The Shape of Cultural Politics

In the pages that follow, the argument will be presented in a series of snapshots highlighting cultural battles that traditional po-

litical, social, or economic history often overlook. Because struggles between Spain and Catalunya and between the Castilian and Catalan languages lie at the core of this study, most proper names used here have either been Anglicized from the Catalan or translated into English. Although this will annoy some readers, it is symbolic of the commitment of this book, which is to write from a Catalan perspective.

Chapter 1 considers how, at the end of the nineteenth century, festivals became performances through which opposing forces in Barcelona acted out their parts. Local citizens, whatever their religious convictions, enjoyed the frequent Catholic holiday celebrations and spectacles often associated with the change of the seasons and key dates in the religious calendar. Celebrants often lost sight of the specific Madonna or saint being celebrated: for the vast majority of the population, religious holidays merely provided opportunities for revelry. Whatever meaning church and civic authorities imputed to them, the ceremonies and processions could in fact mean anything and everything the audience desired—one reason competing groups often adopted the same or similar forms for their celebrations and demonstrations. For those who opposed the authorities who repressed unions and tortured labor militants, celebrations provided a means for registering their outrage or promoting an alternative vision. By organizing pageants of their own in which to attack military or civic leaders, they symbolically contended with those in power for control of the city. Celebrations at this time provided a way to express solidarity as Catalans against the government in Madrid.

With popular spectacles and folk art constantly before their eyes, Barcelona's artists sought to create their own alternative community, which is the subject of Chapter 2. In the 1890s, Santiago Russinyol used his vast wealth to promote modern, "decadent" art by turning his villa just south of Barcelona into a museum and a retreat. There, through theatrical galas and artistic processions reminiscent of religious festivals, he put forward the idea that art should be worshiped. Not content to retreat to the country, Russinyol, the artist Ramón Casas, and the entrepreneur Pere Romeu founded the Barcelona café known as the Four Cats. Modeled on the Chat Noir in Montmartre, the Four Cats was a beer hall, art gallery, and puppet theater where the French avant-garde of postimpressionism was promoted along with Catalan folk arts like puppetry. There people of all classes found companionship, and Pablo Picasso, who arrived in the city in 1895 and remained until 1904, acquired his first group of admirers.

No form of cultural life could always contain class antagonisms. At times, as in the general strike of 1902, the city became a war zone. Later that same year, however, attempts were made to use a week-long Virgin of Mercy celebration to repair the damage. The events covered in Chapter 3 thus represent both sides of the civic coin, internecine struggle and community unity, and in turn raise issues about solidarity and local antagonisms that resonated as late as the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939. Moreover, while the 1902 general strike presented the embryo of a future egalitarian society, the Virgin of Mercy festival suggested the possibilities of commercializing existing culture in Barcelona. Despite the danger of violent political clashes, festival life, with effigies, banners, anthems, and folk figures, drew even outsiders to Barcelona. These symbols were apparently manipulated by successive city governments in the hopes of encouraging tourism.

Chapter 4 explores the many valences of women in Barcelona and the ways in which differing perceptions of women reflected the cultural conflicts in the city in the early twentieth century. Patron saints like the Virgin of Mercy, nuns, upper-class women, prostitutes, and the working-class women of Barcelona were all cramped in certain stereotypic roles. Yet these stereotypes were exploded during the period 1905 to 1909 as women participated prominently in civic rituals and civic conflict.

Chapter 5 investigates how grass-roots movements led by women helped to shape political culture in Barcelona. Women whose lives intersected with those of men of all classes could play a variety of roles on the civic stage, from victim to sexual activist to political revolutionary. Victimized women abounded, but so did activists. Women textile workers led a strike in their own way in 1913, breaking with the male leaders who claimed to speak for all the workers of the city. In 1918, women again called on one another as neighbors and as citizens to take matters into their own hands when a freezing winter, fuel shortages, and speculators violated the system of rights by which they thought the city should be ordered.

Meanwhile, during the height of the First World War, leftists and Catalan nationalists were seeking to forge new systems of political culture, as Chapter 6 reveals. In the summer of 1917, regionalist challenges to the Spanish monarchy and the threat of a leftist general strike undermined the stability of the national government. This year of crisis for the central government in Madrid permitted divergent forces in Barcelona to assert specific political agendas for the city and the region. Car-

nival, revived in 1917 after many years, provided a fitting vehicle for the confrontation with authorities that was taking place at all levels of society. Pablo Picasso, who returned to Barcelona for several long visits in 1917, may have reaffirmed his connections to the city by using carnivalesque images in his sets and costumes for the ballet Parade , introduced in Paris and then performed in Barcelona in the late spring and early winter of 1917. At this time, Picasso also produced a number of drawings that focused on a theme rooted in his years in Barcelona and his recent experiences there: the violence of the bullfight. The image of the wounded horse, which figured prominently in these works, would reappear during the Civil War in his masterpiece, Guernica .

With the brutal repression of the workers' movement in 1919 and the virtual civil war that reigned between employers and syndicalists until 1923, cultural and political Catalan nationalism became the primary vehicle for resistance—the subject of Chapter 7. The dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, who ruled Spain from 1923 to 1930, repressed the Catalan language, holidays, and dance, but that only enhanced their underground appeal. Violations of Catalan culture welded disparate forces, from the clergy to anarcho-syndicalists, into a united movement for Catalan freedom.

The contradictions between the political culture of working men and women and the goals of regional autonomy reemerged forcefully with the creation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, the period at which Chapter 8 begins. When the anarcho-syndicalists of Barcelona crushed a right-wing army-led insurrection against the legally elected republican government on July 18, 1936, the revolution in community consciousness that had long been dreamed of in certain circles came to fruition. Although half the country fell to the army and its promotion of the right-wing Nationalist cause, Barcelona was transformed into a commune, a collectivist, self-consciously revolutionary city. But by May 1937 the dream had turned sour as Communists, aided by republicans and Socialists, attacked the anarcho-syndicalists, who had become the dominant force in the city. Barcelona experienced a civil war within the Civil War in late April and early May 1937, a conflict that manifested the kind of hostility so often found in places where solidarity has been greatest. Picasso, whose mother, sister, nephews, and old friends were still living in the city, knew about events transpiring there. Commissioned by the Spanish government to paint a mural for the Paris Exposition of 1937, he may have drawn on his past experiences as a citizen of and visitor to the city and on his consequent awareness of what frat-

ricidal struggle could mean in Barcelona. The result was the celebrated Guernica .

The title of this book requires some explanation. From the vantage point of art history, the years 1900 to 1904 constitute Picasso's "blue period." Because Picasso, as a young man living in Barcelona between 1895 and 1904, participated in some of the festivals, pageants, and alternative artistic communities that contributed to the popular culture of that time, his images often provide visual information about the city. Blue itself has had a variety of uses in twentieth-century Spain. Thanks to the production in Germany of Rickett's blue, a by-product of manufacturing steel, blue became the color of the cheapest dyes and paints. Like denim today, the blue cloth that Spanish workers wore from the late nineteenth century up through the 1960s was durable and cheap. The paint made from the pigment, too, though not very durable, was inexpensive, which is one reason Picasso used it so much in the early twentieth century. This book uses "blue period" to define the time span from 1888 to 1939, when popular culture in Barcelona was shaped and reshaped by groups of people including the workers and artists for whom blue was so important.

"Red and black city" would be the appropriate designation for Barcelona if this book were a study of anarcho-syndicalism, and "red and yellow" if the focus were on the Catalan nationalists. But since this book is really about how republicans, regionalists, and workers, including women, forged a shared culture, red is an appropriate color to represent them all.