Jazz Age Barcelona [1 ed.] 9781442690134, 9781442610439

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JAZZ AGE BARCELONA Robert A. Davidson

One of the world’s renowned centres of culture, Barcelona is also one of the capitals of modernist art given its association with the talents of Dali, Picasso, and Gaudi. Jazz Age Barcelona focuses the lenses of cultural studies and urban studies on the avant-garde character of the city during the cosmopolitan Jazz Age, delving into the cultural forces that flourished in Europe between the late 1910s and early 1930s. Studying literary journalism, photography, and the city of Barcelona itself, Robert A. Davidson argues that the explosion of jazz culture and the avant-garde was predominantly fostered by journalists and their positive reception of innovative new art forms and radical politics. Using periodicals and recently rediscovered archival material, Davidson considers the relationship between the political pressures of a brutal class war, the grasp of a repressive dictatorship, and the engagement of the city’s young intellectuals with Barcelona’s culture and environment. Also analysing the 1929 International Exhibition and the down-and-out Raval District – which housed many of the Age’s clubs and bars – Jazz Age Barcelona is an insightful portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most culturally rich times and places. (Studies in Book and Print Culture) robert a. davidson is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto.

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ROBERT A. DAVIDSON

Jazz Age Barcelona

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9937-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1043-9 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Davidson, Robert A., 1970– Jazz Age Barcelona / Robert A. Davidson. (Studies in book and print culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9937-2 (bound).–ISBN 978-1-4426-1043-9 (pbk.) 1. Barcelona (Spain) – Civilization – 20th century. 2. Barcelona (Spain) – Social life and customs – 20th century. 3. Jazz – Spain – Barcelona – History and criticism. 4. Jazz – Political aspects – Spain – Barcelona – History – 20th century. 5. Barcelona (Spain) – History – 20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in book and print culture DP402.B29D38 2009

946'.72074

C2009-901963-9

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1 Barcelona Boom Town 11 2 Where Others Fear to Tread: El Escándalo and Sangre en Atarazanas 27 3 The Spatial Aesthetics of Jazz Rhythm

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4 Vantage Point: Barcelona’s Mirador (1929–31) 5 An Age in Pictures: Imatges (1930)

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6 The Colour of a Cocktail: J.M. de Sagarra’s Aperitiu and Vida privada 182 Conclusion: Picking Up the Tab 212 Notes

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Works Cited Index

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Acknowledgments

This book has benefited greatly from the input of many people over the past few years. John Kronik’s exacting eye and merciless green pen were crucial in helping my writing. Criticism from him was always supportive, generous, and inspiring; he is deeply missed. I also thank Dan Schwarz at Cornell; Peter Bly, Dan Chamberlain, and George Lovell at Queen’s; Enrique García Santo-Tomás at Michigan, as well as Gordana Yovanovich and Ken Mose at Guelph for having got me started in the first place. Material support for Jazz Age Barcelona has come from various sources. I thank the Program for Interuniversity Cooperation, the Einaudi Center at Cornell University, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto, and especially, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, which has been extremely generous in its support of my research agenda both in terms of trips to the archives and in the communication of results. The publication of this book was made possible by a generous Senate Research Grant from Victoria University. Thank you to Berg Publishers for permission to reprint the section of chapter 4 that appeared in Visualizing Spanish Modernity (2005). I thank as well my colleagues in the North American and Anglo Catalan Societies who welcomed me into their field and have been very encouraging. The staff at the Casa Ardiaca (Albert Gil and Alicia Torres, specifically), the UAB Hemeroteca and the ANC (Conxi Petit Cibiriain) have been extremely helpful: moltes gràcies. Thank you to Núria Casas Formiguera for kindly giving me permission to reprint her father’s photographs. Many thanks must go, too, to my colleagues and the staff in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. What a joy to work in such a friendly and respectful environment. Joe Blackmore has

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been a true mentor, as have Rosa Sarabia and Stephen Rupp. Special thanks go to Néstor Rodríguez and Eva-Lynn Jagoe for always being willing to bounce ideas around. I thank Linda Hutcheon for her excellent advice and especially Aphrodite Gardner and Bao Nguyen for making the Bader a great place to go every day. For their friendship, support, and timely encouragement I owe deep thanks to – among others – Colleen, Fran, Juan, Victoria, Bill, Berna, Derek, Hilary, Minelle, and wine merchant extraordinaire, David Sparrow. Special thanks to Silvia Torres, who, while at the Casa Ardiaca, was instrumental in getting my project moving. If Barcelona has become a second home, it is because many generous people have taken me into their families. I single out those at the Roure: Toni, Santi, Rafa, et al., as well as Elisa Gisbert for always having a room for me. Thank you Jordi, Maite, and Miquel for the many insights into Catalan culture and, of course, for the many bottles of excellent wine. My parents, Gail and Stewart Davidson, and my grandmother Alyce Halliday sacrificed a lot so that I could be the first in our extended family to go to university. Their unconditional support is something that I can never repay. Hélène Grégoire has challenged me when I needed it most and always been there for me. She has put up with many hours of my being ‘there but not there’ and has been a constant source of inspiration over our many wonderful years together. I simply would not be where I am today were it not for her; she has my eternal gratitude and love. Finally, more than anyone, Joan Ramon Resina has been instrumental in what academic success I have had. He opened the door to Catalunya for me and reminded me of the importance of what we do when I seriously doubted staying in academia. To work with the best is always a privilege and for that opportunity as well as for his support, encouragement and friendship, I am very grateful. This book is for him.

JAZZ AGE BARCELONA

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Introduction

The Jazz Age The 1920s and early 1930s were a time of rapid technological, political, and cultural change. Shocked by the horrors of the First World War, American and Western European societies embraced a new style of daily life that fed off the postwar economic boom. Sport and leisure activities such as dance and cinema became popular distractions. In art, various ‘isms’ came and went, gathering strength in some places and dissipating in others. The larger political sphere saw communism and fascism emerge as two poles. During the early 1920s in Catalonia, Spain’s most prosperous region, anarcho-syndicalism continued to push its agenda, threatening a skittish bourgeoisie.1 While the manifestation of the aesthetics of modernism differed from country to country, one element caused a similar sensation across the board: jazz. Born in America, jazz quickly found its feet in the Old World and spread. Its name stuck to the period, and it became part of a soundtrack that included the din of machines and the roar of the city. The term ‘Jazz Age’ in this book refers to the period roughly defined by the First World War (1914–18) and the first year of the Second Spanish Republic (1932). Barcelona’s experience of this time was unique and it is through this lens that I view the Age as a composite phenomenon that crossed linguistic, national, and class borders – a cosmopolitan, syncretic style with an avant-garde initial phase that was followed by a more gentrified version. Importantly, while the music was a strong influence, the Jazz Age – or Roaring Twenties – were not bound exclusively by it. The same may be said about this book. Jazz Age Barcelona draws on aspects common to both the emerging lifestyle of the time and the fundamental

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Jazz Age Barcelona

characteristics of jazz – and, in so doing, acknowledges the music’s important aesthetic influence – but deals primarily with the way in which this Age played out in its urban setting and was mediated subsequently by journalistic text. The objective of this study is thus twofold: first, to bring to light how an international phenomenon manifested in the Catalan capital and second, to consider the manner in which journalistic and intellectual engagement with the Jazz Age city took on political valences specific to the Catalan context. That in Barcelona, Spain’s most cosmopolitan centre, this connection between transnational spatial practice and journalism was linked intimately to the experience of the city as both a site of spectacle/performance and one of political desire underlines the uniqueness of the Catalan case while pointing to the importance of the urban environment in the evolution of the Jazz Age aesthetic as well as in the engaged political will of the journalists and critics who covered it in the city.2 Barcelona’s status as a neutral player during the First World War, its own social conflicts between organized labour groups and industrialists, followed by the effects of a dictatorship, and then those of a fledgling nationalist movement combine further to differentiate it as a singular example of a Jazz Age city. It was at once a prototype for and a product of a remarkable time. In this study I explore these multiple dynamics from an interdisciplinary angle. My cultural analyses draw on periodical and literary studies while engaging with the built environment of Barcelona through a perspective that is informed by urbanism, architecture, and theories of space. Jazz Age Barcelona thus serves to complement earlier works that have dealt primarily with the period’s literary production. These studies include Joan Ramon Resina’s edited volume, El aeroplano y la estrella: El movimiento de vanguardia en los Países Catalanes (1904–1936); Joaquim Molas’s Literatura catalana d’avantguarda; Maria Campillo and Jordi Castellanos’s ‘La literatura del 1925 al 1939’ (published in Salvat’s Història de Catalunya); and Carme Arnau’s Marginats i integrats en la novel. la catalana (1925–1938). Jazz Age Barcelona also contributes to the growing revalorization of twentieth-century Catalan writers and intellectuals that is evident in the appearance of collections of works by Just Cabot, Irene Polo, Josep M. Planes, and J.M. de Sagarra (the last two of whom I study here), as well as in a volume such as L’escriptor i la seva imatge. Contribució a la història dels intel·lectuals en la literatura catalana contemporània, by Ramon Panyella and Jordi Marrugat.3 The approach to the texts that I employ – whether they be newspapers, essays, fictional works, photographs, or the built environment itself – is based on close reading. Detailed analysis of the way that the Jazz Age style manifested

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in the work of Barcelona’s pre-eminent writers and thinkers provides invaluable insights into the Catalan capital during the period in question. Journals such as El Escándalo, Mirador, and Imatges, fiction by Francesc Madrid and J.M. de Sagarra, along with the photographs of Gabriel Casas and Josep Gaspar – and especially the writings of cultural critic Sebastià Gasch – show just how vital a place the city was as it negotiated important political and cultural challenges. To speak of urban space, journalistic tendencies, and the Jazz Age is to speak of interurban space – of spaces that manifested in cities across the West in response to the demands of an increasingly cosmopolitan culture industry fuelled in part by postwar frivolity that capitalized on increased leisure time. Spaces of (predominantly) nocturnal entertainment like nightclubs, hotels, bars, and music halls were activated by an aesthetic the codes and cues of which had been established at an international level. While Paris and New York may have existed as iconic models, these spaces reflected nonetheless the particular tastes (and laws) of their respective local environments. The Jazz Age was a social formation, a lived style that responded to changes in the cities where it played out. It did not exist solely at the level of literature or philosophy even if, in Barcelona`s case, textual manifestations helped propagate it and were involved in the creation of myth. It found its way into the experiences of different classes – especially that of the bourgeoisie – and took advantage of both burgeoning mass media and established networks that facilitated the exchange of common points of reference. ‘American’ bars, touring bands and revues, as well as the rise of cinema all contributed to this effect, and these international connections ensured degrees of continuity and cohesion indicative of the spatial practice of the Jazz Age. I borrow the term ‘spatial practice’ from Henri Lefebvre, whose work on space addresses an issue of practical applicability that is particularly useful for consideration of an interdisciplinary ‘event’ such as this one. According to Lefebvre, space comprises three fields: the physical, the mental, and the social. His conception of space is that of social practice: ‘the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias’ (Lefebvre 11). This view is pertinent to my understanding of the Jazz Age aesthetic as a product of a transnationalized social imagination, replete with its own projections (for example, that of an exotic conception of negritude in largely homogenous European societies, or the aforementioned valorization of frivolity), symbols (the flapper, the jazzman, the debutante, sports icons, etc.), and ‘rhythms’ (time and music’s

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connection with movement, speed, and the urban environment). This last point is especially germane when one considers the importance of the reception of jazz rhythm as a theoretical paradigm in Sebastià Gasch’s appraisal of the Jazz Age in general as well as how it manifested in Barcelona particularly. In this book, when I consider how urban space, journalism, and the cultural codes of the Jazz Age combine, I am focusing more on spatial practice than on what Lefebvre calls the ‘problematic of space,’ which has its roots in philosophy and investigates the interconnectedness between social and mental space (413). Spatial practice, on the other hand, ‘is observed, described and analyzed on a wide range of levels: in architecture, in city planning or “urbanism” […] in the organization of everyday life, and, naturally, in urban reality’ (413–14). Furthermore, according to Lefebvre, it ‘simultaneously defines: places – the relationship of local to global; the representation of that relationship; actions and signs; the trivialized spaces of everyday life’ (288). Although, as part of his discussion of abstract space, he states that mental or literary ‘places’ are not his concern, I believe that attention given to the actual empirical qualities of spaces manifest in text enhances a reading not only of the period but also of the texts themselves and is especially pertinent to the burgeoning field of periodical studies. Furthermore, as is evident in my preference for the idea of ‘manifestation’ over ‘representation,’ I consider the act of reporting, in all of its myriad ways, to be an integral part of the experience of the Jazz Age. The relative immediacy of journalistic text at the time and its responsive qualities make it an ideal genre for the transmission of new cultural codes. Thus, I would argue that this textual space is another manifestation of the Jazz Age. That is to say, that it stands as the Age’s simultaneous conversion into theory – into an epistemological space of reception that is not representation but another form of presence of the many convergent elements of a transnational style and time that includes the culturally specific debates as to how cosmopolitanism takes hold and evolves in a given geographic locale. Shows, innovations, and all manner of leisure activities are presented as ‘news’ and events worth mentioning in the press. Thus, they become vehicles for cultural theorizing and criticism while, at the same time, the venues and neighbourhoods where they take place grow more visible in text as they are experienced by an increasing number of people. Journals and newspapers, then, not only become mediators of an interurban and international cultural aesthetic, but also of the physical, grounded spaces of the practice and the

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presence of the new that naturally accompany it. These spaces were varied and vital; the hotel, for example, was an emblematic site for cosmopolitanism. There, not only could one take in the jazz spectacle – a crucial aspect of the reproduction of the style before the mass production of jazz recordings – but it was also where the cocktail hour could be enjoyed as part of the general frivolity of the period.4 Cabarets and nightclubs provided similar points of reception of the Jazz Age by booking foreign acts. Also, they organized dance contests and marathons and were venues for local entertainers to enter the business. Later, as the Jazz Age became more mainstream and gentrified, music halls welcomed elaborate revues, the aesthetic effects of which sparked cultural theorizing all over Europe. I propose that journalism acted as an interface for the aesthetic and its spaces of performance, facilitating adoption and adaptation by participating in a novel mapping of the urban environment as the types of journalistic discourse brought to bear on the city expanded in the early twentieth century.5 That in Catalonia, journalism, the political movement of Catalanism, and an increasing awareness of the sheer urbanity of the capital city should combine so fruitfully further underlines the unique characteristics of Barcelona’s experience of an international phenomenon. Chapter Descriptions The chapters that follow this introduction and the more historically oriented chapter 1, are close-reading analyses of texts that engage with the city of Barcelona during the build-up, height, and aftermath of its experience of the Jazz Age. The newspapers, essays, and fictional accounts that I have chosen provide key insights into the period and the city with regard to the mediation of Jazz Age codes, the role of journalistic inquiry, and the re-evaluation of the city itself by major figures in Barcelona’s intelligentsia. Together, they represent a canon for a critical reading of Barcelona during an exceedingly vibrant, yet often overlooked, period in its history. Chapter 1, ‘Barcelona Boom Town,’ gives a historical overview of the situation in the city during the heady years of the First World War that served as the precursor to a Roaring Twenties period played out under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. By emphasizing the fact that Barcelona was far from a peaceful haven during and after the war, I link the experience of violence to the energy of the Age and at the same time detail events that would resonate in the work of critics later in the decade

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as the local elements of this cosmopolitan time were enshrined as being foundational aspects of Barcelona’s Jazz Age. In this section I also gloss the urban nature of the international Jazz Age in general and offer a brief recapitulation of the rich history of Catalan journalism so as to better situate the analyses of the periodicals that follow. Chapter 2 looks at two important projects by the prominent writer Francesc Madrid. The first is El Escándalo (The Scandal), a Spanishlanguage newspaper that he co-edited and that engaged the Jazz Age metropolis during 1925–6, a pivotal point in its development. My analysis of the tone of the editorial comment as well as the paper’s general take on life in modern Barcelona shows that ‘scandal,’ for El Escándalo, is a malleable term. It is at once a moral stance that plays to the consumption and titillation inherent to the zeitgeist and, importantly for my overall thesis, one that defines an ethical position towards information dissemination under a dictatorship. What is more, in the newspaper’s eclectic content one sees a double movement of mystery-making and revelation that fuels the general approach of the paper towards the mid1920s Jazz Age city as it seeks to be the weekly that goes where others cannot – or dare not – tread. This dichotomy is one that will be repeated frequently in later journalistic accounts of Barcelona at the time. The second part of this chapter deals with Madrid’s seminal pulp treatise Sangre en Atarazanas (Blood in Atarazanas), a hybrid text of fiction and history that grew out of his work in El Escándalo and cemented many of the urban legends about various city spaces during the Jazz Age period. Despite its importance, this work only garners brief mention in treatments of modern Barcelona. I correct this oversight by identifying Sangre as a key text in a historiographic process that centres on one of the neighbourhoods most associated with the Jazz Age in Barcelona: the Raval or Barrio Chino (red-light district). Madrid’s collection of voices and spaces serves as an outlet for the pressures that the dictatorship could contain but not eradicate. At the same time, through the enunciation of such stories and their recapitulation in a historiographic form tied intimately to journalistic inquiry, Madrid gives the themes and past events that had led to the present-day situation a new urgency and topicality. Jazz Age Barcelona for Madrid, then, is more than cocktails and dancing, it is an engagement with the burgeoning metropolis in such a way that unrecognized histories may manifest; it is a time of discovery in the sense that not only are the recently arrived international codes adopted, but also Barcelona’s own spatial practices – past and present – are revealed through the public discourse of

