The Royal Academy of San Fernando exhibits her images of Catalá Roca, a small part of a photographic collection in the making
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando is the second largest art gallery in Madrid due to the relevance of its collections of historical paintings. But it hardly adds 50,000 visitors a year when a museum like the Sorolla, as interesting as few others but far from the golden triangle formed by the Prado, the Thyssen and the Reina Sofía, borders on 250,000. With more than 1,400 paintings, 1,300 sculptures and 15,000 drawings, treasures such as prints and plates of Goyesque engravings, paintings by El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo, Arcimboldo, Picasso or Juan Gris are kept in San Fernando. But photography is still kind of a poor sister in the centennial institution founded in 1752.
And that has someone to watch over: the academic and historian Publio López Mondéjar, an authority on the genre, a renowned curator, great collector and secretary of the New Image Arts department, the youngest in the house. But López Mondéjar encounters remarkable difficulties in exhibiting the institution’s photographic collections. An archive of thousands of images currently being cataloged “that we can hopefully present soon”.
In the house there is a tradition of academic photographers, the last discipline that has been taken up along with the cinema. Juan Gyenes and Alberto Schommer were, and the academy cherishes images of both, in which today photography teachers such as Cristina García Rodero -elected, already waiting to read her entrance speech- or Isabel Muñoz who will read her speech next Sunday, January 29. But there is little money to acquire works from third parties and even to include those of these great photographers. “I asked García Rodero for some of his photos and he told us we could have the negatives for free. But it turns out that if we have to make the copy, we have to pay for it, and there is hardly any money,” López Mondéjar hurts.
It has the selfless co-operation of Adolfo Autric, a lawyer, philanthropist and patron, photography enthusiast and collector, who pays for the prints meager academic budgets cannot afford. And then we are only talking about a few hundred euros per copy.
“There are still problems, but we have an important collection. The Academy has enormous potential that we are not taking advantage of. We have a room for visitors to the Sorolla House Museum, which is outside the main museum circuit, and that is to let them look at it,” says López Mondéjar.
The expert scrutinized the house’s funds, and among the archives of the 19th century, he found images of pioneers such as Jean Laurent and Charles Clifford that had already been incorporated into the archives, but were neither dated nor catalogued. Some half-thrown treasures contained in an archive of images by Gyenes, Schommer, García Rodero, Pérez Siquier, Virgilio Viéitez, Xavier Miserachs and many more.
“Photography is a source of memory, like the images of Catalá-Roca that we are exhibiting now, that go where literature cannot go,” says López Mondéjar, who donated some images from his collection to the academy. He explains it in front of the small and charming picture room of the Academy Museum that houses a selection of works by Francesc Català-Roca (Valls, 1922-Barcelona, 1998) until July. A dozen images in current copies from the academic collections on display along with other works by the Catalan photographer from private collections. “They are the work of a documentary photography humanist of infinite skill and a solid command of his craft.”
Photography and the rest of the fine arts, painting and sculpture, should help each other to attract more viewers to this fascinating museum. The camera exhibition Català-Roca takes place in the context of the centenary of the birth of the photographer, «who is unanimously regarded as the great master of his generation, who formed the decisive bridge between the pre-war avant-garde represented by his father Pere Català Pic (1889-1971) and the new documentary avant-garde, which he himself led on the border between the 1940s and 1950s,” explains López Mondéjar.
The Catalan photographer learned in the family lab as a child. «From his father he inherited his talent and formal audacity to compose his images. His numerous books, which he began publishing in the 1950s, show a rigorous professional who was able to combine a thorough knowledge of the technique with an endless creative capacity, in a work in which the powerful visual instinct, the fierceness and the precise perception of reality beyond any whim or will of style,” sums up López Mondéjar.
Català-Roca turned “his confident gaze to the decisive details of things, aiming to convey his own vision of reality”. Firmly established in the steps of certainty, he always felt a deep certainty in the validity of his own perceptions, and this was probably the essential characteristic of his photography; the one that enabled him to place the camera in places he had never visited before and to achieve the formal efficiency of his prodigious shots from high and low angles, which he learned to master as a child. A photo that marked the definitive end of the late pictorial childishness of those dark years, which he managed to capture like no other in the eternal age of his photographs, full of wisdom and humanity,” writes the connoisseur.
Among those who have visited the small permanent exhibition space of the academic museum are big names in Spanish photography, such as Charles Clifford, Ramón Masats, Paco Gómez, Gabriel Cualladó, Castro Prieto, García Álix, Isabel Muñoz, Ouka Leele, Manuel Outumuro , Chema Madoz or Carlos Perez Siquier.
Twice awarded the World Press Photo, the highest award in photography, Isabel Muñoz (Barcelona, aged 72) has long been at the forefront as one of the greats of her craft. According to Publio López Mondéjar, who will receive her on Sunday, January 29 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, she is the author of the best collection of portraits in Spanish photography in recent decades. ‘An Anthropology of Feelings’ is the title of the inaugural address that Muñoz will read in the learned and tricentennial house, in which he will be the sixth academic number.
Defining herself as a “storyteller”, she offers in this text her personal vision of the evolution of photography in Spain “over the years through my bibliography”. She never thought she would become an academic, but with a career spanning half a century and well-deserved prestige, she believes “an important moment in my life” has come when she wants to “give something back to photography of how much it has given me.”
Muñoz, a deceased photographer, held her first exhibition, ‘Toques’, in 1986. Since then, he has traveled almost all over the world and exhibited in the best galleries and museums. In search of “beauty in suffering and suffering in beauty”, the reflection of physical pain is a constant in her work. In recent years he has devoted a large part of his work to mapping the consequences of climate change. Earlier he made visual essays about the subculture of violence, with his shocking series of portraits of the gangs, he moved with his photos of prostitutes in Cambodia or the devastation of the earthquakes in Bam in Iran.
His images, almost always in black and white, are in private collections and institutions such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York or the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. He is National Photography Award (2016) and Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.
Source: La Verdad
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