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Josep Llimona Biography

Josep Llimona

(Barcelona, ​​1864-id., 1934) Spanish sculptor.He frequented the workshop of Frederic Trías and completed his studies at the Escuela de la Llotja.In 1880 he went to Rome on a scholarship from the Barcelona City Council.With the works he carried out in Rome, among others a sketch for the equestrian statue of Ramón Berenguer el Grande, he has already achieved awards and a great reputation.Since his return to Barcelona, ​​the orders and the realizations were constant.After a period dominated by religious themes ( First Communion , 1897), he turned to the female nude, a field in which some of his masterpieces are inscribed ( Desconsolation , Youth ).In other works, such as The Forger , the tenderness of the nudes gives way to a contained aggressiveness.He is also owed, among many other creations, the monument to Dr.Robert and the Risen Christ of Montserrat.

Josep Llimona

Hermano del painter Joan Llimona, also his sons María and Rafael would be artists, dedicated respectively to sculpture and painting.Josep Llimona began his training in Federico Trías's workshop and at the age of fourteen he entered the School of Fine Arts of La Llotja in Barcelona, ​​where he studied painting with Martí Alsina and sculpture with the Valimitjana brothers and Nobas.The Barcelona City Council granted him the Fortuny pension in 1880 to further his training in Rome, a city where he frequented Enric Serra's workshop, attended the Gigi Academy and received the influence of the four-century sculpture (especially by Donatello) more than properly that of the classical one, along with certain medieval echoes.

During his first Roman year he made the sketches for the equestrian sculpture of Ramón Berenguer III el Grande, which earned him the extension of the scholarship for one more year.He then modeled the work and presented it at the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona in 1888.The reliefs that he sculpted for the monument to Christopher Columbus in the port of Barcelona (1886) also correspond to the stage immediately after his stay in Rome.commission of the Universal Exhibition, a statue of Ramón Berenguer el Viejo and the frieze of the Arc de Triomphe.

Shortly after, in 1892, Josep Llimona founded with his brother Joan the Artistic Circle of Sant Lluc, of which he was president from 1898 to 1902.To the Catholic and moralistic ideology of the Circle correspond works of religious themes such as the Virgen del Rosario (1892), Consumatum est (1896, Montserrat) and The First Communion (1897, Barcelona, ​​Museum of Modern Art ).

The First Communion (1897)

Despite its narrative nature and still being in the line of Eighteenth-century sculpture, these works correspond to a stage in which Llimona felt an increasing attraction to the so-called "modernity".Indeed, since 1891, with his female head titled Modestia , Llimona's interest in modernist aesthetics was revealed, perhaps due to the influence of the sculptor Miguel Blay Fábregas, but surely also as a result of the trips made to Paris and throughout Europe since that year.Such trips led him to get in touch, in the early years of the 20th century, with artists who represented the overcoming of detail and the eight-century mannerism, such as Auguste Rodin, Constantin Meunier or Paul Albert Bartholomé; Likewise, they led him to learn about and follow a line of search in classical Greek sculpture of forms, volumes and an aura of serenity that allowed him to connect with the artistic ideas of Aristide Maillol and Manolo Hugué.

Modesty (1891)

In 1901, following the death of his wife, the introvert character that had always characterized him seemed to intensify; Along with that introversion then increased, his Catholicism accentuated the concern to reflect physical and moral pain, which he dealt with in a series of female figures, many of them naked, which became a frequent theme of his sculptural production.In this conjunction of the preoccupation with the volumetric modeling of the bodies, the personal crisis and the interest in the treatment of the female body, his work Desconsolation (1903) originates, preserved in later replicas, from 1907, in the museum of Modern Art in Barcelona and in the Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid.Influenced by Rodin's Danaide , this sculpture must already be described as fully modernist and reaches the highest quality within the aforementioned female nudes in which pain is reflected, intensely but serenely.The sensuality and refinement in the representation of the female body demonstrate an unusual virtuosity in marble work and an impressive ability to convey the state of mind in a contained way.

Desconsolation (1903), by Josep Llimona

Responding to an eclectic modernism and as a result of inspiration from Rodin's epic sentiment and from the realism of Meunier's figures, Llimona made a monument in honor of Dr.Robert (1903-1910), a work on a social theme, realistic and at the same time fully idealistic in its allegorical exaltation of the work, arts and letters of the Catalan people.

In the decade of the ten and the twenties, Llimona continued with his series of female nudes, characterized by their soft and delicate invoice, with an approach to the figure similar to that of his productions of the previous decade , despite which, with his attitude of restraint and serenity, he managed to connect with the movement that prevailed at that time, the Noucentisme.Examples of this are sculptures such as Youth (1913, Museum of Modern Art of Barcelona), Meditation (1917), Beauty (1924) and Cordelia (1930).

Another of the frequent themes in Llimona's work, and in the same field of body modeling, is that of male figures.In them an omnipresent serenity seemed to guide the sculptor in order to calm the possible aggressiveness that reigned in the muscular male bodies; This is how it is seen in El forjador (1914), the equestrian Sant Jordi of the Montjuïc Park (1924) or the monument to the Martyrs of Independence (1925).

Funerary statues of Josep Llimona in Comillas and Cadaqués cemeteries

He did not stop cultivating throughout his life the sculpture of religious themes, as shown by the numerous funerary monuments that he made for aristocratic or upper bourgeois families: the Maristany, counts of Lavern, in El Masnou (Barcelona), the Mundet de Arenys de Mar (Barcelona), the Rialp from Barcelona, ​​Robert from Sitges (Barcelona), Satrústegui from San Sebastián (Guipúzcoa), Santiago López de Comillas (Santander) and Berjano from Cáceres.Other notable religious works are the Burial of Christ made for the parish of Vilafranca del Penedès (Barcelona), the Risen Christ (1914, basilica of Montserrat), commissioned by the Bishop of Vic, Josep Torras i Bages, or the Calvario for the cemetery of Portugalete (Vizcaya), commissioned by the Marquis of Comillas.Included in the works on pious themes are also some of his allegorical sculptural groups such as Amor a la infantil (Escuela del Bosque, Barcelona).

In 1931, Josep Llimona was appointed president of the Barcelona Museum Board, a position from which he sought to encourage the renewal of Barcelona's artistic and cultural life, having already become one of the modernist sculptors himself most prominent and influential in Catalan artistic life in the first third of the 20th century.His career included innumerable exhibitions in Spain and Europe and had been recognized with international awards; For his equestrian statue of Ramón Berenguer el Grande, he received the gold medal of the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona in 1888, and Disconsolation deserved the honor prize of the International Exhibition of Fine Arts (1907).

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