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modern journalism and thus activated as myth, sensationalism, and as the local anchor in an increasingly cosmopolitan way of life. In chapter 3, I look at the essays of Sebastià Gasch, Spain’s most important art and cultural critic during the second half of the 1920s. Through an examination of Gasch’s critical commentary on fellow Catalan Salvador Dalí’s art, his own collaborative work with Dalí and Lluis Montanyà on cinema and urban advertising, as well as his series on spaces of Jazz Age entertainment, I show how an overarching paradigm of jazz rhythm and what Gasch called urban ‘violence’ or energy informed his work as a whole and was representative of the acute penetration of Jazz Age spectacles in interdisciplinary critical discourse as well as their increasing massification in the wake of the Charleston’s arrival in Spain in 1926. For Gasch, rhythm came to be a fundamental tenet of his critical approaches not only to art and mass spectacle but also to the modern city that contained them and served as their staging ground. The development of Gasch’s jazz-based criticism is visible in many of his writings published over the period of 1926 to 1931. That his significant and influential work appeared predominantly in journalistic sources further underlines my contention that this medium played a key role in the reception, analysis, and transculturation of Jazz Age codes, in this case, the foundational notion of ‘rhythm.’ The fourth chapter of Jazz Age Barcelona turns to the literary press and analyses the interdisciplinary Catalanist weekly, Mirador (Vantage Point) – a unique example of how important figures of Barcelona’s intellectual community resisted the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and articulated their dissent. I focus on the paper’s first two years of publication (1929– 30), which are of particular importance as they correspond to the last year of Primo’s rule and the swan-song of the Jazz Age. Mirador’s coverage of the city and the events of the time, especially the cosmopolitan 1929 International Exposition of Barcelona, reflects the growing political facets of the Jazz Age in Barcelona. These manifest in the way in which its editors concentrate on physical, practical aspects of urban life as questions of urbanism and mass spectacle take centre-stage in the journal’s take on Catalan modernity. I explore these elements through close readings of Mirador’s approach to the leisure aspects of Jazz Age Barcelona as well as its comprehensive coverage of the World’s Fair, especially the Poble Espanyol (Spanish Town) area of the site, and the editors’ intense interest in a process of imagining the future Barcelona while still under the effects of the dictatorship. Mirador’s overwhelmingly Catalan nationalist bent in this regard made it a key organ for the

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transmission of evolving codes of city life in the unique context that was and is Barcelona: the capital of a stateless nation. Chapter 5 takes the discussion beyond the 1920s and into the first year of what would come to be known in the West as the ‘Dirty Thirties.’ Here my focus is on another key player in Barcelona’s Jazz Age: the cultural observer and journalist Josep Maria Planes. As editor of the intriguing and innovative photojournal Imatges (Images), Planes expanded his role in the naturalization of the modern processes that had been part of the 1920s experience in the Catalan capital. The year in which Imatges had its six-month run, 1930, was a transition period in Barcelona; even though Primo de Rivera had fled to France in January, authoritarian rule persisted in the form of the so-called dictablanda (bland dictatorship) that put off political and social normalization until the arrival of the Second Republic a year later. I contend that this political, economic, and social in-between time permitted a subtle adaptation to the changes that had occurred during the city’s unique experience of the Roaring Twenties. Imatges reflects this process in a unique way through its graphic approach to Barcelona and especially so in the pictures of its primary photographer, Gabriel Casas. That said, the aesthetic here is one of consolidation because while 1930 may have stood technically on the downward side of the Jazz Age’s pinnacle, it was still too early for the process of retrospective evaluation and criticism that the hangover years would later elicit. A fierce assessment and criticism of the Jazz Age in Barcelona arrived in 1932 in the form of J.M. Sagarra’s award-winning Vida privada (Private Life), which is the topic of chapter 6 along with a collection of his earlier writings on the Age. I read the novel as an in-depth retrospection on the heyday of the Jazz Age and interpret the author’s portrayal of the city and its citizens as a laying bare of the degenerate social core of a metropolis that had suffered under the dictatorship and the indignity of its ruling classes’ own capitulation. I dedicate particular attention to Sagarra’s detailing of the architectural interior as a way of establishing a direct link between the spatial experience of Jazz Age Barcelona and the ethical deficiencies of the citizenry that the author lampoons. Furthermore, I contend that the suitability of journalism as a means for documenting the Roaring Twenties lifestyle as it happened, combined with a need for critical distance in terms of the conflicted political and social dynamics of the Jazz Age dictatorship, meant that Barcelona had to wait for its great city novel of the modernist period. Vida privada, a product of the Age’s literal and figurative hangover, is just that book.

1 Barcelona Boom Town

From Barcelona’s initial First World War boom through to its International Exposition of 1929 and beyond into the hangover phase, the city’s unique relationship to the world – and the Spanish state, in particular – coloured the way in which it reacted to itself during this period. Barcelona’s experience of the time, however, is especially unique in that the First World War temporarily relieved Paris of its role as the pan-European city; Barcelona’s geographic location and social conditions allowed it to host spies and representatives of both warring sides and assume the role of frivolity-loving boom town for a brief yet intense period that was fuelled also in large part by an exodus of entertainment professionals who had fled the war in France for a safe haven across the border in Catalonia and beyond. Barcelona was the European capital for arte frívolo and it lived a prototype of the happy-go-lucky lifestyle that Paris, London, and other cities would resume in earnest once the fighting had ended. It was not difficult for Barcelona to fulfil this role, as the city had already been seeing a Europeanization of the spectacles – and spaces of spectacle – in its Barrio Chino and Paral.lel districts. The cabaret à la Montmartre had become fashionable and another international phenomenon, the tango, was the reigning dance of choice in the dancings when jazz began to assert itself. Jazz and the City The history of jazz sheds light on the music’s cosmopolitanism and the predominantly metropolitan nature of the Age with which it came to be associated. Nicholas M. Evans ventures that in aesthetic terms, jazz ‘arguably best represents […] the indeterminately hybrid composition

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of black culture’ (Evans 16). He bases his views on Paul Gilroy’s assertion that black music employs forms of syncretic montage to embody the instability of everyday black life. Evans supports Gilroy by observing jazz’s wide variety of initial influences and ‘developmental accretions’ (17). I propose that this idea may be pushed further, beyond the specific experience of African Americans, and used as a metaphor that is applicable, as well, to the instability of everyday life in general during the First World War and in its aftermath. What is more, I suggest that the core notion of syncretic montage is equally germane to the way in which the newspaper as a manifestation of urban presence and practice creates a mosaic of daily life. That it does so through both the spatial juxtaposition of text and the temporal act of apprehending information with a relatively minimal lag between the event and the existence of that event at a later moment in print as well as in the imagination of the reader is suggestive. The practice of critique as a form of value added to the transmission of information during such a vibrant and hectic period as the Jazz Age further inflects the syncretic nature of journalistic text and its relation to urban activity. While the newspaper may be an inherently fitting medium for the expression of urbanity in a textual form, I suggest that the addition of Jazz Age culture and spatial practice to the mix makes it even more apposite for the apprehension and distillation of activities that are themselves intrinsically urban in nature. The agility and responsiveness of the press gives it an advantage over traditional narrative, especially in terms of the aesthetic transmission of immediacy – with immediacy here being both a temporal category and a metaphorical quality of the Age in question. Put simply, the newspaper is the most suitable staging ground for the reception, recognition, and critique of the Jazz Age. This is particularly true in the case of Barcelona given the historical importance of the press to the consolidation of Catalan culture and, connected to this, the repressed political desire that goes hand in hand with the city’s experience of the 1920s. The identification of jazz as montage or collage is rooted firmly in its equation with the city. This is especially patent in the relationship between the music and the American city in which it originated. As Michael Jarrett comments: ‘Jazz, like the city of New Orleans, is always conceptualized as a conglomeration of diverse elements cooked up together; heard as the musical analogue of gumbo’ (qtd in Evans 100). Jazz was never stagnant, however, and in his book The Jazz Age Arnold Shaw identifies two moments of change in the music’s history that were key to the period’s development. The first of these urban events was the closing,

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in 1917, of New Orleans’s red-light district, Storyville; the second, the appearance of the (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) at the  prestigious New York restaurant Reisenweber’s (Shaw 14). When Storyville shut down, the exodus of musicians and entertainers to northern cities like Chicago and New York – which had already begun years before – intensified the spread of the music, exploding it out of a marginal area of a peripheral city.1 In the second case, the exposure that the ODJB received thanks to its New York gigs resulted in a recording, made on 26 February 1917, which sold so well that Columbia records endeavoured to copy the band’s success with other groups. Their achievement heralded the age of recorded jazz and put into motion an industry that expanded the music’s reach beyond the moment of its actual performance. Many factors contributed to jazz’s growing popularity, but the syncretic mix between the physical displacement of the players, an openness within the recording industry, and a receptive upper class signalled jazz’s arrival as a musical and cultural phenomenon.2 By 1920, the booming Midwest city of Chicago had become the de facto centre of jazz for both white and black groups. The ‘Harlem renaissance,’ though, turned New York into a jazz locus as the neighbourhood became ‘the recognized Negro capital’ around the turn of the decade (James Weldon, qtd in Shaw 59). During this period of vibrant cultural activity, Harlem was a magnet for artists of many different types. The energy of the area attracted poets, novelists, and playwrights, as well as politically active figures such as Marcus Garvey. Music and its spectacle were the primary attractions, however. In the mid-1920s, Harlem was known as the ‘Nightclub Capital of the World’ (Douglas 74). Clubs such as Connie’s Inn, the Paradise, and the Cotton Club had established themselves at the beginning of the decade and then, as the Jazz Age hit its zenith some years later, became even more well known for their ability to draw big names like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. It is generally accepted that jazz music arrived in Europe when the United States entered the First World War.3 Its emissary was James Reese Europe, composer and conductor of the ‘Harlem Hellfighters’ infantry regiment. The Hellfighters received a warm welcome. The French quickly took to the all-black group and their jazzed-up versions of classic songs, marches, and folk tunes. Just why jazz became so popular so fast, though, is a subject that is open to debate. Citing Argentine tango and Cuban music as two previous examples, Hobsbawm offers that, in the beginning, jazz was another artistic creation to emerge from the ‘specialized lumpenproletarian environments of the entertainment

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quarter in the big cities’ (Hobsbawm 266). He and other jazz commentators also identify the technological modernity of the time with the rhythm inherent in jazz. Perhaps more practically, jazz was not simply a spectacle to be idly received. It was an art form whose vibrant rhythm genuinely shocked people and inspired participation through dance. As Jackson points out, ‘syncopation was not new to European music, but using it as the basis for an entire musical genre was quite a novel phenomenon’ (Jackson 69). Prior to the Jazz Age, the cakewalk fad that had gripped France around the turn of the century ‘stretched the bounds of decorum’ in high-society circles where ballroom dancing represented the physical manifestation of social etiquette (Blake 21). Hobsbawm concurs with Blake and observes that organized social dancing increasingly ‘lost its formality and ordered succession’ (267). Thus, one sees in jazz a popularly created musical form that, while appealing to cultural critics for its association with modernity, Americanism, and colonial otherness, also came to represent a loosening up of social mores throughout Europe.4 Later, during the mid-1920s, Josephine Baker’s erotic dancing shows in France would loosen things up even more while reaffirming the importance of rhythm, which in turn mirrored the ever-increasing pace of the metropolis and both cultural and industrial modernization.5 Paris played a major role in the reception and creation of the Jazz Age scene in Europe. The mise-en-valeur of so-called exotic cultures of French colonies in Africa, the accompanying primitivist movement in the plastic arts, and the enthusiastic reception of the Harlem regiment contributed to the creation of an environment in the French capital that quickly – and indiscriminately – assimilated African-American music into the entertainment imaginary. Blake points out the undistinguishing nature of this process when she sustains that ‘the French were quick to disregard that ragtime and jazz created by American Blacks contained European elements, and were commercialized for white audiences’ (Blake 5). She also notes that ‘jazz age entertainment carried the influence of art nègre beyond avant-garde galleries’ into areas such as Montmartre, the Parisian Harlem (8). While France had been what many considered the cultural capital of Europe and easily assimilated the new and exciting jazz style, what about Spain? Of its two prospective metropolises, Barcelona and Madrid, it would be the former, a port city forever turned towards Paris, that would experience the new social and spatial codes most acutely.

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Wartime Barcelona and Its Aftermath During the First World War, Spain’s economy boomed and prices rose. In Catalonia, mills turned out textiles for French soldiers, and in Asturias, coalfields were worked feverishly to pick up the slack that a decline in Welsh exports created (Carr 497–8). That said, the good times were reserved for rich speculators and an increasingly powerful industrial class, who opted to take quick profits rather than reinvest in growth (498). On the other side of the social coin, to their increasing dismay and anger, workers found that a sky-rocketing cost of living outstripped any increases in wages that they were able to win. As Kaplan observes, between 1914 and 1920, the effective buying power of a working family in the Catalan capital decreased by 17 per cent (Kaplan 129). This dynamic worsened what were already contentious labour relations in the country. A palpable need for reform led to the crisis of 1917, in which disparate groups joined forces to try to effectuate change. Their failure to do so through ‘regular channels’ laid the seeds for General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s military coup in 1923. That Barcelona had become a European centre for speculators, displaced performers, and both French and German agents during the war usually garners brief mention in studies of the time. The First World War caused an economic boom in Barcelona that was taken advantage of by a bourgeoisie eager to show off its new wealth and advance socially. The Catalan upper middle class was ready for its moment in the spotlight. By 1917 they had elected their own political party, the Lliga Regionalista, and had seen in Modernisme and Noucentisme Catalan culture promoted and expressed after years of relative stasis.6 The flamboyance that this upper class displayed when their chance came and money was easy could stand more study, as it is often passed over in favour of descriptions of its repercussions in the form of the increased ‘social war’ that was waged in the streets between workers’ groups and the elite. Of course, these intense and frequent conflicts were extremely crucial both in terms of how Barcelona experienced its modern period and for their role in the perception of overall political instability in the eyes of those in the rest of Spain. It is important to underline, though, that what occurred in Barcelona – both as part of the development of the leisure infrastructure of the city and of the practice and pursuit of luxury and entertainment – may be seen as a prelude of the type of Jazz Age that would later begin in earnest elsewhere after the First World War had ended. Barcelona was a warm-up or prototype, and

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recognition of this means that it is necessary to reconfigure the general sense that the frivolous Jazz Age aesthetic arose solely from the horrors of the First World War. As a neutral country, Spain (and hence Catalonia) was spared the war’s carnage, so it would appear at first glance that the high life Barcelona enjoyed was simply a spin-off of the suffering of others, a period of affluence gained without any direct experience of the ‘official’ war. That it did profit from neutrality is not in doubt; to imply, though, as Paul Aubert does, that there was a lessened sense of mortality in Spain as a result of this obviates the specific experience of Catalonia and Barcelona in particular (Aubert 39). Here is where class warfare or ‘social crime’ and the nascent Jazz Age style intersect directly. The Catalan capital during the First World War and immediately afterwards was far from a peaceful place. The conflict between violent anarchist groups and industrialists was a brutal street campaign replete with bombings, assassinations, and fierce demonstrations.7 Add to these the important organized strikes that occurred during 1917 and 1919, as well as the literal declaration of a state of war in the city during the first months of 1918, and one can see that the Catalan experience of the time serves as a microcosm of the larger European experience with one key difference: the initial boom in Jazz Age style frivolity and modern leisure activities was being enacted with the violence of the social war as an immediate backdrop. Whereas the broad European experience of the 1920s – which includes the second, more gentrified phase of the Age in Barcelona – may have been articulated and perceived as a latent response to the strife and horror of the First World War, it is clear that violence and this new Age of frivolity were intimately connected when it comes to how the overall period developed in Barcelona. The intensity of this mix was such that during the later, calmer phase of the mid- to late 1920s, various journalists, writers, and intellectuals would refer back to these early days in a way that contributed to the mythification of specific areas of their city while at the same time contributing a sense of local continuity in the face of an increasingly strong foreign cultural influence. That the notion of violence also surfaces in the way that Sebastià Gasch, one of Barcelona’s most important interpreters of Jazz Age life and spectacles, viewed the period is also highly suggestive in terms of how Barcelona’s experience of the time was a unique one that not only absorbed cosmopolitan codes from abroad but also harked back to its own moments of foundational violence.8 In their book Barcelona memoria de un siglo, Josep M. Huertas and Jaume Fabre note the way in which the built environment changed and

