A non-public donation brings to mild lots of of unpublished photographs of the technology of ’27 in Murcia | Culture | EUROtoday

In an orange cardboard field from an English Christmas pudding, the Murcian author Juan Guerrero stored negatives and images from his household album for many years, from his travels by means of Spain however, above all, from his mates. By Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, Gabriel Miró, Manuel Altolaguirre, Vicente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas. There is virtually no title linked to the technology of ’27 that escapes this archive of pictures, most of that are unpublished and by no means earlier than printed. The treasure has simply come to mild due to a non-public donation that, like the remainder of the historical past of those portraits, has been the results of a collection of occasions that return virtually a century in time and have continued till the arrival, this November, of that orange field on the Ramón Gaya Museum in Murcia.

He has executed it with the assistance of Guadalupe Ríos, an 83-year-old graduate in Fine Arts, illustrator of botanical posters and editorial covers and director of the Plastics division of a faculty in Madrid, who, in a type of “chances” that he likes to speak about, Juan Guerrero’s widow, Ginesa Aroca, gave him this legacy within the 60s in order that “at some point, in the future,” he would “take care of” it. That second has taken six many years to reach, additionally the results of one other probability, wherein the artwork critic and historian Juan Manuel Bonet, a private pal of Ríos, takes half, to whom she confirmed the photographic archive and instructed him of her intention to donate it to some public establishment. “The Ramón Gaya Museum in Murcia immediately came to Bonet’s mind, because that center had been studying for some time to incorporate the figure of Juan Guerrero into its rooms. It seemed like the perfect place: in Juan Guerrero’s hometown; in the museum of one of the artists that Juan Guerrero himself encouraged and helped; where the proposal was received with great affection and they were willing to pay attention to the file; in a medium-sized city, where culture is not as crowded as in Madrid, where there are too many legacies and too much of everything,” he explains by cellphone.

The donation has been welcomed with enthusiasm by the director of the municipally owned museum, Rafael Fuster, who believes that the archive will mark a earlier than and after, each within the historical past of the technology of ’27 and to focus on the determine of Juan Guerrero, who defines him as “a man of letters in a broad sense, promoter of culture and patron.” Guadalupe Ríos describes him as “the protector of the generation of ’27.” Bonet, as “a chronicler of the world of writers and artists that surrounded him.” But who was Juan Guerrero, so near that technology of writers wherein he has not been included?

Juan Guerrero was born in Murcia in 1893, he studied Law as a free scholar on the Central University of Madrid and traveled to the capital in 1913 to fulfill the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, fascinated by his literary work. Thus started a relationship of deep friendship that led him to have intense cultural exercise for the remainder of his life, collaborating in literary magazines and founding his personal publications in his native Murcia: the complement Literary Page in 1923 and in 1927, in collaboration with the poet Jorge Guillén, the journal Verse and Prose, which all the good writers of the time went by means of. It is in that publication the place Federico García Lorca writes his first gypsy balladheaded by Romance to the Spanish Civil Guardwhich was accompanied by a dedication: “To Juan Guerrero, consul general of poetry.”

The archive that’s now coming to mild consists of quite a few negatives of the Granada poet; in some, portrayed alone, equivalent to one dated 1929 in New York, the place he wrote his well-known Poet in New York. In different pictures taken by Guerrero, Lorca seems accompanied by different members of the Generation of ’27 equivalent to Vicente Aleixandre, Jorge Guillén, Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas, and even along with his little sister, Isabel, who can also be portrayed alone on this archive.

The negatives, 1,131 in whole, are organized, positioned in envelopes on which, most often, the title of the protagonist of the portrait is written. Some additionally present the date and place the place the photograph was taken, though a lot of them are undated. The oldest dates recorded are from 1927 and the newest are from 1953, two years earlier than the dying of the author. The Gaya Museum technicians have made a primary classification of the fabric: there are 567 negatives of landscapes from cities in Andalusia, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia, the Community of Madrid, the Basque Country and the Valencian Community. Another 113 pictures correspond to Guerrero’s family. The relaxation are illustrious individuals, most of them writers, though there are additionally painters, sculptors or politicians. The archive additionally consists of 33 optimistic pictures, 14 of them taken on the Madrid Student Residence of the authors of 27.

The director of the Gaya Museum acknowledges that there’s now an immense process forward of cataloging all the fabric that, he assures, won’t cease there. The thought of ​​the middle is to digitize the fabric, print a part of the gathering and perform an exhibition to which a catalog raisonné shall be linked to “do justice” to the good work that Juan Guerrero did for literature and artwork.

Guadalupe Ríos, who has stored this legacy for six many years, didn’t get to understand it in particular person; However, she is linked to him by means of each her paternal and maternal households, in one other shocking stroke of probability among the many many who dot this story. A brother of his maternal grandmother, a businessman from Alicante, began a hostel within the Rock of Ifach within the Nineteen Thirties due to the recommendation and intervention of Juan Guerrero, who at the moment labored as secretary of the Alicante City Council.

In one of many negatives within the assortment, Guerrero’s kids pose with Guadalupe Ríos’ mom within the parador, the place different pictures of illustrious individuals from the archive had been additionally taken, equivalent to one in every of Rafael Alberti along with his first spouse. , María Teresa León, earlier than leaving on a visit to Ibiza in 1936. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War caught the couple on the Balearic island and these photographs, by no means printed, are the final that had been taken in Spain earlier than go into exile. Guadalupe Ríos knew that historical past of the parador when years later, within the sixties, she moved to Madrid, to a constructing on Hermosilla Street that was owned by her paternal grandfather, a local of Aragon. Guerrero had lived there as a tenant for years, his widow continued to reside there, and there she gave him that field of English pudding that now makes its contents public.