Noucentisme: Catalan Modernity and Joaquim Sunyer’s Art
Noucentisme: Urban Modernity and Formal Features
Urban modernity, debugging formal, didactic allegory, and realism screening of idealization are the main formal features of Noucentisme.
Geographic Delineation of Noucentisme
Noucentisme is a movement of Catalan origin and essentially prescriptive. This movement cannot be explained without the first conquests of Catalan politics.
Chronology and Historical Context of Noucentisme
The year 1906 marks the beginning of the literary movement. The birth of plastic Noucentisme was delayed until 1911, shortly after a significant change in painting style, making it clearer and calmer. This movement created an entire program due to the minimum platform of government represented by Prat de la Riba. The liberal Canalejas recaptured the spirit of the unborn Local Government Act of conservative Maura and got Congress to approve the Law of Commonwealths.
Achievements include the final determination of the language, the creation of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Nova University), and an extensive network of public libraries and museums. Avant-garde movements such as Surrealism and literary Noucentisme began the fall. During the Republican period, many visual manifestations bore the Noucentista imprint. Many works published or displayed in Catalonia after the war took Noucentisme as a sign of continuity, the desire to overcome trauma or resistance, although this was not always achieved by the authors. Noucentisme started between 1906 and 1911 and ended between 1929 and 1936.
Main Representatives
Poets like J. Carner, Goday architects, sculptors like E. Casanovas, E. Toldrà musician, and painters like J. Torres García.
Joaquim Sunyer’s Artistic Development
He went to Paris in 1896, primarily dedicating himself to urban landscape painting—streets with no history or suburban locations where characters from the popular classes are grouped. Figures blend into the landscape. His palette is close to Fauvism without being so.
By 1908, his style began to change, becoming more austere with flatter colors and a more archaic composition. This change was influenced by a trip to Catalonia in 1906. The transformation was definitive when he was in his hometown of Sitges, and the austere Garraf landscape pervaded his spirit. There, he painted Pastoral. Returning to Catalonia in 1911, he held a retrospective exhibition showcasing his Parisian and more recent works.
The Catalan landscape change was radical. The Impressionist cycle closed. He emerged opposite a genuine style of Parisian avant-garde experimentalism and German Expressionism.
Importance of Pastoral
Joan Maragall considered the work representative; the nude is not arbitrarily placed, and the color and drawing are clean and precise.
PASTORAL AND THREE NAKED IN THE WOODS BY JOAQUIM SUNYER
Title: Three Naked in the Forest
Author: Joaquim Sunyer (1874-1956)
Year: c. 1913-1915
Style: Noucentisme
Museum: MNAC
Dimensions: 1.25 x 1.51
Technical Aspects
These are oil on canvas works, paradigmatic of Noucentisme for their clarity, order, simplicity, perfection of drawing, and transparency of colors. They feature short brush strokes and drawing outlines.
Composition
The elevated frame gives a more descriptive view. It also structures the table by drawing a freer and more decorative diagram. The figures are fully integrated into the landscape.
Plastic Elements
This work responds to Sunyer’s characteristic style, similar to Cézanne’s constructivism, but Sunyer takes a more lyrical side because the harmony of forms and the chromatic is impregnated in a positive, ideal, and highly poetic sense. Another feature is the emphasis on the volumes of all elements and the transparency of the atmosphere, giving a more tactile value to the elements, suspending all formal elements of the structure.
The drawing outlining all elements is accompanied by a short stroke, sometimes barely perceptible, which blends the color on the canvas. Sunyer uses a sober but well-harmonized color.
Subject
In 1913, he traveled to Italy and was impressed by Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto. Their influence is seen in the figures in his landscapes. Back in Catalonia, he painted his subjects naked in the forest. Three Naked in the Forest is a Mediterranean landscape with three female figures in a lazy and relaxed attitude. The figure on the left shows some concern in her posture. The subject has obvious resonances with Cézanne.
Meaning
The work presents a vision of the ideal landscape, Mediterranean and ultimately classic. Eroticism permeates this work, as in most of Sunyer’s paintings where the nude appears, collecting a certain archaic naivety but in an intellectualized way. The nude in the forest becomes a symbol of the Catalan woman and the eternal Catalonia.
Style and Historical Context
These two works by Sunyer are considered paradigmatic of Catalan Noucentisme. Noucentisme is the representative artistic trend of the twentieth century. Eugeni d’Ors coined the term Noucentisme in 1906, understood as a generic adjective referring to the new directions taken by Catalan culture in the early twentieth century. It reflects absolute faith in sound and elaborate creation and appreciation of classical aestheticism, but the connection…