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grew according to the new economic reality of the time. During the years 1910–19, in addition to more traditional forms of ‘free’ leisure and entertainment such as fiestas mayores (annual fairs), picnicking in the country, or religious processions, new options, for which one had to pay, appeared as portions of the citizenry became richer and sought new ways to pass their free time (Huertas and Fabre 33). Among other edifices, they point to the Casino de la Arrabassada, the Principal Palace’s frontón (pelota court), and the Can Tunis hippodrome as examples of sites where consumer society and leisure time came together (33). These additions to the upper classes’ social scene complemented already existing locales such as the Grill Room and bars like the Zurich, the American Bar, Canaletes, and London. In terms of mass spectacle, various important cinemas, the Kursaal, the Ideal, Excelsior, and Catalunya, had been in business since the beginning of the decade, while the cabaret Moulin Rouge and the Teatre Arnau had been hosting performers like Raquel Meller since 1911. A boxing club was established in late 1913 and Barcelona was the site of an important match between world champion Jack Johnson and European champion Arthur Craven in 1916. Thus, the influx of entertainers, producers, and musicians who were refugees from the war boosted and expanded Barcelona’s (and the rest of Spain’s) existing social infrastructure. This state of affairs, combined with the ‘easy’ money that came from speculation and gambling, as well as the city’s own inherent dangers, made Barcelona’s boom especially intense. As I detail above, the press and print culture in general were especially apt at engaging with the rapid social changes at play during the first and second phases of the Jazz Age. An editorial from 11 May 1917 in the satirical but always very topical and widely read weekly L’Esquella de la Torratxa (The Ringing of the Bell) captures the ambience of this wartime Barcelona particularly well. In this instance, the focus is not on Barcelona’s own violence but on the way that the citizens perceived the Great War going on next door. Note above all the ironic tone regarding business matters, which are linked intrinsically to the zeitgeist of the city: La Guerra? ¿I qui es recorda de la guerra en aquesta Barcelona, que sembla una revista de modes, amb els maniquís passejant pels festivals? Si ho fem és per a convertir-la en diversió com aquells filosòfics gitanos que vetllen als morts fent broma. La guerra és negoci i de la propaganda – francòfila o germanòfila – ne fem festa […] Però tots, francòfils i germanòfils, riuen, frueixen, se amaren de musiques i de colors. Barcelona, condescendenta i

18

Jazz Age Barcelona neutral, els hi dóna un pit a cada un, i així la ciutat esvalotada i ferèstega, se transforma en una festa major sense darrer dia, en una mena de revista Pathé de l’alegría. Si de tot això poguessim ésser empresa, només que d’entrar a Barcelona ja faríem pagar entrada. (Paradox 374) The war? And who remembers the war in this Barcelona, which resembles a fashion show, with models passing through the festivals? If we do remember it is to convert it into a diversion like those philosophical gypsies who pass the night with the dead making jokes. The war is a business and it’s made of propaganda – Francophile or Germanophile – we make a party out of it. […] But everyone, Francophiles or Germanophiles, laugh, enjoy, soak themselves in music and colours. Barcelona, condescending and neutral, lends a teat to each one, and this way, the excited and wild city transforms itself into an endless local fair, into a sort of Pathé happiness revue. If we could make all of this a business, we would make people buy a ticket just to enter Barcelona.9

The editor’s take on the city may be sarcastic, but nonetheless, it reveals the festive nature of the city while the large European powers were caught up in their mutual conflict. L’Esquella was a very graphic-oriented paper and several of its cartoons from the First World War period are helpful in giving a twentyfirst-century reader a feel for the dynamic of the time. In one image (fig. 1.1), the Eiffel Tower dressed as a Parisian woman carries artwork en route to Barcelona. While the overt reference is to an art fair being held in the city, ‘she’ represents also a privileged group of refugees that the war displaced; a group that took their regular social practices and carried on as best they could in the Catalan capital. The satirical dig at this figure comes in the caption attributed to her in which, after she has remarked that she has been invited to show her art in the city, she asks blithely if Barcelona is lacking in people. Figure 1.2 addresses the prosperity of the wartime city in a way that captures the exoticism of the cosmopolitan feel that Barcelona had acquired; the artist depicts the Plaça de Catalunya, the centre of Barcelona and the axis of the old and new areas of the nascent metropolis, as a sultan’s kingdom or oriental bazaar where arms can be bought. Along the same lines of speculation and profiteering in a multicultural setting, figure 1.3 plays on the difference in wartime experiences between Berlin and Barcelona. As the Germans in the former grow progressively thinner and less prosperous, those living in the Catalan capital become fat on wartime profits.

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Figure 1.1 ‘The Paris Salon of 1916.’ L’Esquella de la Torratxa 7 July 1916, p. 457. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Figure 1.2 ‘Panorama of a Neutral Country.’ L’Esquella de la Torratxa 21 July 1916, p. 496. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

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Figure 1.3 ‘The Berlin Germans and Barcelona Germans.’ L’Esquella de la Torratxa 16 February 1917, p. 115. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

As I allude to above, the increase in conspicuous consumption in the city could not help but aggravate Barcelona’s already tense labour situation. As a result of the class conflicts, the bourgeoisie’s Barcelona during the 1890s and early twentieth century was a city of bombs, one in which the imaginary was inflected by insurgency. Public space was danger space. For a time, a great number of people stopped going to the theatre and their fear was justified: violence and entertainment had converged once already in Barcelona’s past and would do so again. The first incident, in 1893, was an unforgettable attack on the upper classes in the city’s luxurious opera house, the Liceu. The assault in question occurred on 7 November; it was the opening night for a new season and the building was filled to capacity. The well-heeled chattering classes took their places in the boxes and orchestra seats. High up in the balcony the anarchist Santiago Salvador waited until the second act of Rossini’s William Tell had just begun before he rose and threw two bombs down below. The first exploded, killing twenty people; the other, a dud, failed to go off. In the aftermath, Salvador and six other anarchists were arrested and subsequently executed while some four hundred others were detained.

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The second touchstone violent incident occurred on 12 September 1920. Barcelona’s economic advantage had evaporated with the end of the First World War, and with tensions running high after a series of bitter strikes in 1919, the first year of the Roaring Twenties proved to be just as contentious. This time, the site of performance that was targeted was not an upper-class haunt but rather the Pompeya, a popular working-class music hall located on the city’s Paral.lel street, an area renowned for its concentration of nightclubs and show palaces. Conservative agents placed a bomb under a seat in the last row of the main room of the building. The device exploded at 12:15 a.m., just as the last act was concluding. Three people were killed instantly while another eighteen were injured – three of whom eventually succumbed to their wounds. This attack came on the heels of the assassination on 8 September of a typesetter at the La Publicidad newspaper; the combination of the two events elicited a firestorm of protest in the local press, which condemned the lawlessness of Barcelona. Again, political cartoons such as figures 1.4 and 1.5 from L’Esquella cut to the heart of the matter. Looked at from a critical perspective, the rubble of the Pompeya represents the confluence in Barcelona of two distinct currents which, while radically disparate in nature, still belonged to equally internationalizing trends: one of mass culture and spectacle, the other, a deadly response to the growing tide of radical left-wing action that had been bolstered by the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. In the Catalan capital, direct action – perpetrated both by anarchist assassins and right-wing death squads – inflected the experience of the city at the same time as new artistic modes of performance, participation, and spectatorship were exerting themselves as their own form of avantgarde. Thus, even though the city’s boom had capitalized on Spain’s neutrality in the First World War, the experience of violence was part and parcel of the urban condition in which twentieth-century ostentation and frivolity sprang to life. Barcelona’s initial expression of the Jazz Age style was forged in this violent atmosphere, the revolutionary potential of which was a leading cause for the Catalan bourgeoisie’s support of the coup in 1923 that would bring Primo de Rivera to power. While under the dictatorship the second phase of the city’s Jazz Age would be more conventional as gentrification took hold, these violent roots would never be totally forgotten even as, ironically, the sense of struggle tied into the time would be converted to one of nationalist Catalan desire as this stateless nation saw its culture put into stasis

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Figure 1.4 ‘Are they victims of the World War? No, they’re victims of the Barcelona peace.’ L’Esquella de la Torratxa 11 September 1920, p. 560. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Figure 1.5 ‘Whose turn is it [to die] today?’ L’Esquella de la Torratxa 17 September 1920, cover. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

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under Primo’s repressive policies. As I explore in more detail below, that the periodicals that I study here would become primary outlets for this desire underlines the obvious political potential that journalism possesses while showing once more just how closely entwined the experience of the Jazz Age would become with the literal and metaphoric ‘writing’ of the city of Barcelona. The social forces that combined to bring about the Primo de Rivera dictatorship that so conditioned 1920s Barcelona included an economic downturn as Spain’s European market share began to shrink following the First World War; the revolutionary risk seen in the growing power of anarcho-syndicalism; and the regional aspirations of Catalonia and the Basque Country. In terms of the economy, the consequences of profittaking and the rapid increase in prices during the boom time were clear.10 This downturn induced layoffs that helped contribute to increased labour militancy and especially to the strength of anarchist unions in Catalonia, making life even more difficult for postwar politicians (Carr 509). Compounding the country’s economic problems was the ongoing question of Spain’s continued colonial presence in Morocco. The month of July 1921 occupies a particularly infamous place in Spanish military history. In practically one fell swoop, the army’s sound defeat at Annual wiped away twelve years of colonial gains in North Africa. After two more years of escalating economic and revolutionary labour tensions, the increasing emergence of ‘national questions’ in Catalonia and Euskadi, and the re-entry of the military into the political sphere, the intensely patriotic Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power on 12 September 1923. He promised to restore the country to ‘normality’ (Carr 564). His dictatorship would leave an indelible mark on Barcelona’s Jazz Age. Far from returning to a professed state of normalcy, Spain under Primo de Rivera saw rapid modernization through massive public works projects. This modernization occurred concurrently with the fierce oppression of regional cultures. Carr’s observation that ‘Primo de Rivera’s Catalan policy had no positive side’ is a massive understatement (568). Primo de Rivera’s designated man in Catalonia, Carlos Losada, was very concerned with issues of morality and his campaign led him naturally to the Raval and Paral.lel districts of Barcelona, which, in addition to being centres of spectacle and performance, were implicated in an increasing trade in pornography, narcotics, and illegal gambling. While he and his replacement, Milans del Bosch, forced many businesses to close as they tried to adapt to restrictive new laws governing operating hours, it is striking that the regime’s crackdown

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on immorality did not begin with illegal substances or closing times, but rather with the performance of one spectacle in particular: the singing of the Catalan national anthem, ‘Els Segadors,’ which was banned outright. The bourgeoisie may have applauded the stability that the dictatorship provided but they had not counted on the cultural repression that came along with it. Even if the expression of Catalan culture was stymied by the dictatorship, modernization did happen. As Vila-San-Juan observes, by 1929, Spain as a whole had five thousand kilometres of roads, regional water projects well underway, two thousand kilometres of electrified railway, and had established international air travel (105–6; 120). The physical landscape of Catalonia’s largest city was changing also. Office buildings and cinemas continued to appear, traffic increased, and the urban population grew. The metro arrived in 1926 and automated telephone service began, even if it was technically illegal to speak Catalan while using the device (107). Barcelona underwent massive construction in preparation for the Exposition of 1929 as well as for other capital projects such as the burying of the Sarrià train line and a redesign of the Plaça de Catalunya. These advances and transformations helped put the city, if not in the same category as other European metropolises, at least into their league. Journalism in Catalonia Over the past one hundred and fifty years, journalism in Catalonia has played an important, if not crucial, role in the consolidation of culture, political power, and language. During the period of the foundational movements of Modernisme and Noucentisme and in their wake, towering figures such as Valentí Almirall, Enric Prat de la Riba, Eugeni d’Ors, Agusti Calvet, Carles Soldevila, and Josep M. de Sagarra all contributed in the press to the modernization processes of Catalan society – whether this contribution has been ‘officially’ recognized or not in contemporary historiography and cultural studies. That said, the press transcends its role as simple accessory, and, as I have detailed above and will underline again below, both at the formal and abstract levels, journalism has important connections to the built environment and to the spatial practices that comprise the urban experience and thus establish the staging ground of the political and social. In his book Periodística catalana comparada, Josep Maria Casasús makes the astute observation that the introduction of a more informative

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‘London Times’ model of journalism was slow in arriving to Catalonia owing to constant political tensions, polarizations, and, especially, delayed advances in infrastructure (Casasús 24). This lag supports the idea that there is a direct link between journalism and the experience of modernity as filtered by technology and, as a consequence, the urban at large. The recognition of knowledge as a commodity and of the increasing importance of advertising (20) is another marker of the relationship between centres of industry and commerce and of how the reliable, fast transmission of information that journalism can provide within an emerging consumer society plays a role in the simultaneous processes of massification in terms of both entertainment and material culture. Nineteenth-century journalism in Catalonia had been characterized by two main types. The first, a Larra-inspired periodisme d’orientació (Casasús 13), was a form of moral leadership proclaimed in print.11 Its practice was made famous by El Diario de Barcelona’s influential editor, Joan Mañé i Flaquer, the so-called oracle to the growing bourgeoisie. The second type was the more overt articulisme doctrinal, evident in Almirall’s Diari Català, which was later re-invigorated early in the twentieth century by Prat de la Riba and his Lliga Regionalistapromoting Veu de Catalunya (25). When the technological advances in transportation and communication systems eventually did take hold, they facilitated a branching out in terms of journalistic styles and subjects. Travel and war reporting, two sub-variants of the informative journalism that came of age during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are especially noteworthy as they would subsequently inform the types of treatments of the city that one finds in papers like El Escándalo and Mirador in the mid-1920s. Given these roots, it comes as no surprise that one of the godfathers of the modernization of Catalan journalism in the twentieth century, Agusti Calvet, a.k.a. ‘Gaziel,’ was himself a popular frontline war reporter during the First World War (Casasús 186). Barcelona and the experience of it as a modern city had always figured to some extent in the press, most notably in the work of Robert Robert and, more famously, in that of the seminal Catalan poet, Joan Maragall, whose well-known trio of articles following the city’s ‘Tragic Week’ of violence between the army and the working classes in 1909 essentially set him apart from the warring sides. It is during the betweenwars period, however, that the field of Catalan journalism really shifts as the modernization of the press and that of the city march together. For not only do technological advances make journalism more immediate,

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its breadth widens enormously so as to better reflect the constantly changing forms of expression and experience during this vibrant period of cultural growth and differentiation. As a result, in addition to the professionalization of correspondents one finds the emergence of new genres such as investigative reporting, interviews, ‘literary’ journalism, modern ‘chronicles,’ sports reporting, and features on fashion as well as the new spectacles of cinema and jazz (Casasús 27). Historically, Barcelona has always looked away from Spain and towards Europe, specifically to France and Paris in particular. What with the city’s already established contacts among the artistic elite in Paris, the injection of artists and musicians during the First World War further cemented Barcelona’s connection to European cultural currents and jump-started the Jazz Age aesthetic in the city. In terms of the journalistic coverage of the second, more gentrified phase of the Age, sections of La Pubicitat, and then, later, more specialized papers like D’ací i d’allà, Mirador, and the late-on-the-scene Joia dealt with cultural phenomena abroad but also, more importantly, at home too, thus drawing Barcelona further into a cosmopolitan dialogue at a level different from that of architectural modernism, which had sought to engage with panEuropean movements some years earlier. Journalists such as Sebastià Gasch, Manuel Brunet, Joan Tomas, Sagarra, Crexells, J.M. Planes, and Josep Carner were the ones to bring the new phases of modernity to the Catalan public. Josep Pla had a name for this type of journalism; he called it ‘periodisme d’amenitat o de divagació’ (journalism of amenity or rambling) (qtd in Casasús 108). Not surprisingly, given the awakening interest in the built environment of the city and its connection to the performances of modernity, this newly expanded form of urban costumisme (writing on local customs and manners) would develop a clearly defined spatial angle. While the bourgeois Eixample, its galleries, and the salons of the intelligentsia had figured in earlier variants, many of the new subjects were to be found in different areas from what had previously been examined or explored. Thus, in addition to the important shifts in genre, there occurs a crucial change in urban navigation and mapping: the journalistic gaze turns to the less reputable side of the Ramblas and sets on the Fifth District or Raval, thus renewing the press’s relationship with the bordering Paral.lel at the same time. By dealing directly with these areas of the city, Barcelona’s Catalanist writers and critics tie – to varying degrees – their political dissent to the spaces in which the Jazz Age took place.

