Roma, el mapa de la memòria. Els diaris de J. Nogué Massó (1914-1917)

After the celebration of the Any Nogué in Santa Coloma de Queralt and Tarragona in 2013 with various exhibitions and activities, Joan Sendra will begin to study Nogué's Italian period (1907-1922) with the objective of locating and document the incredible work that the artist had created during his stay in Italy, especially the portraits of people from the Roman aristocracy, the diplomatic monastery, the Catholic Church, from the documentary sources of the Museu d'Art Moder de la Diputació de Tarragona (MAMT). Now, he will try to discover the links, the influences or the trace of the Italian divisionist school in his artistic creation.

The contents that can be seen in the exhibition Rome, the map of memory. The diaries of J. Nogué Massó (1914-1917) are part of the documentary and artistic collection of the J. Nogué Archive of the MAMT, which was bequeathed to the museum by the artist's son, José Nogué Vallejo, during the last decade of the 20th century.

We must place the protagonist of this story, José Nogué Massó (Santa Coloma de Queralt, 1880 – Huelva, 1973), in the city of Rome at the beginning of the 20th century, a capital that was being transformed urbanistically for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary in 1911, of the unity of Italy, with the celebration of major events and international exhibitions such as Archeology, Fine Arts - in which he himself participated -, Science and Technology, etc. The artist arrived in the Italian capital to enjoy a landscape painting scholarship at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, which lasted from the fall of 1907 to 1911. After finishing his pension, he remained there until 1922, when he returned to Spain, after winning the competitive examinations for a position as a professor of artistic drawing and decorative composition at the Jaén School of Arts and Crafts. They were fifteen intense years in Rome, in which Nogué, as we will see, repeatedly found himself at the crossroads of having to decide his future.

He speaks extensively about this entire period in his memories, texts that Nogué dictated at the age of 80 to his cousin Ignasi Massó, and that the Diputació de Tarragona published in 1993, twenty years after the artist's death: Memories of a Painter. In principle, they were not to be published, but to relive their memories and thinking, perhaps, of their descendants, however, the interest in its content led to its edition.

But, apart from these memories, Nogué had started on different occasions the tradition of writing personal diaries. In a fragmentary way he wrote some between 1909 and 1913, which we call proto-diaries, but the newspapers that were written throughout the years 1914, 1915, 1916 and the first half of 1917 become the backbone of the work presented.

Although these diaries do not have much literary value, we discovered the authentic passion that Nogué felt for music and the lyrical world, in addition to the pictorial facet for which our artist is known. Indeed, in Santa Coloma de Queralt - the town where he was born - there is a street dedicated to the Nogué Painter; In the city of Jaén - where he lived and worked for ten years - the school of arts and crafts is named after José Nogué; In the extensive bibliography about our character, he is studied as a painter, but the novelty - and this is highlighted with greater typography - is that he wanted to be an opera singer, a hobby that he has known since he was young and probably due to paternal influence. . He himself, referring to the musical field, said in his Memoirs: “The anecdotes are so many that I would need another book to tell them.” And lo and behold, somehow, what you have in your hands is this other book!

It should be said that the newspaper texts provide new information, complementary to what was known until now about the figure of Nogué, and that in no case are they a repetition of the content of the Memoirs. On the contrary, they are very lively texts and of great sociological value, since, because they are written day by day, they provide us with the spontaneity and immediacy of the artist's life in a different way from the Memoirs, which, for On the other hand, they have a notable documentary value on the artistic environment from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.

During the long period of preparation of this work, which Joan Sendra has been able to allow due to his personal circumstances and because she did not have any editorial or academic pressure, she has been reorienting it again and again, and has changed her perspective regarding the artist and of what the documentary collection contributed to the project. Especially after having finished transcribing the newspapers, a moment in which I could have a broader look at that character full of concerns for survival and deeply obsessed with painting and lyrical singing, two languages ​​that become almost inseparable during this period, as he documents in some texts where he describes parallels between pictorial and musical theory.