Catalan painter Anglada Camarasa

Catalan painter Anglada Camarasa, an exhibition of his works opens on Sunday at the Sant Domingo Convent Church in Pollensa. | wikipedia

Andrew EdePollensa09/04/2022 11:38
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To mark, somewhat belatedly, the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Catalan painter Hermenegild (Hermen) Anglada Camarasa, an exhibition of his works opens on Sunday at the Sant Domingo Convent Church in Pollensa. There are sixty-six paintings and drawings in all, the director of the Pollensa Museum, Andreu Aguiló, saying that they are highly representative of his work but are not normally displayed at the CaixaForum permanent exhibition in Palma. La Caixa Foundation acquired the Anglada Camarasa collection in 1988.

He was born in Barcelona on September 11, 1871. He died at the age of 87 in Puerto Pollensa in 1959, having returned to Mallorca in 1947 after several years in exile. A Republican, he left Mallorca in 1936 and eventually settled for a time in Pougues-les-Eaux in central France.

He first came to the island in 1908, although his granddaughter, art historian Silvia Pizarro, believes that he may have come before then. It was in 1914 that he made Puerto Pollensa his permanent home. While Spain was neutral, Mallorca was perceived as somewhere truly peaceful and removed from the war.

He and the Argentine painter Tito Cittadini founded what was to be dubbed the Pollensa ‘School’ in that year. It was a journalist called Pedro Ferrer who used this term in a book published in 1916 - its title was ‘Flirt’. Ferrer, who was on friendly terms with many of the painters who came to Pollensa around that time, was referring to a style of post-impressionism that was developed in Pollensa.

When his work was exhibited at the CaixaForum in Barcelona in 2006 to 2007, another art historian, Francesc Fontbona, wrote that Anglada Camarasa was the “most universal Catalan painter” before Joan Miró (who also lived in Mallorca). “No other Catalan artist of his time had, by any means, a presence as alive as his on the international art scene.”
He is honoured in the place where he lived, Puerto Pollensa, by having had a promenade named after him - the Passeig Anglada Camarasa runs from the yacht club roundabout to the pinewalk, Passeig Voramar.