Secrecy in the Art of Santiago Rusiñol (1861-1931) and the Catalan Modernistes

Abstract

Can an artwork keep a secret? This dissertation examines the form and function of secrecy in the art of Santiago Rusiñol (1861—1931) and the Catalan modernistes, a group of artists, writers, architects, and designers active in and around turn-of-the-century Barcelona. Rusiñol and the modernistes made secrecy a subject and a stylistic strategy of their paintings, drawings, prints, performances, novels, plays, poems, short stories, essays, and buildings. Throughout their works, secrets advance plots and define characters, establish tones and structure compositions. Secretive, moreover, is an apt descriptor of the ambiguity, elisions, allusions, and indirection in modernista works, as well as their presentation in exhibitions and publications. During the 1890s and early 1900s, the modernistes forged a movement that resembled a secret society. And yet, this secret society was not so secret. Rusiñol and his colleagues participated actively in the cultural life of Catalunya, official and unofficial. At the outset, their aim was to modernize Catalan culture by creating a regional vanguard. They initially regarded these two objectives—cultural modernization and vanguardism—as consonant. But as the modernistes produced increasingly ambitious works in the final years of the nineteenth century, they experienced conflicting impulses toward revelation and concealment, inclusion and exclusion. What was the ideal relationship between modern artists, artworks, and beholders? If artworks, as Rusiñol believed, were like secrets, should artists divulge them? Was modernisme a movement for modernistes or the masses? This dissertation explores such questions across six chapters, each of which considers select modernista works—visual and verbal—that engage the aesthetic and ethical conundrum of modern art’s accessibility. Chapters one and two study the modernista notion of artworks as secrets shared with beholders and withheld from beholders, respectively, in relation to paintings made and displayed in Paris and Barcelona. Subsequent chapters analyze the same dynamic in modernista interiors (chapter three), performances (chapters four and five), and books (chapter six). Ultimately, “Secrecy in the Art of Santiago Rusiñol (1861—1931) and the Catalan Modernistes” argues that modernista secrecy was an attempt to imbue modern art with meaning by restricting access both to art and to meaning.