2 Where Others Fear to Tread: El Escándalo and Sangre en Atarazanas

El Escándalo Amidst the rich history and historiography of Catalan journalism, El Escándalo is a weekly that seems to have fallen through the cracks. It is very rarely mentioned and even the exhaustive Historia de la premsa catalana concedes that given its diverse subject matter – and name – it is hard to categorize.1 A definite contributor to what one may call periodisme de nit or ‘night journalism,’ the paper combines aspects of travel and war reporting with a strong dose of sensationalism, which is unsurprising given the title that its editors bestowed upon it. Bombast notwithstanding, El Escándalo plays an important role in the reception and propagation of the Jazz Age in Barcelona at various levels. First, an analysis of the tone of the editorial comment as well as the paper’s general take on life in modern Barcelona shows that ‘scandal’ for El Escándalo is a malleable term that at once defines an ethical position towards information dissemination under a dictatorship and a moral stance that plays to the consumption and titillation inherent to the spirit of the time. Secondly, in the newspaper’s eclectic content one finds a double movement of both mystery-making and revelation that fuels the general approach of the paper towards the mid-1920s Jazz Age city as it seeks to be the weekly that goes where others cannot or dare not tread. Finally, Francesc Madrid’s status as one of the editors combined with the paper’s close interest in Barcelona’s redlight district, the Barrio Chino, makes El Escándalo essential reading for an in-depth analysis of his important work, Sangre en Atarazanas, which had chapters previewed in the paper and was advertised relentlessly in its pages.

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Information Dissemination The brainchild of two young, well-known Republican journalists, Francesc ‘Paco’ Madrid and Braulio Solsona, El Escándalo first appeared in kiosks on 22 October 1925. Over the course of the next thirteen months, the paper would normally appear on Thursdays; it cost 30  centims, which was not an insignificant price. In physical terms, El Escándalo was an eight-page tabloid that measured roughly forty centimetres by twenty centimetres (Torrent and Tasis i Marca 675); its masthead (fig. 2.1) was a bright, gaudy red. Those who have done quantitative studies of Catalan journalism from the time have either forgotten about or plainly ignored the paper. This is undoubtedly due, in part, to the journal’s short run (it was resurrected in the 1930s), although the fact that, even though the paper published various articles in Catalan, it sported a distinct and loud Castilian title may have been a factor. In the first issue, Madrid and Solsona seem intent on reflecting the general sense of frivolity and accelerated pace of the time. They are keen also on affirming their credentials as nascent iconoclasts. Consider, for example, the opening editorial that accompanies a list of contributors in which they remark that ‘No hemos tenido tiempo de escribir el acostumbrado artículo editorial en que se prometen muchas cosas que luego se cumplen. Nosotros preferimos no comprometernos a nada’ (‘No hemos tenido tiempo’ 2) (We haven’t had time to write the normal editorial in which many things are promised and then followed through on later. We prefer not to commit to anything). This irreverent attitude is disingenuous and so too is the supposed lack of interest in engagement of any type. As would become clear to the readers of the paper, El Escándalo was more than willing to take up positions on various issues, and in so doing, the editors would display an intriguing sophistication vis-à-vis the particularities of Barcelona’s experience of the time – one that puts the lie to any condescension that may have been at the root of the lack of critical interest in the paper. This is not to say that humour was not a part of the paper’s style. A few issues into its run, for example, the ironic tone surfaced again with the publication of a list of names of people who would definitely not be contributing to the paper. Under the subtitle ‘Para (la) tranquilidad de nuestros lectores’ (For our readers’ peace of mind), the editors take a dig at the strong conservative element in Barcelona’s past and present journalistic scene by including in the roll not only Eugeni d’Ors’s proper name, but two of his noms de plume as well (‘Para tranquilidad’ 3).2

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Figure 2.1 Masthead of El Escándalo 1. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

A month into the paper’s existence, the editors started to articulate more precisely their aspirations for El Escándalo, but not before they would thank the readers for their support and immodestly proclaim themselves the ‘greatest editorial success of the year’ while promising new sections and features so as to build on their good start (‘El Escándalo’ 8). A veiled reference to the political and cultural context of Barcelona under Primo de Rivera, ‘Nos hemos propuesto hacer una publicación a más altura de las circunstancias y lo conseguiremos’ (We have proposed to build a publication that is better than its circumstances and we will do it), precedes a manifesto of sorts: ‘El Escándalo será como hasta ahora, dicharachero y curioso, sin llegar a dañar a nadie; picante, sin ser grosero; audaz, sin valentía […], liberal, humano y apañado’ (8) (El Escándalo will be as it has been up to now, witty and curious, without reaching the point of hurting anyone; piquant, without being disgusting; audacious, without bravery […], liberal, human and clever). In true upstart fashion, they go even further and declare all ‘pedantic wise men’ to be their targets (8). For the bulk of the 1920s in Spain, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship imposed a program of censorship that meant that freedom of expression, especially in the form of overt political dissent and criticism of the government, was severely curtailed, if not completely suppressed.3 Primo de Rivera not only censored what the press wrote, but in a move that shows the extent to which he understood the media’s ability to disseminate information and ostensibly mould public opinion, he commandeered column inches so that he could contribute personally to  newspapers in the form of his much-ridiculed ‘official notes,’ the publishing of which was obligatory.4 In January 1926, the directors of

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various Barcelona newspapers held a meeting to discuss the issue of state censorship of the press. Representatives of El Escándalo attended but came away disgusted and incredulous at the feeble tactics that their less aggressive colleagues proposed. Particularly galling to them was a suggestion that the assembled newspapermen simply write a letter seeking the lifting of official censorship. Madrid and Braulio outlined their disbelief at such naïveté a few days after the meeting in an article entitled ‘La prensa y la censura.’ In the piece they underscore the futility of asking the government to abolish something it so obviously valued as a tool. Instead, the two suggested that the practical response would be to demand an end to what they perceived as preferential treatment given to papers from the capital, Madrid (‘La prensa’ 2). That they sign off this article proclaiming an end to their idealism suggests that a more practically oriented form of protest or resistance was in the offing. A week later, on 28 January, Madrid and Solsona provided a mission statement that further dispelled the frivolousness evident in their editorial comments of the previous autumn. Their words emphasize the ethical dimension evident in how they interpret the multi-faceted notion of ‘scandal,’ a term and idea that served not only as the name of their organ but also as an over-riding theme that inflected the paper’s treatment of cultural and urban-related issues. In what may be considered to be an ironic touch given the risqué material that they publish, the two men stake out the moral high ground while referring to their youthfulness in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest of the journalistic establishment in Barcelona. The core ideas of the editorial are especially suggestive: Nuestro periódico es el esfuerzo romántico de unos jóvenes batalladores, asqueados ante un ambiente de cobardía colectiva, de claudicaciones vergonzosas, de acomodamientos repugnantes. Reflejo de este ambiente es la Prensa, sin alma, sin bríos, entregada a los intereses subalternos del anunciante, y del que manda, del que puede dar algo, o puede castigar. […] El Escándalo aspira a ser el periódico que diga lo que callan los demás. En otro país esta aspiración sería modesta; aquí constituye una nota escandalosa. Y ésta es la justificación de nuestro título, que es nuestro lema. (‘Digamos’ 1) Our newspaper is the romantic enterprise of a few young scrappers [who are] sick of an atmosphere of collective cowardice, of shameful backings down, of repugnant deals. The Press is a reflection of this atmosphere,

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soulless, lacking brio, in the pocket of the advertiser’s subaltern interests and of the Boss, of him who can provide something or can punish. […] El Escándalo aspires to be the paper that says what others hush up about. In another country this would be a modest aspiration; here it strikes a scandalous note. And this is the justification of our name, which is our motto.

When one views the sensationalistic mien of many of the paper’s stories in this light, it accrues a much more engaged charge and opens the door to a reading of the paper more as an alternative vision to a city once again under siege than as a frivolous journal interested in a fleeting, impressionistic sensationalism. The paper’s high-minded aversion to advertising is particularly remarkable for a journal that craved readership and publicity; although it must be noted that such a stance was ultimately unsustainable, and little by little, small amounts of publicity crept into El Escándalo’s pages. Before examining in detail the extensive ‘reportajes’ (feature reports) that formed the core of many of El Escándalo’s issues, I must mention first the other, more obvious connotation of ‘scandal’ with which the paper engaged and which, inevitably, conditions any reading of the weekly as ‘subversive’: the sense of moral scandal that the correspondents and editors affected. This is where the hot air of sensationalism was allowed to expand, at once lending significance to the stories and contributing to a sense of the exotic at home, a perception that articles dealing with the Fifth District invariably projected. Along with the often related topic of crime, the question of sensuality is an important source for moral outrage in El Escándalo. The way in which writers broach female sexuality, in particular, makes clear Boatwright and Ucelay da Cal’s assertion that the paper was coming from a strictly masculine point of view (34).5 The base assumptions of what is and is not scandalous are thus connected closely to social mores relating to the behaviour of women. As a result, the perception of scandal by the editors and writers inflects the coverage of a variety of issues, from prostitution to drug use, social crime, and modern mass spectacles.6 The moral posturing of one of El Escándalo’s main contributors, Ángel Samblancat, may be initially implicit, but it grows increasingly overt. In the second issue of the new paper, for example, Samblancat writes a scathing indictment of the fictional character Don Juan Tenorio, at one point calling him a ‘terrorista del amor’ (Samblancat 1) (terrorist of love). It is a move that at once invokes a sense of Spanish-ness while

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condemning a central figure in the country’s literary canon; in his diatribe, Samblancat advises young readers to turn their backs on Don Juan and follow instead the chaste Don Quixote so as to avoid being ‘contaminated’ by the former’s amoral behaviour (1). Even though his tongue seems to be firmly in cheek, a close reading of Samblancat’s words reveals a line of commentary germane not only to nineteenthcentury mores but to the reality of the twentieth century as well. Are his descriptions simply retrospective critiques of Don Juan or are they aimed equally at Barcelona’s own ‘quinta esencia del mal’ (fifth essence of evil), the Fifth District (another name for the red-light area), and those who frequent its illicit pleasures? Consider his criticisms with this possibility in mind: [es] la perdición, es la inmoralidad desenfrenada, el crimen suelto. Es la mentira, la superstición, la opresión del débil, el egoísmo feroz. Es la quinta esencia del mal. Es el aventurero fanfarrón, pendenciero, camorrista […] es el ‘niño bien’, el deportista holgazán, […] juerguista, borracho, mujeriego, dilapidador, parásito. (Samblancat 1) [he] is perdition, uncontrolled immorality, crime running wild. He is the lie, superstition, the oppression of the weak, ferocious egotism. He is the fifth essence of evil. He is the braggart adventurer, ruffian, gang member […] he is the ‘rich kid,’ the lazy sportsman […] fun-loving one, drunk, libertine, dilapidator, parasite.

Among this litany of evils, the notion of ‘unchecked crime’ stands out. Don Juan’s ability to come and go as he pleases, outside the purview of the authorities, has its double in the unbridled sexual practices and sensuality found in the Raval, where, as I will detail in this chapter and in others, the line between private and public domains is very much blurred, and which results in a much more overt and visible demonstration of sexuality than could be found in the bourgeois Eixample (Expansion) district of Barcelona, for example. A rejoinder written by ‘Don Juan’ a week later is amusing but also very informative in the sense that, in his own defence against Samblancat’s moral outrage, the infamous lover founds a rationalization of his deeds in the same biological determinism that will later be at issue in the nature/nurture debate over the lasciviousness of the women who are either born or fall into the orbit of the Fifth District. For his part, the question is clear, and with a reference to a work by Pío Baroja that had

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been turned into a popular show, Don Juan places the blame squarely on the shoulders of el exceso de sensualidad envenenada contenida en cada músculo, en cada nervio, en cada fibra, en cada membrana de mi ser, fue la causa determinante, generatriz del tan decantado libertinaje mío. Fisiológicamente considerado, yo debí figurar en la escala de los antropoides, aunque en el fondo soy, como aquel Rey Kiri de ‘Paradox rey’, un hombre sensible, un sentimental. (Nimio 2) the excess of poisoned sensuality contained in each muscle, in each nerve, in each fibre, in each membrane of my being, that was the determining cause, generator of this unbridled wantonness of mine. Physiologically speaking, I should feature in the scale of anthropods, even though, in essence, I’m like that King Kiri in ‘Paradox rey,’ a sensitive man, an old softy.

As these initial examples illustrate, within the pages of El Escándalo, the two active meanings of scandal that I have identified were not mutually exclusive. What is more, from the very beginning of the paper’s run, the moral questions raised by modern life in the Catalan capital were very much gender- and space-specific, an element that would increasingly cement its role as an early and important mediator of a particular part of life in Jazz Age Barcelona, that of the supposedly morally degraded Fifth District. Mystery-Making / Revelation Even if it partook of hyperbole on many occasions, motives aside, when it came to the job of reporting, El Escándalo documented accurately Barcelona’s particular zeitgeist. The aspiring modern metropolis, warts and all, was the paper’s general focus. That said, the aforementioned eclecticism of subject matter combined with the freedom from immediate day-to-day actuality that its status as a weekly provided made for an ‘anything goes’ type of newspaper in which journalistic styles would mix. Foremost among these approaches is that articulated by the figure of the roving reporter who would hit the streets in search of a story, a new phenomenon that had only just arrived in Catalonia when El Escándalo began to appear in kiosks (Boatwright and Ucelay da Cal 30). It would be hard to overstate the importance of this development because it is on this form of reporting that many of El Escándalo’s claims

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to journalistic innovation and integrity are based. Likewise, it is the cornerstone of the ‘revelation’ aspect of the paper’s approach to the city that I consider key to its urban engagement. In the figure of the story-based reporter, one sees the confluence or possible fusion of many types of reporting all focused on a single issue or theme. Thus, elements of travel journalism, war-reporting, and commentary on daily life could inform one another. This multiplicity at the level of the story was equally present in the more general journalistic environment of El Escándalo in that informative reporting on entertainment in the city would share space with moralistic takes on modern life. Additionally, in-depth reports on specific zones of the Catalan capital might recount acts of violence while others would centre on local histories with detailed descriptions of current denizens that verged on ethnographies. As a result of such heterogeneity, Barcelona as a subject of journalistic inquiry appears ever nearer to the reader while simultaneously existing at a metaphorical arm’s length as an exotic, dangerous, and cosmopolitan zone. Journalism and the manifestation of the time become even more intertwined as the distance between the citizen/ reader and the city is reduced. This dualism at the level of engagement with the city is a key element of the revealing/mystery-making dynamic that I see at the heart of El Escándalo’s treatment of the Catalan capital and, particularly, its Fifth District, during a crucial moment in the development of the Jazz Age in the city. Through its stories, readers became aware of the present-day spatial diversity of their burgeoning metropolis as well as of new or alternate aspects of its history, particularly epidodes from the early period of the Age: the years of the First World War. That is to say, in El Escándalo’s pages the public gained access to a colourful municipal archive, one that contained the histories not only of different types of establishments, but of the streets themselves, and of the various movers and shakers who played parts in the city’s development – all while these pages provided the scoop on the illicit or intriguing activities that were occurring at the present moment. Here one sees the power of popular historiography in the creation of myth and the moulding of important dynamics of collective civic memory. Exaggeration and exoticism manufactured in the now of the present condition the way that the past is maintained and recalled. Thanks to the journalistic privileging of specific areas of the city in this vein, the often nocturnal excursions to them seemed to be trips not only to another world, but also to another time. This was exactly the type of engagement upon which

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El Escándalo thrived in order to fulfil the promise of its name as well as to live up to its reputation as a source of hidden or arcane information. The editors presented the reader with revelations about Barcelona and the shenanigans going on right under the noses of the good citizenry in different ways. One key form that this process of disclosure took was to provide guide-book like accounts and lists of the urban spaces frequented by those in the know, those who could navigate the sordid streets and who had free access to locales from which others would be barred. As mentioned, though, the parallel historiographic element that would piggy-back on the descriptions of the city’s fashionable and/or dangerous hot spots helped provide a deeper and more nuanced understanding of these spaces as they relate to the history of Barcelona as a site of spectacle and ‘alternative’ spatial practice. Two related in-depth reports that appeared in 1925 demonstrate this effect. The Jazz Age spirit that manifested in Barcelona during the Age’s gentrification period was fuelled in part by the habits of upper classes that emulated the social codes of Parisians, Londoners, and New Yorkers. Naturally, then, these actors figured prominently in El Escándalo’s coverage of the Jazz Age scene in the Catalan capital and such was their importance that they merited two multi-page spreads that the paper regularly dedicated to ‘reportajes escandalosos’ (scandalous feature reports). The article’s titles – ‘Como se divierte la “gente bien”’ (How Rich People Have Fun) (fig. 2.2) and ‘Sigue divierténdose la “gente bien”’ (Rich People Keep Having Fun) – were straightforward and exemplify the Baedeker-like quality of their content while adding a slight dose of DIY for those readers looking to hobnob. Importantly, in ‘Como se divierte …,’ treatments of more cosmopolitan locales such as the Excelsior club, Maxim’s, the Lion d’Or, and Casa Llibre are bookended by descriptions of two ‘local’ spaces: one Catalan, the other Andalusian. The choice of La Granja Royal as the first place to be profiled is telling. Essentially a traditional Catalan dairy bar serving rennet, cream, and the like, the jazz music infused La Granja serves as a light introduction to the world of Jazz Age entertainment for both readers and revellers alike. As the writer of the piece explains, before cabarets became popular destinations, the owner of La Granja noticed that high society in Barcelona was curious but hesitant to experience this risqué space, so he decided to provide a tamer one in the centre of the  city and to make it affordable for a diverse crowd (‘Como se divierte …’). The hybrid nature of the space, the fact that it existed as a

