miracle painting recounting Miquel Utrillo's auto accident is just one instance, demonstrating the artist's sensitivity to popular forms and his unwillingness to separate himself from artisanal traditions.
Reviving lost artistic forms and using them to express modern themes was a specialty of those who frequented the Four Cats. Of course, without knowledge of the French avant-garde, they would have had no context into which to fit popular forms. At the same time, without heightened sensitivity to the works of El Greco, votive paintings, and crafts that were alternatives to official art, they would have been unable to draw on the genius of traditional arts and entertainments. By bringing public attention to folk arts and practices and by developing a view of art that excluded aesthetic hierarchies, the Four Cats, which lasted only five years, left its mark on culture in Barcelona up through the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939.