Luministic School of Sitges
The Luminist School of Sitges ( L'Escola lluminista de Sitges in Catalan ) was a landscape painting school located between Catalan realism and modernism . This is particularly evident in the commitment of the Catalan painter and writer Santiago Rusiñol to this school from 1891, which made Sitges the “Mecca of Modernism”. The bond that bound all painters of this school was the endeavor to artistically depict the specific color and light effects of the Mediterranean coastal landscape with its white villages and beaches glistening in the sun using luminism . The school has great artistic parallels to the school of Olot , which, like the school of Sitges , was inspired by the school of Barbizon when it was founded.
School painter
The painter Joan Roig i Soler was the initiator of the school in the 1880s. He modified the color palette of the oriental works of Marià Fortuny, which reflected back to Catalonia . Here he focused on the landscapes of the Mediterranean coast and its villages. The preferred motifs were the white walls of houses and the boats on the beach, especially at lunchtime. This time of day allowed him to play with the whites of the house walls, the yellows of the sand, and the blues of the sea and sky.
In its beginnings in the 1880s, the school was more realistic and naturalistic than modernistic. It was not an abrupt movement of new beginnings, but rather an evolutionary movement based on the luminism of Fortuny and his followers, which tended away from the anecdotism of this movement. Due to very different circumstances, various painters came to Sitges and joined this new, realistic-naturalistic school of luminism. The painter Arcadi Mas i Fondevila (1852-1934) came there in the 1880s to marry a woman from Sitges. Joan Roig i Soler (1852–1909) herself came from Sitges. Eliseu Meifrèn i Roig (1859–1940) came to Sitges at the same time to study luminism. Other painters from the area such as Joaquim de Miró , Joan Soler i Casanovas , Joan Batlle i Amell chose Arcadi Mas as their artistic role model.
Arcadi Mas preferred motifs such as the beach and the white village of Sitges with the church and the fortifications of the city on the canvas. He was also interested in manners, customs and anecdotes within church spaces or outside, such as the picture of a shepherdess with geese under the title Pause ( Repos , Museu d'Art Modern del MNAC, Barcelona). Roig i Soler was the painter of the bright white villages, to which he often added pottery along the way, and the painter of the beaches in the glaring sunlight. Eliseu Meifrèn almost only brought seascapes with the strongest light contrasts onto the canvas.
Classification of the school
At the same time as Impressionism , the Sitges School broke with the tradition of dark landscape painting, but without using the modern techniques of Impressionism. In this context, the Sitges School must be seen as a first step towards modernism.
literature
- Xavier Barral i Altet (editor) and others: Art de Catalunya, Volume 9, Pintura moderna i contempoània. Edicions L'isard SL, Barcelona 2001, ISBN 84-89931-19-4 (for volume 9), ISBN 84-921314-5-4 (for the entire work), page 204 ff., L'Escola lluminista de Sitges .