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geographic mid-point between ‘respectable’ Barcelona and the disreputable areas of the Raval and Paral.lel districts, and its ‘performance’ as a cultural border line between Catalan tradition and American/ European innovation speak to the gradual process of gentrification of the cabaret and music hall entertainment that characterized the second half of the Jazz Age in Spain. That El Escándalo should then choose to lead with it in their sensational report on the process of gentrification suggests a calculated structuring of the historiographic elements of their revelatory exercise. The last space mentioned in this first part of the report on the upper classes, the well-known Villa Rosa, also evokes a sense of familiarity. One of the most famous clubs in Barcelona during the 1920s and early 1930s, La Villa Rosa was the brainchild of a local businessman. Like the Granja, its mention evokes a sense of locality or indigenousness, but in this case, the referent is not that of Catalan culture, but rather of the gypsies of southern Spain. Questions of authenticity aside, the owner’s efforts to establish a flamenco cabaret for Barcelona’s gente bien were wildly successful, and, as the reporter informs the reader, the Villa Rosa quickly became known as the obligatory final stop on the club-hopping circuit of the city’s revellers. In Spain as elsewhere, exposés such as ‘Como se divierte …’ and ‘Sigue …’ often treated the elite and fashionable participants of the Jazz Age cocktail and cabaret culture as anthropological specimens, subjects to be studied, followed, and examined in the wild. Although text could be very evocative in this regard, visuals were key elements of these stories and the subject matter was prime fodder for the many illustrators who contributed drawings to the magazines, reviews, and newspapers of the time. As regards the drawings that accompanied the ‘reportajes escandalosos’ in which these Jazz Age figures appeared, they played an important secondary role in their ‘study’ and offered the added advantage of increasing any possible titillation alluded to in the stories. Consider, for example, the following drawings that were included with ‘Como se divierte …’ (figs. 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6). In the first, the reader sees an apparently drunken tuxedo-clad man leaning against the bar while a woman, sitting high on a stool facing away from the viewer, her back and side generously revealed by her dress, asks the bartender for some ‘poison to make her forget.’ What does she wish to forget? Is it something that has happened or that is about to? Whatever it may be is left to the reader to decide.

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Figure 2.2 ‘How rich people have fun.’ El Escándalo 31 December 1925, p. 4. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Figure 2.3 Bar scene. El Escándalo 10 December 1925, pp. 4–5. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

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In the second and third illustrations, which go together and accompany the same article, less is left to the imagination as the artist traces a visible link between modern dance and desire (figs. 2.4 and 2.5). The first of the pair, ‘Como empieza el tango’ (How the Tango Begins), is a dynamic illustration of a couple dancing. One page later, the inquisitive reader is informed of how it ends in the form of another drawing, which shows the two locked now in a passionate embrace, the woman’s dress overlapping the man’s trousers. The man in this second, more erotic image is faceless. While this is perhaps simply an innocent detail, it does render him anonymous and hints at the possible fleetingness of the tryst, which would be the case if the woman depicted were a taxi dancer or prostitute, both of whom frequented cabarets and bars during the 1920s and 1930s in Barcelona. In figure 2.6, the artist’s drawing contributes to the overall effect of revealing that is cultivated in El Escándalo. The caption, which speaks directly to the reader, first poses an innocent question regarding the couple that is depicted: ‘¿Parece que están separados, verdad?’ (It looks like they are separated, no?), before putting the lie to this first impression: ‘Pues, están mucho más unidos de lo que parece’ (Well, they are much closer than it appears). This, because unbeknownst to the others in the room, the man is rubbing his foot on the woman’s while they affect a respectable distance above board. The inference is, of course, that desire is always percolating below the surface and even if circumstances do not permit its full expression, it will find a way even as bourgeois appearances are maintained. In ‘Sigue diviertíendose la gente bien …,’ the sequel to ‘Como se divierte …’ an even more striking illustration appears (fig. 2.7). This time, in addition to the important visual representations of spaces and participants, there is an extended caption that narrates a sequence of suggestive events in the rapid-fire staccato style characteristic of the time. While the illustration of five women at a bar captures the Age’s sharp-lined fashion aesthetic, the mini-narrative draws on the entire experience of one of the prototypical Jazz Age spaces: the bar – from the type of drinks on hand, to the music, to the new experience of being served at the bar rather than at a table. The first two lines, ‘El bar y la mujer. El “barman” ha preparado un cocktail diabólico’ (The bar and the woman. The bartender has prepared a diabolical cocktail), set the scene and place the bartender in the role of biblical snake that tempts the woman with a drink, which like the apple, she cannot resist and quickly guzzles. Then, rather than take up a position at a more traditional table,

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Figures 2.4 and 2.5 ‘How the tango begins’ and ‘How the tango ends.’ El Escándalo 10 December 1925, pp. 4–5. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Figure 2.6 Drawing of a cabaret/restaurant scene. El Escándalo 10 December 1925, pp. 4–5. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

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the woman in question sits on a stool at the bar that that holds her up like an ‘exciting statue’ on a pedestal. The narrative of the caption continues and describes how the cocktail, a heterogeneous drink whose high alcohol content is masked by exotic flavours, excites the lady, which in turn inspires her to show off her ‘magnificent’ legs. At this point, jazz music enters the equation in the form of a camel-trot and the state of expectation heightens. The culmination of the vignette occurs when a male patron winks at her. It is notable that the drawing to which the caption refers contains no men. This absence breaks the figurative fourth wall of the scene so that the male reader, previously positioned as voyeur, may be drawn in as a participant in the seduction. The final lines, ‘El “bar” es el mismo en todas partes. Lo mismo da el de los sótanos del “Ritz”, que el del “Excelsior”, que el de “Casa Parés”’ (The bar is the same everywhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s the basement of the Ritz, or that of the Excelsior or that of Casa Parés), underline not only the relentless homogenization of Jazz Age codes of social performance and spectacle but also the perceived common denominator of female lasciviousness that accompanies them (fig. 2.7) (‘Sigue’ 4). Literally, then, as these illustrations show, El Escándalo does indeed proffer its readers a privileged view of the life of the upper classes through an examination of some of their preferred spaces of diversion. While one points literally under the table, all capture either erotic activity in the act or reveal its potential, thus inscribing a sexual element on the historiographic one evident in the textual pieces that make up the stories. That the figure of the flapper begins to be evident in such stories and their graphic representations shows how a core image came to be transculturated.7 The histories of places like the Ritz, the Excalibur, and La Villa Rosa contribute to a more textured impression of how the leisure practices of the upper classes developed in Barcelona. They also engage directly with the built environment in a way that underlines the manner in which architecture plays its part in the creation of a sense of civic memory – even as these spaces are co-opted by the editors of the paper so as to present a cohesive sense of frivolity while social codes are laid bare. That the practice or playing out of the Jazz Age in Barcelona was influenced not by any sort of temperance movement as in the United States, but directly by the policy decisions of a dictatorship, also has ramifications at the level of the built environment and in terms of how the citizens of Barcelona adapted their spaces in order to work around the dictates of Primo de Rivera and his representatives.

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Figure 2.7 ‘The bar and the woman.’ El Escándalo 31 December 1925, p. 4. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

One short article that appeared in El Escándalo on 1 April 1926, ‘Las excentridades norteamericanas: El baño de champán’ (American Eccentricies: The Champagne Bath) is a neat reminder of the essential difference between the American and European Jazz Ages: the prohibition of alcohol in the US. The piece recounts the story of a nude woman’s literal bath in champagne at a high-class party in New York. Rather than arrest the woman who went for a dip in the bubbly and lay charges related to public indecency, though, the prosecutor was much more interested in the champagne. With this in mind, it is quite possible that the ‘eccentricity’ named in El Escándalo’s headline refers not to the bath but to the reaction (‘El baño’). What is certain is that prohibition had spawned an entirely new form of criminality, one that revolved around the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol. As a result, cocktail culture in the US carried with it an inherent danger and bestowed an added frisson. This was not the case in Spain and Catalonia, where the dictatorship was more

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interested in stamping out other practices that it deemed immoral – a different form of Prohibition. In Barcelona during the 1920s, various attempts were made by the military governors to control the nightlife of the city and to clean up what they considered the immoral trades of pornography and gambling. A close look at this campaign reveals how ingrained some spatial practices associated with the Jazz Age were, even after being transculturated. To begin with, shortly after Primo de Rivera’s coup, Barcelona Governor Carlos Losada imposed restrictions on the operating hours of various nocturnal establishments. Performances had to finish by 1 a.m. and the cabarets, restaurants, music halls, and bars were to expel their patrons an hour later (Villar 116). His edict, which also banned gaming, caused a commotion among owners and was relaxed after a few days of protest. The next year, however, the new governor, General Milans del Bosch, reimposed the early closing hour and once again attempted to crack down on illegal gambling. As Villar documents, in March 1926, the Gobierno Civil published a text detailing restrictions on various measures. The list of forbidden items and activities shows that, even though there was no ban on booze, the same sorts of safeguards famously employed by American speakeasies were also in use at Barcelona gambling houses. Among other things, the official decree prohibited the use of lookouts, doorbells, sliding panels on doors, and signals to gain entry to an establishment (118). The importance of the fact that the built spaces of the Jazz Age in Barcelona were modified in this way is twofold: first, it speaks to the reception of what had become an international style of spatial practice (with practice here also entailing the creation or construction of the built environment), and second, it shows how the local specificity of the Barcelona experience of the time could assert itself within this cosmopolitan set of codes of behaviour. The Disclosure Imperative While there was extensive coverage of the specific city spaces where the Jazz Age was being enacted and enjoyed by the upper classes – those who would have made up the majority of the paper’s readership –, the fact that the editors turned their eyes on the activities of the lower classes and engaged many of the more nefarious aspects of Barcelona’s feliços vint comes as no surprise, considering their professed ‘duty’ to say what the other papers would not. This feature of the paper’s coverage of Jazz Age Barcelona is evident especially in the treatment of drug use

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and addiction, topics that would occasionally crop up in mainstream papers but that were given the royal treatment in El Escándalo as being indelibly linked to both spatial practice and space, Jazz Age life in general, and especially to a port zone like the Fifth District.8 Drugs appear as a topic very early on in the paper’s run. In November of 1925, Francesc Madrid himself penned a two-page exposé of Barcelona’s underground drug scene entitled ‘La tragedia de los paraisos artificiales: Cocaína, morfina, opio …’ (The Tragedy of the Artifical Paradises: Cocaine, Morphine, Opium …). This article served as a stage to both reveal a scandalous part of city life and revel in the paper’s ability to do so. To that end, in his opening paragraphs Madrid takes pains to point out that permission from the censors was necessary in order to publish such material. The admission increases the air of danger and the forbidden that the paper cultivates as well as adding some important context to his initial assertion that, in Barcelona, drugs were not as widespread a problem as popularly thought and that the police were about to put an end to the ‘plague’ (Madrid ‘La tragedia’ 4). One way to read this is as a brief pandering to the authorities before Madrid could really dig into the soft underbelly of the city and show the readers of El Escándalo just how depraved drug users could be in his eyes. That said, the reporter does not view the mere existence of drugs as the base reason for abuse, and his conception of ‘artifice’ clearly encompasses the imagined world of the written word: ‘Vivimos en pleno artificio; vivimos en plena fantasía literaria. La literatura y el snobismo están corrompiendo a la juventud de una manera asquerosa e indigna; francamente repugnante …’ (We live in plain artifice; we live in plain literary fantasy. Literature and snobbism are corrupting the youth in a disgusting and undignified way; [it’s] frankly repugnant …). What is he implying, exactly? It would seem that the editor cum reporter is presenting his own form of journalism as a tonic to the decadent literary arts. It bears reminding that, at this point of the decade, Madrid’s generation was still waiting for its great Barcelona novel, a work that would only come during the hangover of the Jazz Age at the hands of one of Catalonia’s greatest writers, Josep M. de Sagarra.9 In the absence of the new novel or a revitalized literary avant-garde in the wake of Salvat-Papasseit’s death, Madrid’s approach and his fearlessness in terms of subject matter need validation.10 This interpretation is corroborated by the editors’ introduction to the piece, in which they congratulate themselves for publishing the article and thus endorse Madrid’s work as modern journalism. Their rhetoric is revealing for the way that it articulates an ethical base of information dissemination from a socially liberal perspective:

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Jazz Age Barcelona EL ESCANDALO responde a una doctrina, a una práctica periodística, a un concepto del periodismo moderno. Hemos querido hacer un periódico nuevo, completamente nuevo, y lo hemos conseguido. Hemos juntado el reportaje sensacional a la indiscreción picaresca; hemos unido un concepto liberal de la vida a la fase de actualidad; hemos cultivado la ironía sin descender jamás a lo grotesco, ni a lo infame … EL ESCANDALO es hoy uno de los mayores éxitos de periodismo peninsular. (4) EL ESCANDALO responds to a doctrine, to a journalistic practice, to a concept of modern journalism. We have wanted to make a new newspaper, totally new, and we’ve succeeded. We have joined the sensational story to picaresque indiscretion; we have united a liberal concept of life with the phase of today; we have cultivated irony without ever descending into the grotesque, or the infamous … today EL ESCANDALO is one of the greatest successes of peninsular journalism.

I propose that one way to look at the paper in the light of such boasting is that it portrays itself as being ‘in the know’ but not so much so that the editors’ indignation or surprise at events and conditions uncovered by their reporters (who were at times themselves) appears overly feigned. Here the sensational and the picaresque combine in a measured or cultivated manner, yet always under the validating auspices of journalistic inquiry. El Escándalo’s overall project is very sophisticated because it responds to the ethical demands not only of a modernizing society but also of a modernizing means of documenting, reporting, and explaining societal changes and how they intersect with the experience of the city, its spaces, and the pressures of globalizing codes of conduct. Sophistication is a relative term, however, and it is one that plays a part also in the creation of the paper’s aestheticization of scandal. For while drugs may be the overall focus of ‘La tragedia de los paraísos artificiales …,’ the women who fall prey to them give the story its scandalous angle. Figures 2.8 and 2.9 show two provocative depictions of female addicts, one who is hooked on cocaine, the other, addicted to morphine. ‘Mechanics’ If the guidebook-like ‘Como se divierte …’ features documented many of the spaces of the Jazz Age in the city and ‘La tragedia de los paraisos artificiales …’ detailed how drugs and their effects on people –

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Figure 2.8 ‘It was the cocaine …’ El Escándalo 26 November 1925, pp. 4–5. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Figure 2.9 ‘Morphine-induced slumber.’ El Escándalo 26 November 1925, pp. 4–5. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

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especially women – initiated a general sense of revelation tinged with outrage in the paper, other ‘reportajes escandalosos’ would continue along these lines and, at the same time, introduce more elements to the dynamic of information dissemination and a behind-the-scenes approach to Barcelona’s Jazz Age in general. Consider, for instance, the report on the Yes-Yes show that takes the reader literally backstage so as to see how such a spectacle is put together. The anonymous author states that this particular show is an innovative novelty and, in a nod to one of the master metaphors of the Age, likens it to a pleasing cocktail. The way that he leads the reader on a tour of the production process thus becomes akin to watching a bartender mix a drink. This report on the way in which mass entertainment is created from its constituent parts is one instance of how El Escándalo reveals the mechanics of the burgeoning culture of mass spectacle of the Jazz Age. By stressing the novelty of the shorter pieces of the production, the reporter obliquely criticizes the ‘interminable lines of beautiful girls’ that invariably appeared in the revue shows of the day (‘Como se ponen’ 4). The appreciation of the smaller unit of performance, this stressing of the fleeting impression, is yet another marker of the way that the paper and its writers captured and reproduced the prevailing aesthetic of speed and fragmentation in art and life in general, an outlook that could also be applied to the appropriateness of the newspaper as a means of covering such a time. It is interesting to note that some five years later, Sebastià Gasch would write along the same lines in his valorization of the sketch segments of cabaret shows.11 A month after the appearance of ‘Como se ponen …’ El Escándalo published another in-depth report that delved into the mechanics of a different aspect of daily life in Barcelona. This time, the subject was a purported ‘thieves’ academy’ in the city’s Barrio Chino. Presented as part of the series entitled ‘Los bajos fondos,’ Angel M. Becquer’s piece follows the now familiar pattern of creating or detailing mystery and then dispelling it. The article begins: Se ha escrito mucho sobre el distrito V barcelonés, nuestro barrio chino. Pero no se ha dicho aún todo. Es cantera inagotable […] La vida del distrito V es una vida independiente de la del resto de Barcelona. La mayoría de los barceloneses no tienen siquiera una idea aproximada de lo que encierran las turbulentas y sombrías calles de este barrio pintoresco y vicioso […] ¡Qué de misterios encierra el barrio chino barcelonés!’ (Becquer ‘Los bajos fondos’ 4)

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A lot has been written about Barcelona’s Fifth District, our red-light district. But it hasn’t all been said. It’s a never-ending source […] The life of the Fifth District is a separate life from that of the rest of Barcelona. The majority of Barcelonans don’t even have the slightest idea of what the turbulent and shadowy streets of this picturesque and depraved neighbourhood contain […] What mysteries Barcelona’s red-light district contains!

