The creative genius of countless artists, such as Anglada Camarasa or Ramón Casas, has been enlivened by landscapes and places, whose nature and history have inspired some of their most outstanding works.
In fact, it is impossible to separate their trajectory from these places, where they found the perfect vehicle through which to give birth to new artistic paradigms.
Anglada Camarasa and Mallorca
In this sense, the paradisiacal landscapes that the island of Mallorca offers us have been the setting in which many artists, writers and poets have found an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Especially with the arrival of the 19th century, Mallorca became one of the favorite destinations for artists who, like Anglada Camarassa, sought in Mallorca that idyllic vision of the exuberant and unspoiled nature that romanticism had promoted.
Camarasa took with him all the plastic innovations assumed then to apply them to the multiple landscapes, which he would make since, in the early 40’s, he would settle in the Majorcan town of Pollença. In them the mark of Tolousse Lautrec of Munch or Toorop will remain latent, settling in his landscapes the sinuous and undulating curves, which proclaimed the triumph of an idealizing, sensualist and hedonistic aesthetic, in front of a realism radically opposed to the world of pure evasion that Camarasa wanted to represent.
The result, as is evidenced in this magnificent landscape, is a painting exultant of delicate forms and textured ranges in which the natural world is impregnated with a fanciful and mysterious character that brings it closer to the post-symbolist tendencies. Under these precepts Camarasa gives life to a mountainous massif that acquires sculptural qualities, and in which the brilliant palette of the artist transforms the Balearic corner into a hedonistic symphony of Mediterranean soul.
Ramon Casas and San Benet del Bages
The career of Ramon Casas is closely linked to Sant Benet de Bages. It was in 1907, when Elisa Carbó i Ferrer, the artist’s mother, bought the land of the old medieval monastery of Sant Benet to transform it into the family’s summer residence. In fact, already in 1881, Casas published, when he was only 15 years old, a sketch of this cloister in the magazine “L’Avenç”.
In this sense, the bidding work reveals the hidden soul of the Benedictine monastery, the atmosphere of contemplation, silence and meditation that has survived the passing of the centuries to create a bridge between the ancient monks and the master of Catalan modernism. With just a few elements, Casas captures the fleeting appearance of the place at a given moment, in the manner of the impressionists. Combining architectural elements of the monastery with elements of nature full of chromatic nuances that reflect the light, Casas transports us to a past of recollection that echoes the melancholic end of the 19th century.
