He dedicated offensive articles to Dalí in which he went from situating him as an "imitator of that cold, hard and academic Picasso" to calling him directly "insane" after the publication of the book La femme visible. He did not spare bile when assessing the young Miró on the occasion of his first exhibition at the Dalmau Galleries in 1918: "He does not suffer from the terrible shyness of almost all beginners; he is magnificently daring and a spirit permeable to modern currents. . but yes, for now, a detestable colourist". And he attacked the avant-garde Parisian artists without mercy: "they are demagogues, bad, rude, lazy, funny, so little painters, so disoriented, that they disorient the spectator in good faith, it is necessary that they know the impressionists [...]. The Last-minute painting is in the hands of charlatans, among whom Matisse and Picasso still stand out, the great culprits".
In Barcelona at the beginning of the 20th century, Joan Sacs was a fierce and fearsome critic, whose incendiary attacks caused notorious train crashes with his contemporaries. For the art of criticism, he had borrowed the pseudonym from a character in The Nuremberg Mastersingers, but his real name was Feliu Elias (Barcelona, 1878-1948), a temperate and perfectionist realist painter with an antique aftertaste who still lived a third life as Apa, an explosive and devastating cartoonist who from satirical magazines such as ¡Cu-Cut!, L'Esquella de la Torratxa or Papitu, of which he was the founder, gave free rein to his republican, leftist and anti-clerical spirit.
In one of his homenots, Josep Pla described him as an anti-bohemian personality, who "was horrified by lack of punctuality, mental disorder, personal disorder, irresponsible vivacity...", but his progressive ideas pushed him three times into exile, the last one following the entry of Franco's troops into Barcelona, where he did not return until 1947 after having been a prisoner for more than a year in an internment camp of the collaborationist Vichy government. Wildly popular at the time, he was everything and everything at the same time. And the diversity of voices of his heteronyms only adds mystery and emotion to the already complicated matter of deciphering Feliu Elias.
“The more they isolated him, the stronger he became”, assures the historian Mariona Seguranyes, adding that as a painter he carried his ideals to the ultimate consequences and remained incorruptible to the principles of realism: “his mission was not to reflect beauty but rather pure reality”. Almost four decades after the exhibition held in 1986, at the Museu al Museu d'Art Modern under the direction of Cristina Mendoza, Feliu Elias is back at the MNAC, ready for a dissection of his different identities through one, with an anthology, La realidad como obsesión (until April 10) curated by Seguranyes herself and Mariàngels Fondevila.
The exhibition follows in the footsteps of the cartoonist who denounces the false morality of religious fanatics who mistreat their wives and mercilessly mocks both the army and the FAI anarchists, which led to his first two exiles in Paris. It stops at the painter Feliu Elias and his defense of "infinite reality as a source of inspiration", in the words of Fondevila, with works as outstanding as La galeria, a portrait of his son Jaume, or the canvases he created for the lawyer of Vic Francesc Masferrer, who for the first time leave their original context. And finally, he confronts the critic with those artists he admired (Josep de Togores, Marian Andreu, Francesc Vayreda...) and others for whom he became a real scourge, among them some of those who during the First World War took refuge in Barcelona (Torres-García, Robert and Sonia Delaunay or Jean Metzinguer).
There are also some of the objects he collected and others for personal use. The insight project is completed with a second exhibition at the Museu de Sabadell.