Among the sensational items that Becquer includes in his story about a group of young thieves is an account of how they are taught to pick pockets and steal. Such is the level of detail in the article’s revelations that the reader even learns of how the aspiring ne’er-do-wells would employ mannequins as practice dummies. And while the writer speculates luridly (and sensationalistically) that the fatherless children are perhaps the result of orgies held by Satanists, the fact that at the end of the report this very engaged reporter recounts how he saved a boy and a girl from the clutches of their ‘teacher’ and was able to put them on a straighter path implies that in this case, nurture and not nature is seen as holding greater sway. Examinations of city life in general were another facet of the ‘revealing’ aspect of stories that El Escándalo’s editors actively cultivated. It may have focused on the Barrio Chino but the paper did sport occasional coverage of broader aspects of urbanism and in this way foreshadowed the full-blown treatment that a paper like Mirador would provide some four years later.12 Various articles, such as a pair on urban construction, one on the proliferation of bars in the city, and another regarding the evolving profession of the taxi driver, are evidence of El Escándalo’s thematic range. That said, the notion of spectacle in or as the city is never far removed. Two pieces by Braulio Solsona from November 1925 deal with the most literal of urban stages – the street – and explore, in the first instance, the question of the physical integrity of the Ramblas and in the second, that of ownership of such public space (Solsona ‘¿De quién’ 8). In the untitled first commentary, Solsona sarcastically praises the spirit of protest (a NIMBYism avant la lettre) that he sees awakening in Barcelona during the construction projects that were crucial for the completion of the metro (Solsona ‘Untitled’ 8). In ‘¿De quién son las calles?’ (Who Owns the Streets?) he broaches the notion of ownership of public space and the encroachment and co-option of it by corporations from the rather democratic angle of the pedestrian: en la mayor parte de las ciudades, la calle es de todos … En Barcelona, la calle es de todos …, menos de los transeúntes; pertenece, especialmente, a

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Jazz Age Barcelona las grandes compañías. Tienen dominio sobre ellas, las empresas del Metropolitano, de los Tranvías, del Gas y Electricidad. Cuando les conviene coger cualquier calle, la abren en canal y hacen descender al subsuelo a una brigada de obreros. (Solsona ‘¿De quién’ 8) in the majority of cities, the street belongs to everyone … In Barcelona, the street belongs to everyone … minus the passers-by; it belongs, especially, to the large companies. They have control over the streets, the Metropolitan businesses, the Tram businesses, Gas and Electricity. When it suits them to grab any street, they open it up like a canal and send a brigade of workers down into the subsoil.

According to Solsona, the one saving grace about this heedless appropriation of the public domain for business needs (justified or not) has to do with this idea of spectacle. For in his eyes, large-scale construction projects have the saving grace that they constitute intriguing public entertainment that is free. They may block navigation and force alternate trajectories but the works do both display the modern capacity for shaping the earth on a large scale and expose the guts of their city to the public: the increasingly complex networks of tubes and wires that make up the built environment at a level seldom seen. Here revelation is more than shining a light on an unknown neighbourhood; it is the literal raising and unearthing of the strata on which the city’s spatial practice is founded. Tied to the image and physical experience of the street is the navigation of the city, a concept germane to the daily life of the members of the growing urban profession of the taxi driver. Near the end of the paper’s run, in September of 1926, Francesc Madrid provides a front-page report on them and identifies two types: professionals and ruffians. For Madrid, who has all of a sudden begun to notice the taxi driver as an omnipresent part of the nocturnal life of the city, good drivers are essential to the metropolis’s well-being. Madrid has a penchant for being dramatic and enthusiastic in his praise of things that catch his fancy and here he does not hold back, first stating dramatically that Barcelona loses its ‘natural life’ during taxi strikes and then committing El Escándalo to a campaign to root out nefarious drivers from the ranks of the exemplary ones (Madrid ‘Los taxis’ 1). In any event, it is clear that, as he often does, Madrid is able to identify new or overlooked elements of the city and bring them to the fore, informing his readers of parts of city life that had perhaps gone unnoticed or at least, in his mind, underappreciated.

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The Jazz Music Spectacle The timing of El Escándalo’s brief run is of great importance with respect to its role as a witness to important changes in national and international entertainment trends. The fact that it appeared during the second half of 1925 and then disappeared a year later in November of 1926 means that it straddled the mid-1920s and as a result saw a key moment in the development of the Jazz Age: the arrival in 1925 of the dance that would supersede the foxtrot and re-energize the feliços vint, the Charleston. In 1925, Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre’s performances at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées captivated the French capital and reinvigorated the Jazz Age by helping to bring jazz to a larger audience. While rhythm had always been considered a special aspect of jazz and jazz dance, Baker’s eroticism further emphasized its connection to the body on stage. André Levinson comments: ‘There seemed to emanate from her violently shuddering body, her bold dislocations, her springing movements, a gushing stream of rhythm’ (Gates and Dalton  7). Although Baker would later perform in Barcelona in early 1930, the dance that she had made famous arrived before her, appearing on Spanish stages only a few months after its debut in France. García Martínez explains that Seville’s Reyes Castillo, a dancer who had performed with Baker in Paris, had incorporated it into her own show (García Martínez 25). As in other places, the dance met with resistance initially. El Escándalo documents this important transition during a time when, additionally, the variety show spectacle was beginning to give way to more elaborate revue productions (Retana 112). At first, the paper’s coverage of opposition to the Charleston was limited to that in London. Then, a more local angle became part of its treatment with the inclusion of reports on both sensational crimes in the music community and the possible inclusion of the Charleston in the Gràcia neighbourhood’s annual August festival. The most important piece on jazz and its reception, though – and the one that clearly places the paper in the camp of ‘early adopters’ of this latest phase of the Jazz Age – is Federico Wüst Berdaguer’s spirited defence of the dance. In it, he focuses on the Charleston’s rhythmic qualities, which he links to the palpable modernity of the present day: ‘Charleston’. Año 1926. Anotemos bien la fecha del año. Que en la palpitante actualidad reside precisamente el encanto y la ‘defensa’ del ‘charleston’. Es el baile de hoy. De 1926 … Si los labios modernos cantan con ritmo

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Jazz Age Barcelona de cabaret, con ritmo moderno, los pies modernos – breves los de ellas, escondidos los de ellos bajo los amplios vuelos del pantalón ‘Oxford’ – deben bailar la danza moderna con ritmo y con ¡resplandores! de hoy. […] A bailar el ‘charleston’ que es el emblema de nuestra generación. (Wüst Berdaguer 1)13 ‘Charleston.’ Year 1926. Let’s note well the year. For precisely in the palpitating present resides the charm and the ‘defence’ of the ‘Charleston.’ It is the dance of today. Of 1926 … If modern lips sing with the cabaret rhythm, modern feet – hers are slight, his are hidden under the ample sails of the ‘Oxford’ trouser – must dance the modern dance with rhythm and the brilliance of today. […] Let’s dance the ‘Charleston’ as it’s the emblem of our generation.

Although El Escándalo would not last long, the fact that it managed to survive for more than a year while coping with state censorship and without relying heavily on advertising is an impressive feat. That during this year the paper would single-handedly open up a part of the city that had been literally and figuratively closed to public view is noteworthy and reinforces my thesis that journalism was an ideal form of expression and manifestation for the spontaneous and ephemeral elements of Barcelona’s Jazz Age. Furthermore, the paper’s dedication to urban space and the practice that produces it is often surprising – its sensationalism notwithstanding. El Escándalo is definitely an eclectic mix in that it offers modern journalistic techniques inflected by a moralizing that is heavy-handed but not two-dimensional. Of course, titles like ‘Vidas difíciles de mujeres fáciles’ (Difficult Lives of Easy Women) may make the modern reader cringe, but at the same time, there were other articles with much more depth, such as that on the encroachment and co-option of public space by corporations, which, for the same twenty-first-century reader, sounds both prophetic and progressive. So whatever the result may have ended up looking like during the tumultuous time of the feliços vint, beneath the scandalous veneer and blood-red banner lay a sophisticated understanding of urbanism, mass culture, and changing public spectacle. ‘Point Blank’: The Jazz Age City of Sangre en Atarazanas El Escándalo’s most spectacular and ultimately enduring connection to the journalistic mapping and manifestation of mid-1920s Barcelona

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came through the advance release of sections of editor Francesc Madrid’s own book, Sangre en Atarazanas. Sangre is a collection of indepth investigations of Barcelona’s Fifth District’s denizens, spaces, and history and has been credited as being the source of the area’s ‘official’ baptism as the ‘Barrio Chino.’14 The book was a hit with the public and went through multiple printings. In the words of an El Escándalo advertisment that preceded the release of the work, Sangre ‘Se trata de un reportaje vibrante, apasionado y cinematográfico de los bajos fondos de Barcelona. La vida social, las gentes de mal vivir, las horizontales y los siete pecados capitales del Distrito V, quedan reflejados’ (is a vibrant, passionate and cinematic report of the lowest depths of Barcelona. Social life, the dregs, the prostrate, and the seven deadly sins of the Fifth District are reflected) (fig. 2.10). The histioriographic aspect of Madrid’s work on the nefarious elements of life in the Catalan capital and the connections between this segment of society, the experience of the modern city, and specific spaces of contact (bars, hotels, cabarets) tie in perfectly with El Escándalo’s unique style. The excerpted chapters work very well as reportajes escandalosos in that the same revelatory element that is patent in the editorial posture of El Escándalo is also present in Madrid’s solo work. The disclosures come thick and fast in Sangre as the reader is led by the hand through the city’s notorious Fifth District. For the paper’s regular readers it is a trip through familiar territory, but for the uninitiated, Madrid’s book would have been an eye-opening experience that would have reinforced existing stereotypes about the area while underlining already existing fears. What is more, due to both narrative technique and its concentrated, sustained thematics, the sense of proximity to the sordid actions is even more pronounced in the book than in the paper, an effect that makes Sangre a literary-jounalistic relation of El Escándalo but one that takes its involvement with the Jazz Age city to another level. Into the Breach … Sangre en Atarazanas begins with a prologue in which the author recounts the events of his life in a ‘chronometric,’ staccato style characterized by sentences separated with semi-colons or ellipses (7). While the prologue foreshadows the historiographic elements of the story of the Barrio Chino, its main purpose appears to be to establish the ‘street cred’ of the author – his qualifications as a guide to the rough and tumble. For example, Madrid explains to his readers not only that he

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Figure 2.10 Advertisement for Sangre en Atarazanas. El Escándalo 13 May 1926, p. 2. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

had spent time in jail, but that Barcelona had become so dangerous for him that he had had to flee the city. Cast in such a light from the outset, the author’s return and explorations of the capital are imbued with a frisson of the forbidden. This feeling is expanded further by the book’s intriguing dedication: ‘Para ti es, lector. Yo una vez escrito lo hubiera echado al fuego. Ahora hasta casi me arrepiento de no haberlo hecho’ (Madrid Sangre 8) (It is for you, reader. I would have thrown it in the fire once it was written. Now I almost regret not having done so). By beginning this way, Madrid initiates the formal addressing of the reader while piquing his/her interest in the material to come. Could it be that the descriptions of this particular urban space are not worth chronicling? Or that what follows is so impure that it should have been cleansed by fire rather than set in type? The reader already familiar with El Escándalo, Madrid, and his style would have turned the page in anticipation of some juicy debauchery.

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The book’s first chapter, ‘En la puerta del mal camino’ (At the Door of the Bad Road), portrays a literal threshold. It begins with another direct address to the reader that implicates him/her in the foray and centres the narrative gaze at a liminal point where two distinct areas of the city are visible. The author pulls back the curtain on the part of Barcelona that will be the subject of inquiry with a theatrical flourish and creates drama through hyperbole while generating a secondary tension from the subsequent juxtaposition of bad with good: ‘Lectora, lector: he aquí el distrito quinto; he aquí toda la fiereza y toda la brutalidad de Barcelona. Es el distrito quinto la llaga de la ciudad; es el barrio bajo; es el refugio de la mala gente. Cierto es que viven en él familias honradas. Esta [sic] es la tragedia’ (Madrid Sangre 9) (Reader: behold the Fifth District; behold all of the ferocity and brutality of Barcelona. The Fifth District is the sore of the city; it’s the down-and-out neighbourhood; it’s the refuge of the seedy. Of course, honest families live there too. This is the tragedy of it). In Madrid’s initial presentation of the neighbourhood, the singularity of the space comes to the fore through a series of oppositions meant to underscore the sheer absurdity of the way that the area has developed. For example, it is a place in which workers, cleaning ladies, milk bars, local palaces, hospitals – in a word, what Madrid calls ‘civilization’ – exist in the same space as ruffians, prostitutes, brothels, taverns, and barracks, the latter all evidence of Spain’s so-called hurdismo or brutish backwardness.15 And even as the reader stands on the brink, ready to enter the space, the neighbourhood spills out of the entranceway; the illicit activities and spectacles are already clearly evident: shameful women shuffle by; the sentry makes a round but does not recognize a group of thieves; shoeblacks sell cocaine, and junkies appear in plain sight. Meanwhile, the gypsies of the famous Villa Rosa tavern sing threateningly … The opening montage, which is very cinematic in nature, is a condensed version of what will appear in greater detail later in the book, a mise-en-abîme of the moral abyss to come. So with Francesc Madrid as our guide, we the readers prepare to enter this foreboding Fifth District. First, however, he relates a curious detail that gives us pause. An unnamed friend will not be accompanying us as he has declined to enter, citing a fear of the powerful attraction of the wickedness to be found within. Addiction, or the fear of it, is the underlying subject in this hesitation. The colleague is anonymous and so lacks a past that might point towards a proclivity to over-indulgence. Thus, the suggestion becomes that everyone is at risk; we all may fall and come to like what is on offer in an area where one is freed of the moral

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strait-jacket that the ‘proper’ society of Barcelona purports to wear. A fear such as this brings to mind Gustave Le Bon’s late nineteenth-century writings on the ‘Law of the Mental Unity of Crowds’ in which he postulates the power of a strong unconscious ‘group mind’ of the crowd to overwhelm the faculties of the individual and render him/her a part of a mob.16 Along the same lines, this nameless friend’s hesitation also offers evidence of Madrid’s belief that nurture plays just as strong a part as nature in the creation of vice, addiction, and anti-social behaviour. The last view from the physical and moral safety of the Ramblas is telling: ‘La calle es estrecha, es larga, es sucia, es torturosa. Vista desde las Ramblas, parece que las casas de una acera y de otra se juntan y que queda un trozo vacío por donde asoma el cielo de color de violeta’ (11) (The street is narrow, it’s long, it’s dirty, and it’s tortuous. Seen from the Ramblas, it seems that the houses from one side meet the other and that a piece of emptiness is left through which a violet-coloured sky peeks out). Not only do the adjectives that Madrid uses intensify an already ominous picture, his observation of the narrowness of the space sets up an unstated binary: that of the tightly packed, labyrinthine form of the Raval as opposed to the wide, amply spaced grid-based streets of the bourgeois Eixample. The tension felt by the reader entering the chaotic world of the Fifth District is thus patent on the larger scale of urban geography as well as at a diegetic level. Descriptions that disparage the cluttered nature of the Barrio’s houses and streets implicitly privilege the rationality of the newer part of Barcelona, the moral codes of which become the filter for Madrid’s perspective. Madrid’s revelations highlight the danger involved in his otherworldly enterprise and this in turn contributes to the myth-making that his particular form of urban historiography and geography constitutes vis-à-vis the Fifth District. The eponymous second chapter of Sangre, a story about violence and anarchism that represents the reader’s first foray into the forbidden, begins with a shooting in the street. This public murder of an anarchist underscores the possibility of spontaneous urban violence and serves to heighten the tension that the author has already intensified in the prologue. That the assassination occurs at extremely close range is significant, as I believe that this fact coupled with the episode’s privileged position at the beginning of the reader’s journey establishes the concept of ‘point-blank’ as a foundational metaphor for the overall experience of the space of the Fifth District. Not only does this idea imply a rank  lack of physical distance – which is quite the case in an area as crowded as the Raval17 – but it also refers to the veritable impossibility

