Hermenegildo Anglada-Camarasa: Barcelona 1871 - 1959 Pollença

AWARDS
1907 - Biennale di Venezia. Gold medal
1910 - Exposición Internacional de Arte del Centenario de la República, Buenos Aires. Grand Prize
1911 - Esposizione Internazionale di Belle Arti, Rome. First prize
1926 - 25th Annual International Exhibition of Paintings of the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. Gold medal
1954 - Honorary Member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid
1955 - Grand Cross of Alfonso X el Sabio and honorary president of the Cercle Artístic de Barcelona
1956 - Premio Juan March de Bellas Artes, Barcelona
1957 - Numerary member of the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Sebastián, Palma de Mallorca 

COLLECTIONS
Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao
Museo Nacional de Arte de Cataluña, Barcelona
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Museo Carmen Thyssen, Malaga
Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, Oviedo
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
Metropolitan Museum, New York
Musée Goya, Castres (France)

Born in Barcelona in 1871, Hermenegildo Anglada-Camarasa studied painting against the will of his family. He trained first with artists Tomás Moragas and Modest Urgell, and later in the School of Fine Arts, the Llojta, in Barcelona, before continuing with his training in Paris where he settled in 1894. There he attended classes at the Académie Julian, where the painters of the Nabis studied. At first a painter of realistic landscapes – the Sala Parés of Barcelona put on his first individual exhibition in 1894 with this kind of painting –, his work evolved during his stay in the French capital towards representation of the Parisian nightlife in striking colourism, and worldly feminine figures. This stage of his career gave him a certain amount of fame and he reached an international public, exhibiting internationally. 

During a summer stay in Valencia in 1904, he became interested in local Valencian folklore, and changed the theme of his works. He then focused on the representation of gypsies and women in Spanish traditional regional clothing – dresses, scarfs, shawls, and jewels –, done with a high level of detail which gave rise to a certain amount of decorative style in his painting.

Anglada-Camarasa travelled for the first time to Majorca in 1909, acting on a recommendation from Gaudí, and moved there five years later, at the start of the First World War. Majorcan landscapes became the principal theme of his work, replacing the themes he had developed in Paris. He again took up the themes of his early work, landscapes, but focusing on the representation of scenes of his new surroundings – country and coastal scenes, fish and seascapes –, and in a radically different manner, setting aside realism for more oneiric views, inspired as much by the Impressionists and Post-impressionists as by the Fauvists, and in which the dominant notes are colour and light. During this period, in counterpoint to the development of the European vanguard after the Great War, Anglada-Camarasa reoriented his career towards the United States, where his fame remained constant. Between 1924 and 1934 he participated in numerous collective exhibitions in the United States: Pittsburgh, Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Cleveland, among others. The painter’s first Majorcan period lasted twenty-five years, until 1936.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Anglada-Camarasa was in Barcelona, and due to the political situation, could not return to Majorca, which had fallen to Franco’s forces. At that time, he found refuge in the Abbey of Montserrat, a mountainous area located near Barcelona, in a monastery dating from the ninth century. The steep landscapes of Montserrat, presenting a singular terrain, were a great source of creativity for Anglada-Camarasa during his stay. In this period, practically all his known works are of Montserrat. 

At the outbreak of the Second World War, he went into exile with his family in France, in the town of Pougues-les-Eaux in Burgundy until 1948 when he returned to Majorca: this period is marked by many representations of flower vases and still lifes, landscapes and some figures. Back in Majorca, the volume of his work progressively decreased, due to an accident he had in 1953. He died in 1959, on the island where he had spent much of his life, and which had greatly inspired the painter.