Speech on the occasion of the presentation of the facsimile edition of Desde El Molino and the closing of the exhibition Ramon Casas, modernity desired, we organized Maricel Museum from 16 November 2016 and 19 February 2017.
From El Molí gather different chronicles from Paris that Rusiñol wrote for La Vanguardia to explain the vital experiences of artists at Montmartre, leaving no details for the imagination. No matter if it's just a portrait of Catalan artist that used to visit the Moulin de la Galette, as the shadows plays at Cabaret Chat Noir, or night like at Montmartre, tavern songs or the can-can dance. One of such chronicles, written and drawn in first person, today would be call self-fiction. They are, as explained in the presentation text, the self-biography of the bohemian life of Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas.
Rusiñol describes his experiences in Paris with a style that describes the work of both friends, in a direct, real and we could say sentimental. Ramon Casas illustrated with a drawing pulse and will that approaches photojounalism, a very swift and expressive style. Written between 1890 and 1892, corresponding to the years that culminate the aesthetic complicity of both artists.
Between 1890 and 1892, something important happens also in the life of Rusiñol and also for us, because he and Casas in Paris are making incursions in Barcelona to present their new pictures both at exhibition halls and all sorts of cultural happenings. This was the reason why Casas came to paint in Sitges during the fall of 1891, he was curious about the patis that Casas commented to him, and at the same time he was going to Vilanova to watch the Greco at the Museum of Victor Balaguer.
This is why From the Mill also has references to Sitges. Specifically, in the tenth chapter, entitled "Impressions of an arrival", one arrival after discovering our town, Because Rusiñol writes that "when (....? you leave those beaches in Sitges (...) when you leave that eternal sweetness in the ambiance with not fakeness whatsoever and you have breathed and inspired it, when you leave a land that apart from being our land, it's also because it's good land (....) you can truly complain and use it as pretext to warm your spirits." And that January 1892 is now exactly 125 years in our past. Not a long while ago Rusiñol pronounced his first speech in Sitges, saying good bye to all those that received him so warmly:
" " My friend, I was a man that was walking around the world, following trails and jumping streams and dales when I met a land that was more sunny than the rest, were the sky was bluer, the sea was bluer and also the houses were white and with no snow and everything was green and blossoming, and I decided to stop. (...) But I will say aloud what my pictures won't say so everybody can hear me, and I will say with my breast full of enthusiasm. That France could have many millions, but they could never buy a land like this, were the wine is malaria, the coast is gold, the sky is light, women are fire and everything swims in an atmosphere of life and friendship.
Also during his first stay he wrote an article about the nostalgia of two homelands, in which deeply affected by the emigration of people from Sitges to America, he places yearning for you homeland in first person, already divided between the attraction to sun and the light of Sitges and the grey mist from Paris representing modernity that he still wants to assimilate, but that he will drop to build a house that will be also be an atelier and a museum in Sitges.
Meanwhile, we must take time to savor his Parisian chronicles, this grey Paris covered by fog but so attractive for the fight for art and freedom in which, as well as Rusiñol, both end wining, importing it as the legacy of modernity to the Catalonia of their times.
Meanwhile, we must take time to savor his Parisian chronicles, this grey Paris covered by fog but so attractive for the fight for art and freedom in which, as well as Rusiñol, both end wining, importing it as the legacy of modernity to the Catalonia of their times.