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of avoiding a run in (missing one’s target), and consequently, it denotes feedback, manifest as a belief that invariably one will be affected by a close encounter with this part of the city. My idea of ‘point-blank’ dovetails well with the thesis put forth by Madrid that social factors exert a strong influence over the subject and that vice, immediate and pervasive in the city’s nether regions, spreads through contact. This sort of attitude, of course, adds an extra layer to the reader’s experience of the space through Madrid’s text; for by walking beside him metaphorically the reader gains both an unprecedented view of an unknown area and the nagging worry that he/she is being placed at risk through such a vicarious experience of the space. Like the anonymous friend who declines entrance, one just may be tempted to stay, partake too much, and return home infected in some way. Sangre en Atarazanas is at once a perverted Baedeker, a forum for seldom-heard voices, and a history text the likes of which no contemporary curriculum would ever have touched. The first part of the book is subdivided into short vignettes that together provide a wide-ranging panorama of life in the Raval. Following the title story about how a young man came to be an anarchist and then met his untimely end at the hands of assassins, the author moves on to other topics and spaces within the Fifth District. Prostitution, thievery, the drug trade, white slavery, and the various clubs and bars that propel the area’s nightlife are all the subjects of short chapters – thus providing excellent perspectives into Jazz Age practices and phenomena that were not as acknowledged (at least at this point in the decade) in mainstream media. Other sections include the extended stories of a young woman who grows up in the Fifth District, the very historical three-part examination of the evolution of the nightclub in Barcelona, and the book’s closing segment that deals with a general strike and the ‘social crime’ endemic to the Catalan capital. In this part of the chapter, I will examine each of these three groupings separately so as to better show how Madrid’s book adds to a multilayered understanding of the Jazz Age city and, at the same time, contributes and points to the mythic nature of the Fifth District, which became a core element of Barcelona’s specific experience of modernity, and later, a key spatial setting for critical reflections on the time. Sex and Drugs Just as the murder of Jaume Ros occurs at point-blank range at the beginning of Sangre, so too do the other encounters that Madrid details

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reinforce the fact that breathing space in the Raval is at a premium. The many prostitutes who patrol the streets in search of johns make clear navigation impossible; one cannot help but come into close contact with them: ‘Son las cinco de la tarde y anochece. No puede darse un paso por la calle del Mediodía. Pasan las mujeres como sombras por las aceras y llaman a todos los hombres que cruzan la calle’ (43) (It is five o’clock and the sun is going down. One cannot take a step on Mediodía street. The women pass like shadows on the sidewalks and call out to all the men who cross the street). Danger lurks not so much in the initial contact with them as in the aftermath of any illicit liaison. For as Madrid recounts, some of these women have become veritable sex-trade anarchists enacting their own form of revolt against a capitalist and bourgeois society that has exploited them. The methods that they use are different, however, from the street violence inherent in the anarchist struggle that the author details in the first story of Sangre. As laid out in this second vignette, it is not a Star pistol that wounds but the sex act itself. Class consciousness in one prostitute that Madrid describes has led her to take a different form of direct action: she delights in placing venereal bombs – that is, she infects her bourgeois clients with syphilis.18 Such a story, of course, whether apocryphal or not, is bound to have caused consternation in more than a few of Madrid’s male readers who had partaken of the pleasures of the flesh in the Barrio Chino.19 Sex as part of the experience of the age in Barcelona and specifically in the space of the Fifth District is pervasive. The solicitation in the aforementioned vignette is characteristic of its public nature. One of Sangre’s later chapters, ‘La magnífica calle del Cid. Los niños en la calle y en el prostíbulo’ (The Magnificent Cid Street. Children in the Street and the Bordello), expands on this theme by showing just how malleable the line between public and private is in the Raval and highlighting the visibility of sex.20 Not only is the street on which one finds Barcelona’s most famous nightclubs a magnet for prostitutes, the doors of the nearby rooms where they take their johns are often left open so that, in the words of Madrid: ‘los pequeños ven lo que no deberían ver … Esto es francamente horrible’ (73) (the little ones see what they should not see … Frankly, this is horrible’). While the business of the streetwalkers may be an example of the unavoidable reality of the zone, other instances of the public display of sex are much more purposefully spectacular in nature. Take, for instance, the infamous sexual tableaux for which certain clubs in the Catalan capital were famous.

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Such is the intensity of these shows that even Madrid cannot stand them. Here are his words in reference to one series of poses that he and a friend witness one night: ‘Los invertidos desnudáronse y realizaron sus plásticas pervetidas … Lo de la muerte de Dato era algo horroroso y feroz […] Salí lleno de asco y temblaba, porque el vicio cuando se mezcla con la miseria y el crimen es algo que espanta’ (81) (the inverts stripped and performed their perverted contortions … The one of the death of Dato was something horrifying and ferocious […] I left full of disgust and trembling, because when vice is mixed with misery and crime it is something that frightens). Even given the lack of boundaries in the Fifth District where sex and sensuality are concerned, Madrid still finds that there are certain varieties of sexuality that remain hidden from view. The first is gay sex between older men and boys – the majority of whom work as shoeblacks – that occurs in an unmarked apartment the shutters of which are permanently drawn.21 Madrid qualifies this form of vice using the same word that he employed to describe the entire district in his introductory chapter; he calls it a ‘sore’ (55). The other, less visible type of sexual exploitation is a form of white slavery that occurs through an agency dedicated to procuring marriages, finding servants, and arranging more mundane liaisons between men and women. In an interview with the madam of the agency Madrid asks about the different types of relations that she manages. Her responses are informative. She contends that with Barcelona’s First World War boom time over, the first two parts of her business have suffered. Her role as a go-between, however, sustains her, and the mechanics of the trade are revelatory. The madam keeps a log of various women who wish to make money in order to maintain a high standard of living. When a man comes to her, she asks his likes, arranges a meeting with a woman, and takes half of the fee. So as to avoid happening upon someone that they know and thus maintain their anonymity, the women are able to observe the client first from behind a one-way mirror. One particularly intriguing element of this story comes in the way that Madrid extracts the information out of the madam in the interview. At one point, we the readers speak. Here is how the exchange with her appears in the text: — ¿Usted por aquí, señor? — Sí, sí, señora – dice mi amigo –. Vengo a por otra muchacha, pero además deseo que entere a este amigo de cómo funciona la Agencia, porque quiere ser cliente de la casa. (122)

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Jazz Age Barcelona ‘You’re here, sir?’ ‘Yes, yes, ma’am,’ my friend says. ‘I’m here for another girl, but I’d also like for my friend to learn how the agency functions because he wants to be a client of the house.’

The confusion of who exactly the ‘amigo’ is here may be a simple mixup on the part of the author. Its consequence, however, is to implicate the reader even more so than before in the visit to the Fifth District. The participation is less than incidental, though, as we are positioned almost as a regular client who facilitates Madrid’s understanding of the agency set-up and thus contributes to the process of journalistic inquiry at play. When Francesc Madrid turns his eye on the places of entertainment in the Fifth District and takes the reader along with him, it becomes even more apparent that in Jazz Age Barcelona, drugs and nightlife go hand in hand. As in his El Escándalo articles, Madrid portrays cocaine abuse as a plague that is no longer contained within the urban boundaries of the Raval. In Sangre his critique of the drug culture extends to a critique of the entire Jazz Age scene and the author dedicates two consecutive chapters to the phenomenon. The first recounts the now familiar story of a woman who falls to the depths of society as a result of addiction, the second tells of a man who leads a lone crusade against the drug scourge. The woman in the first chapter is a French immigrant who aspires to be a stage star but instead comes under the sway of cocaine and ends up selling cigarettes outside bars in the Barrio Chino. Madrid’s story emphasizes the woman’s physical deterioration, an element that also plays up a tendency among male intellectuals of the time to connect the female body and the geography of the district. I explore this angle more fully in my discussion of Sagarra’s novel Vida privada in chapter 6. The link between cocaine and the lifestyle that eventually wore down the French woman in the preceding story is made more patent in the chapter ‘Un apasionado enemigo de la cocaine’ (A Passionate Enemy of Cocaine), which details a conversation between newspaperman Carlos Madrigal and an anonymous friend. The colleague becomes the voice of indignation and information regarding the spread of cocaine throughout the city: an anonymous source, so to speak, for the roving reporter. Among other things, he cites the ease with which one can buy the drug in Barcelona and muses on the way in which it has become an indispensable element of city life. This man is extremely well informed

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and the detail with which he describes the distribution network for cocaine makes him a lucid and valuable informant. According to the source, the ‘poison’ enters Barcelona on boats from Marseilles or Genova (134). Once the drugs are off-loaded in large quantities, the shipment is bought by well-connected intermediaries who package the cocaine and then sell it to waiters, hairdressers, and salesmen or else keep it to distribute directly to their clients. In addition to this clearly illicit system, the informant also points to the fact that many pharmacies continue to deal in very large quantities of illegal drugs even in the face of an increase in crack-downs on the part of the police. The constabulary has been ineffectual in stopping the trade, however, and the man laments the state of Barcelona’s youth. Here one sees a direct connection between cocaine and the Jazz Age lifestyle: La juventud agoniza en los cabarets y en los music-halls. Van minando la salud de sus cuerpos con el tóxico que les quita la voluntad, la energía, la hombría de bien … Esas mujeres estúpidas del cabaret, que por pose empiezan a tomar cocaína y que no se ven en el espejo de la desgraciada mujer que vende cerillas en la puerta del Excelsior […] (135) The youth are agonizing in the cabarets and in the music-halls. They are undermining their bodies’ health with the poison that robs them of their will, their energy, their decency … Those stupid women of the cabaret, who start to take cocaine as a pose and who don’t see themselves [reflected] in the mirror of the disgraced woman selling matches in the doorway of the Excelsior […]

Cocaine’s spread from France south to Catalonia mirrors the flow of the Jazz Age codes that helped dictate the spatial practice that became the styles of the time. This international element of the Age, the cosmopolitanism inherent in such transculturation (even at the level of drug abuse), was of course evident all over Barcelona, from the social centres such as hotels to the high-class cocktail bars and clubs. Nowhere, though, was it more concentrated than in the Fifth District, home to a naval base, the port, and hundreds if not thousands of migrants from Central Europe (many of whom, it has been noted, arrived during the First World War) as well as others from different parts of Spain itself. For Madrid, this internationalism, forged not in the style of a League of Nations, but rather as the direct mixing of people from different ways of life, permits a profound meditation not only on Barcelona, but on the

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nature of the modern city. In his chapter ‘Vidas estrafalarias’ (Outlandish Lives) he lays out his theories: A mí el barrio bajo, el bajo fondo me inspira una gran curiosidad. Está allí el verdadero sentido primitivo de todas las ciudades. No hay nacionalismo profundo. Un barrio bajo es el principio de la idea internacionalista. Nadie es del país y todos lo son: rusos, montenegrinos, chinos, franceses, italianos, ingleses pueblan un barrio bajo y forman una república. […] La ciudad es de ellos y por eso la asaltan. En Barcelona sucede lo mismo. El distrito V es toda Europa. (77–8) The poor areas, the depths, inspire in me a great curiosity. The true primitive sense of all cities is there. There is no profound nationalism. The poor areas are where the internationalist idea begins. Nobody is from that country and yet they all are: the Russians, Montenegrins, Chinese, French, Italians, English populate a poor area and form a republic. […] The city is theirs and because of that they loot it. In Barcelona the same thing happens. The Fifth District is all of Europe.

This is quite revolutionary thinking. Not only does Madrid point out the class-based economic dynamics that feed the process of ghettoization, he couches his observations in a language that subverts the present political conditions under which Catalonia labours. Particularly interesting are the ways that Barcelona acts as protagonist – a template – and the experience of the Fifth District as a metonym for the entirety of Europe. What becomes clear as the reader delves further and further into Sangre is that Francesc Madrid’s knowledge of the Fifth District is comprehensive. He is an expert on many different aspects of urban affairs and one of the ways that he came to such understanding was through his dedication to journalism. This commitment to exploring, asking questions, and seeking answers is especially evident in one chapter of Sangre: ‘Una noche en una casa de dormir’ (A Night in a Flop-House). In this section, Madrid goes undercover to investigate the conditions inside what was once a municipal hostel but now is in private hands. Upon giving a false name and passing himself off as a mechanic from Murcia, he receives his entrance ticket, good for when he decides to pack it in for the night. When he returns later to claim his bed he is prepared not to sleep but to observe. Madrid’s impressions of the sleeping quarters are straightforward but certain to shock: the vast bunkroom is lit by a single bulb, making it as dark on the inside as the neighbourhood outside; the men sleep in close quarters and the author is confronted

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initially by the sight of a naked man at his side; what is more, the omnipresent threat of thievery means that one has to be extra cautious. What follows in this short chapter is a litany of the characters that inhabit the space, and particularly compelling is the way in which Madrid further emphasizes the connection between the geographic area of the Fifth District and the Jazz Age lifestyle in Barcelona. First, the reader learns of those who parade in for the night – from the drunken Catalan labourers and the physically challenged beggars to the common ruffians and amorous transvestites. When morning comes and the manager blows his shrill whistle, the resulting spitting, yawning, yelling, and insulting on the part of the roused men create what Madrid describes as a ‘repugnant jazz-band’ (67). Here the base sounds of those who inhabit the transient space of the flop-house imitate the rambunctious performance of a jazz ensemble, thus creating not only an acoustic comparison but a spatial one in which those who inhabit the area where the jazz spectacles are played out are performers in their own right. When, a few lines later, Madrid proclaims that the ‘la Mina’ flop-house is located in what he considers the geographic heart of the Barrio Chino, he cements the connection between these men, urban space, and a spectacular practice that is doubly reinforced through his textual description of it. That the intrepid reporter further explains that ‘ahí está toda el alma, todo el espíritu de los barrios bajos’ (67) (there is all of the soul, all the spirit of the low neighbourhoods) brings the internationalizing angle and universal nature of the Barrio that he referred to in the early piece on cocaine into relief as well. Madrid ends the ‘la Mina’ chapter with a reference to the lingering effects of his overnight stay that may be interpreted as a general take on the aftermath of any excursion into the district. The reporter goes to the sea to bathe and then proceeds to dispose of his mechanic’s outfit. Even in fresh clothes and sporting cologne, however, he still imagines that he can feel the fleas and lice on his body. Scratching at himself as if he had scabies, the author finds it hard to rid himself of the corporeal memory of this prolonged excursion into the depths of Barcelona’s Barrio Chino. The neighbourhood, which is a place where private and public, as well as sex and spectacle, merge, affects him both mentally and physically. The Historian If the first constellation in Sangre en Atarazanas consists of chapters that describe the various activities, characters, and locales of the Barrio Chino from a man-in-the-street – and, in one instance, undercover –

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journalistic perspective, the second, which Madrid dedicates to how the area’s lifestyle evolved, proceeds in a historical documentary fashion that is bulwarked by narrative accounts of/by the protagonists themselves. Entitled ‘Las tres etapas de la mala vida moderna de Barcelona’ (The Three Stages of Barcelona’s Bad Modern Life), it details specifically the evolution of the city’s nightlife from the avant-guerre period, through the First World War and into the 1920s. Each stage is represented by a specific type of nightclub, a preferred form of gambling, and a woman who defines the period and to whom Madrid dedicates a biographical narrative. This section is especially intriguing in that it solidifies wartime Barcelona, which I have described as the first phase of the Jazz Age period in the city, as both a continuation and a foundational point for the social practices enacted later on in the 1920s, thereby reinforcing the city’s local traditions of frivolity in the cosmopolitan formula that the Jazz Age represents. The first phase of Barcelona’s ‘bad modernity’ that the author deals with is the time of the cafés de camareras, bars in which students and labourers could dance with waitresses, Spanish women often described as being less than beautiful, rather corpulent, and given to being known only by nicknames. According to Madrid, while the women would generally not allow themselves to be touched by the men, they would rub up against their partners so as to excite them sexually in what could be best understood in modern terms as a form of standing lap dance.22 One café de camareras in particular, the El Canal, took the sexual trade to a higher level and provided basement rooms where the women could service their clients. Madrid’s description of such a period of roughand-tumble establishments sporting rough-and-tumble women reads as a sort of anti-almanac of city life, one that the municipality would never have endorsed. According to the author, the era’s preferred game of siete y medio mixed well with the ruffians, the waitresses, the adulterated cognac, and the dances of the day: the mazurka and the vals-jota. Madrid’s depiction of the cafés de camareras era finishes with a personalized story of one of the women. Thus, the documentary style of the first part segues into a narrative take that sensationalizes the period and in so doing offers a familiar cautionary tale regarding the comportment of women and the frequency with which they ‘fall.’ For Madrid, the second phase in the bad life of modern Barcelona is embodied by the cabaret, a space with particular characteristics in the city. According to a theory popular at the time, ‘a cabaret was a basement and a basement was meant to be a cabaret’ (165). The preferred

