"This crazy payo doesn't paint me." Like many gypsies of the time, Rosario Amaya earned a living as a model for painters in the 1950s. "But she was the star of the moment," recalls her son Santi Léonard. In her early twenties she posed daily for the students of the Escola Massana and was the favorite of artists such as Pichot or Sainz de la Maza. Dalí also wanted to portray her, but the gypsy was adamant. Paradoxes of life, years later she would be the genius Empordà man who would pose in front of the lens of the gypsy's husband, the French photographer Jacques Léonard, and she herself would get on her Gala boat for a surreal ride, with the painter dressed in a barretina and espardenyes, off the coast of Portlligat.
Santi Léonard remembers the anecdote about Salvador Dalí. Poetic dreams under the gaze of Jacques Léonard, an exhibition that brings together at the Reial Cercle Artístic in Barcelona the artist's illustrations for The Divine Comedy (1959-1963) by Dante Alighieri and Life is a Dream (1975) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, next to the intimate portraits that Léonard stole from him with the permission of the genius. “My father used to say that when he was with Dalí and a journalist appeared, he would tell him: ‘Excuse me, Jacques, now I have to start acting’. And if you look closely, in almost all the photos we see him as playing a role. Very few show how he behaved normally, when no one saw him. And that's what makes these portraits different."
The culprit behind the encounters between Dalí and Léonard (Paris, 1909 - LEscala, 1995) was Alberto Puig Palau, a wealthy Barcelona industrialist, playboy and patron of numerous artists (Uncle Alberto of the Serrat song), whom the photographer and The filmmaker met on his first visit to Barcelona with Arthur Kaps' Los Vienases company. He was the son of a horse breeder and the owner of a haute couture house in Paris, introverted, educated and extremely handsome, spoke five languages and had led a globe-trotting life as a film editor, stage designer, secretary to a French ventriloquist. ..., which stopped short when he met Rosario Amaya, cousin of bailaora Carmen Amaya, a gypsy who lived on the street ("the Montjuïc barracks had not yet been built", her son specifies) of whom he fell madly in love
“He must have seen her at a party and didn't stop until he found out where she lived. One night when she was in a bar on the Rambla with a painter friend who knew her, they asked the night watchman to go look for her at Montjuïc, she went downstairs and introduced her to him. Then he stood guard to see her pass when she went to pose at the Massana school. He was super shy and he was like that for days, doing nothing, until he dared to approach her and asked her to go out for a drink”.
The courtship began at the Los Caracoles restaurant on Escudellers street. Santi Léonar imagines him “white with fear, because in my mother’s family she was in charge, she was always the one who went ahead, a warrior, but she did not know if she would arrive accompanied by her brothers, one of whom was the Spanish boxing champion and another, a pelota player, had won the Catalan championship”. He lived for years in the barracks of Montjuïc, where he was known as Payo Chac or El Loco, and began a new life as a freelance photographer, collaborating with the Revista, a monthly publication sponsored by Puig Palau, Gaceta Ilustrada and making reports on the pages of color of La Vanguardia, of which he was also the author of the texts. He signed as Yago Dranoel or Santi Léonard.
The Dalí photographs that are exhibited at the Reial Cercle Artístic were made in 1955 and 1957 for the first two publications and there is a third, from 1963, which is not known if it ever saw the light of day. The show, curated by Rosa Perales, includes a screening of Jacques Léonard, el payo Chac (2011), a fascinating documentary made by his grandson Yago Léonard, who explores the figure of a photographer whose work continues to grow and who, thanks to which we can put a face, heart and life to that gypsy Barcelona only within the reach of those who were part of it. The subject of a major exhibition at the Arxiu Fotogràfic in Barcelona, Lèonard is also the protagonist of a book, Half payo, half gypsy (Destiny), written by Jesús Ulled based on an autobiography found by his son Santi after the death of the photographer.
And here Léonard's life takes an unexpected turn even for his family. "In the handwritten papers he explained that as a child, during a stay at his paternal grandparents' house, he discovered a photograph of his father surrounded by gypsies and dressed like them." “If he told us – he continues – we wouldn't have believed it, neither because of his personality nor because of his character did he seem to have gypsy blood. And that we recognize each other at first sight, even by the way we walk. But not even my mother was aware of it. Why didn't she explain it herself?
Santi ventures that perhaps the paternal grandmother, Emiliene Leonard Tabary, who moved in the world of haute couture, did not accept her son marrying a gypsy, perhaps because she was never accepted by her husband's gypsy family. She disinherited him and bequeathed all her assets to social work. “We were only able to enter his apartment near the Paris Opera for a moment. We took some pots as a souvenir and when we emptied the earth to be able to transport them better, it turned out that they were full of gold coins. Imagine what was left there!” he says.
Santi and his brother Álex have withdrawn the collection that they deposited in the Barcelona Municipal Archive in 2009. Currently the 18,000 negatives are in El Alfolí de la Sal de l'Escala and are represented by Photographic Social Vision.
