Ritmo clásico, danza y música en el Noucentisme catalán

Abstract

In the first two decades of the 20th century, many visual artists of the Catalan Noucentisme movement introduced ideas of classicism and Mediterraneity into their works, using a style imbued with French Post-Impressionism and Return to Order. Essential artists and theoreticians of Noucentisme included Eugenio dOrs, Josep Maria Junoy, Joaquim Torres García and Joan Llongueras, among others. Their ideas extolling the classical and the Mediterranean also implied the consideration of ancient Greek dance as a visual and rhythmic model, on the basis of Dalcrozes theories. Their iconographic representations expressed this aesthetic framework, involving the recovery of Antiquitys music, dance and instruments, according to various iconographic models. For the philosopher and critic Eugenio dOrs, the renewal of Catalan society at the beginning of the 20th century was to be carried out by means of a unitary process of modernisation which he called Noucentisme, a symbol of artistic and social renewal based on a new classicism. The term appeared for the first time in the work Glosari by Xènius (pen name of Eugenio dOrs) in 1906. The aesthetic confrontation of Modernisme and Noucentisme was, for dOrs and the noucentistes, a theoretical question of the greatest importance. Indeed, for dOrs, Modernisme was romantic, irrational and laden with emotion. A system of categorisations of antithetical values was established: localism-imperialism, north - Mediterranean clarity, classicism-romanticism, naturalism-idealism, sentimentalism-intelligence, based on the premises of the French École Romaine and LEsprit Nouveau. The division between the arts proposed by the noucentista intellectuals attributed a pre-eminent place to music. Throughout Glosari and critiques in newspapers and magazines, aesthetic judgements are found on certain composers, although the fundamental aspects of the discourse on music stem mainly from the attribution of musical values and notions to certain features of classicism. The structural and architectural quality of the classical was associated with the notion of counterpoint, which was used in reference to painters. Noucentisme forms the opposite pole to Impressionism, which was associated with the 19th century and with Wagner and the Spanish modernista artists (Anglada Camarasa and Mir). This paper compares the ideas put forward by the noucentista theoreticians in the principal texts and publications (La Veu de Catalunya, Almanach dels noucentistes, La Revista) with the visual representation of music and dance and its expressive and especially allegorical signification, as well as with the iconographic models used for this representation, analysed through the main works of the visual artists of the Noucentisme movement, including canvases, frescoes, cycles of paintings, drawings, magazines and illustrations by, among others, Sunyer, Picasso, Dalí, Viladrich and Torres García.