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game of chance during this period was baccarat, run by croupiers dressed in black and played to the strains of tziganes, waltzes, and argentine tangos. The women of the cabarets were no longer known by nicknames and rather than resemble barmaids, they all seemed to be seamstresses (modistillas). In one particularly succinct moment, Madrid captures the flavour of the boom that came to Barcelona during the crucial war years that would mark the start of the Jazz Age style in the city: Iniciábase en aquella época la decadencia de los toros y el surgimiento del movimiento deportista actual: incubábase la guerra social y el terrorismo feroz de la tras-guerra; dominaba a la ciudad una fiebre africana de negocios y el oro brincaba en los bolsillos de los más audaces; empezaba a hacerse uso del jabón y del pijama con ostentación y caían sobre el distrito V pillos y aventureros de todos los puertos del mundo. El espionaje tejía una red opresora del país y los divos de la zarzuela comenzaron a ganar cientos de pesetas. El cabaret triunfaba y con él la inmoralidad que es limpieza y es civilización, daba a la ciudad aires de país europeo … El Banco de Barcelona preparaba su crac de melodrama y las mujeres del cabaret empezaron a saber ser mujeres de mundo … (167–8) In that period began the decadence of the bullfight and the rise in today’s sporting movement: the social war and ferocious postwar terrorism incubated; an African fever of business dominated the city and gold jangled in the pockets of the most audacious; soap and pyjamas started to be used with ostentation and rogues and adventurers fell upon the Fifth District from all the ports in the world. Espionage wove an oppressive net in the country and the zarzuela stars started to earn hundreds of pesetas. The cabaret triumphed and with it the immorality that is cleanliness and civilization gave the city airs of a European country … The Bank of Barcelona prepared a melodramatic crash and the women of the cabaret started to learn to be women of the world …

The story that accompanies the section on the cabaret deals again with a young woman who slides into prostitution after falling under the spell of a man who uses and then quickly tires of her. Again, Madrid’s text reinforces the connection between a space where women may be commodified and subsequently their services bought for cash or exchanged for expensive gifts. His synoptic descriptions of the time lay bare the foundations of the later frivolity of the 1920s without obviating

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the violence that characertized Barcelona’s particular experience of the First World War period. In keeping with this historiographic description of spatial practices, in the third section of ‘Las tres etapas …,’ Madrid, as Wüst Berdaguer had done in his defence of the Charleston in El Escándalo, provides a specific temporal marker – the year 1926 – as the beginning of the second quarter of the twentieth century. For him, the dancing, a space intimately connected to music, modern life, and the international trends of a developing cosmopolitanism, covers everything; it is a site of transculturation. In his words: Es la piedra de toque de nuestra civilización; es el alma y la vida; la argolla y el libro de nuestra actualidad. El negro que brinca arrancando del saxofón las notas últimas del Charleston recién llegado; el banjo que ayuda a trasladarnos a la selva virgen a través de un cock-tail de veinte licores y de un solo color. (173) It is the touchstone of our civilization; it is the soul and the lifeblood; the link and the record [book] of our presentness. The black man that jumps, tearing from his saxophone the latest notes of the recently arrived Charleston; the banjo that helps moves us to the virgin jungle by way of a cocktail made from twenty liquors but one colour.

What is more, in the wake of the more marginal spaces of the pre-war cafés de camareras and the basement wartime cabarets, the dancing stands as an essential element of day-to-day life. In Madrid’s estimation, just as the café and streetcars are intrinsic to the imagining of a city, so too is the dancing. Again, the author plays off the earlier touchstone of modernity, in this case using the cabaret as the foil. The tango has moved on, surpassed by the shimmy, while the black jazzman, the boxer, and footballer have emerged as symbols of the era along with the international financier, another patron of the dancing, one who lives the anxiety inherent to the ephemeral nature of money markets. That Madrid sees the figure as also being perhaps the ruined foreigner who has gambled everything only to ultimately lose it all lends a precognitive element to his description of the powerful position of these financial types in modern society. Just as he did in his El Escándalo article on artificial pleasures, the author continues to keep in mind the literary reception of his era, and in this historiographic section of Sangre he rails against the novela rosa

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(sentimental novel) when he states that ‘El dancing no teje literaturas baratas y estúpidas, sentimentales y lamentables como el cabaret; el dancing rodea una literatura de frases y de imágenes’ (174) (The dancing does not weave cheap and stupid literature, sentimental and lamentable like the cabaret; the dancing circles literature with phrases and images). This realization works on many different levels. Not only does it echo the artistic avant-gardes’ tendencies to break down a realistic mode of expression into fragmentary elements of a whole that is no longer capable of being apprehended, it also points to the slogans and jingles of the Age and the way in which advertising penetrated urban consciousness on a massive scale. The dancing, in short, is a menagerie: American cinema, international revues, great football fixtures, the roar of the jazzband, van Dongen paintings, and Montparnassian surrealism (175). It is modern life, according to Madrid, with all of its defects and all of its virtues and with all of its showiness of a great spectacle (176). Madrid’s interpretation of this relationship between the performative space of the dancing and the present situation of Barcelona does not eschew politics. His statement that ‘El dancing se mantiene firme porque tiene una autoridad y una disciplina; una jerarquía y una función social; un ritmo y una liturgia’ (176) (the dancing keeps itself firm because it has authority and discipline; a hierarchy and a social function; a rhythm and a liturgy) invokes the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the general social order under which the Jazz Age in the city took place. That said, he underlines as well the fact that urban spatial practice is an internationalizing phenomenon when he further proclaims in the same section that ‘el dancing sin la Sociedad de Naciones no podría existir, no debería existir’ (the dancing could not and should not exist without the League of Nations). This, in turn, resonates with his earlier assertion in ‘Vidas estrafalarias’ that the Barrio Chino was a model of European diversity. When taken together these two lines of thinking position the Barrio Chino as a subversive and/or alternate force in the development of social codes – as a buffer or receptor space between the local and the global. As a connection to the growing international market of mass culture and spectacle, the activities of the Barrio Chino lay bare the Age’s reliance on a cosmopolitan sharing of codes and on an influx of foreigners not only to begin the movement but also to sustain it and contribute to the aesthetic conditions that push it along. Barcelona’s inherent cosmopolitanism as a port city thus comes into focus as a prime reason why it among Iberian cities became the most vibrant site for said cosmopolitanisms’s manifestation.

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The narrative that goes along with Madrid’s effusive paean to the dancing underlines many of the themes that he lays out in the first half of this section. The woman around whom the story revolves is neither the rough-and-tumble matron of the café de camareras nor the ingénue of the cabaret; instead, Elvira is cosmopolitan through and through. Born on a transatlantic ocean liner to parents from Danzig and Seville, she is sexually ambiguous both in nature and preferences. Her story, which chronicles her life as a flirt and flapper, ends in just as uncertain a manner when the reader hears second-hand information that she has either suddenly dropped out of the party scene and joined a convent or escaped her life of sin through the institution of marriage. Either way, the vagueness of her fate contributes to a sense of the intensity with which she lived during her Jazz Age cocktail party days. This same sense of the present would continue to evolve and envelop others as the gentrification process grew. Elvira the cosmopolitan Spaniard, though, stands as Madrid’s last fictional woman in Sangre; that her story ends with an ellipsis may be interpreted as a coy commentary on the author’s part regarding the state of indeterminacy that the Roaring Twenties introduced in Barcelona’s social fabric. The Journalist and the Social War The final constellation of Sangre de Atarazanas, which is dedicated to Salvador Segui,23 begins with four short vignettes about a general strike and closes with an extended anarchist parable of social violence and retribution. Even though Madrid crafts this last, longer piece as a story with an older protagonist who serves also as narrator, he maintains an interdiegetic presence by including himself in the action in his guise as a reporter. This emphasis on journalism and on the interview as a means of telling a story results in ‘La novela de un crimen social’ acting as an anchor for the whole of Sangre. The tale and, importantly, the way in which it is communicated bring into even clearer focus the role of the journalist in the mediation of a Jazz Age Barcelona that has been conditioned by dictatorship and a strictly controlled flow of information. In this sense, Madrid’s fiction/interview in this last story and the book as a whole may be seen as expanding on El Escándalo’s original, defiant goals of revelation, subversion, and inquiry. In terms of ‘La novela de un crimen social,’ this dynamic is evident from the beginning of the tale, which recounts the travails of a poor old worker named José Bertrán who, fired from his mill job after working

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there his entire life, exacts revenge on the new owner only to be set free by a lenient prosecutor. The novella begins with a bureaucratic act of the authorities: the reading out loud of a ‘nota oficiosa’ at the police station, an event for which journalists would assemble so as to hear charges, police news, and the like. Madrid informs his reader that these notes would then be copied scrupulously into the daily papers in what one can think of as an early variant on the police blotter section of a periodical. The fact that the author/journalist reproduces the government dictum and then offers the inside scoop on why the crime took place qualifies his own journalistic activity as a form of alternate historiography, if not subversiveness, vis-à-vis the official line of the dictatorship’s representatives. My interpretation of this duality is bulwarked by Madrid’s confession in this section that the reason for which he himself had been put in jail was that of writing politically charged articles. He explains that it was while incarcerated for this crime that he came into contact with Bertrán, the perpetrator of his own ‘social’ crime. Thus, ‘La novela de un crimen social’ becomes a journalistic piece that flows from the same journalistic instincts that resulted in Madrid being imprisoned in the first place. For, as he puts it, his encounter with the old man whose crime fell outside the normal range of the social violence between anarchist workers and rich owners (196) ‘era una interview interesante, muy interesante’ (was an interesting interview, very interesting). The account of his time in prison that Madrid gives in this chapter creates a neat bookend with Sangre’s prologue, where the author had first mentioned his incarceration. And while the story of the old man deviates from the rest of the collection’s pieces that focus on the Barrio Chino, the theme of social injustice and violence is one that sprang from the first phase of Barcelona’s Jazz Age experience and continued to course throughout the period of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. Madrid’s collection of stories, voices, and spaces serves as an outlet for the pressures that the dictator could contain but not eradicate. At the same time, though, through the enunciation of such narratives and the summary in a historiographic form tied intimately to journalism, Madrid gives the themes and past events that had led to the presentday situation of mid-1920s Barcelona a new urgency and topicality. Through plurivocality, the author manages not only to diversify the reader’s take on a feared neighbourhood but also to shed light on an occulted history of the city. Jazz Age Barcelona for Madrid, then, is more than cocktails and dancing, it is an engagement with the burgeoning metropolis in such a way that unrecognized histories may manifest;

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it is a time of discovery in the sense that not only are the recently arrived international codes adopted, but Barcelona’s own spatial practice is reactivated in the public discourse of modern journalism and thus galvanized as myth, sensationalism, and as the local link to an increasingly cosmopolitan way of life. These goals mesh with those of El Escándalo and the connections between their visions are clear. That Madrid’s book in the end had much more longevity than the scandalous weekly is a testament to journalism’s ephemeral nature and by consequence, its aptness for the manifestation of the Roaring Twenties’ fleeting styles and their connections to a rapidly changing city.

3 The Spatial Aesthetics of Jazz Rhythm

One of the hallmarks of the Jazz Age style in terms of both its manifestation and its reception was a changing expression and appreciation of the notion of rhythm. Jazz music’s often frenetic, syncopated beat became an intrinsic part of the Age’s overall aesthetic. Its novelty served also as a convenient bridge concept for discussions of the rapid changes in the experience of modern life in Europe. For the Catalan cultural commentator Sebastià Gasch, rhythm came to be a fundamental tenet of his critical approaches not only to art and mass spectacle but also, importantly, to the modern city that contained them and served as their staging ground. The development of Gasch’s jazz-based criticism is visible in the writings that he published between 1926 and 1931. That his significant and influential work appeared predominantly in journalistic sources further underlines my contention that the press played a special role in the reception, assimilation, and transculturation of Jazz Age codes as they manifested in space and text alike. Gasch was a leading voice in both Barcelona and Madrid, and he engaged the notion of rhythm in very spatial terms. His treatments of modern architecture, the music hall revue, and the city’s visual environment show how his critical application of ritme (rhythm) transcended jazz music and came to be both informed by and indicative of urban space and the practices associated with it. Given that Gasch’s initial interest in jazz and rhythm was concurrent with the arrival of the Charleston in Catalonia, his criticism signals an important new phase in the reception and manifestation of the international Jazz Age aesthetic in this stateless nation. I begin this chapter by outlining Gasch’s place in the critical firmament of the time. Then, I detail the growing importance of jazz music in his early work and how his understanding of its rhythm becomes a

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much broader rubric that inflects his readings of an increasing number of urban subjects. I consider this growth of the concept as it dovetails with the related notion of violència and the extent to which this latter idea permeates his interpretation of the visual field of the city and may be read as a critical resonance of Barcelona’s own violent first phase of its Jazz Age, when it was a prototype for Europe. As regards actual spaces of performance and their aesthetics, I analyse Gasch’s direct treatment of the music hall, a key 1920s space that, along with the hotel and cabaret, played a role in the continued evolution and gentrification of the Jazz Age style in Barcelona. I conclude the chapter by looking at the critic’s most important theoretical essay on jazz music. Sebastià Gasch: A Critic at Odds ‘Rafael Benet: encara no us haveu convençut que la vostra pintura és una merda?’ (Gasch ‘Personalismes’ 175) (Rafael Benet: have you still not convinced yourself that your painting is shit?). With these words, first proclaimed from the pages of the Full Groc (Yellow Page) in 1929, art critic Sebastià Gasch reached what Minguet i Batllori rightly identifies as his ‘moment de màxima irritació davant del panorama artístic català’ (Minguet i Batllori ‘Sebastià Gasch i les avantguardes’ 36) (moment of maximum irritation before the Catalan artistic panorama). Gasch’s biting inquiry was the culmination of a feud he had with the painter turned art critic of Barcelona’s most influential conservative daily, La Veu de Catalunya. This latest salvo, of which his none-too-subtle critique of Benet’s artistic prowess is a part, begins just as bitingly as it ends: ‘Rafael Benet s’ha convertit de cop i volta en el més repugnant dels nostres repapiejadors, i ens ofereix actualment l’espectacle fastigós de la més abjecta senectud’ (175) (Rafael Benet has suddenly turned himself into the most repugnant of our doddlers and currently offers us a loathsome spectacle of the most abject old age). Gasch’s youthful venom was not reserved for one man alone; he challenged the Catalan artistic establishment of the 1920s in general. Proof of his desire for change may be found in his signature, alongside those of Salvador Dalí and Lluis Montanyà, on the Manifest Groc, otherwise known as the ‘Catalan Anti-Art Manifesto.’ While he condemned vehemently what he considered a stagnated artistic legacy in Catalonia, Gasch did not see a future devoid of promise. He had a keen eye for talent and was a boisterous supporter of young, up-and-coming artists. More specifically, as early as 1925 he had begun to proclaim Joan Miró, long ignored in

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Catalonia, as the most important and original force in painting since Picasso (Gasch ‘Els pintors’ 57).1 Another recipient of his early enthusiasm and support was Dalí himself. Gasch’s critical eye did not remain exclusively focused on the world of painting or the so-called high-culture art in which he made his reputation. At the end of the 1920s, his interests shifted to new artistic and urban spheres and began to encompass spaces that were marked by and contributed to the creation of a sense of the nocturnal Barcelona of the late 1920s and early 1930s. His attention to cinema, dance, music hall, and, above all, jazz proved decisive in the formation of his own personal critical lexicon and interpretative gaze. Understanding the interdisciplinary mien of Gasch’s perception of the numerous shows and spectacles put on throughout Barcelona during this period is vital to an understanding of his role in the reception of the Jazz Age not only in Catalonia but in Spain as a whole and to grasping the larger importance of journalism in the mediation of the metropolitan spaces in which the Age played out. That his theories on spectacle and space were contingent on his conception and use of the notion of ritme in the development of his personal critical framework makes Gasch very much a critic of and for his time.2 It is necessary to situate Gasch more firmly in the cultural moment of Barcelona and Madrid in the 1920s and 1930s. When, early on, he failed to find satisfying employment in commercial circles, this future commentator, who had been born in Barcelona in 1897, turned to an artistic world which, while flatly rejecting him as a full-fledged participant, would, in turn, embrace him as a critical observer. Gasch crossed the fence, so to speak, and began to make his name as an art critic after the disastrous exhibition of a single drawing of his at the ultra-conservative Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc.3 He would never be completely insulated from the artists he scrutinized, though, and as is clear to anyone who studies his massive oeuvre, the defining feature of what became a plethora of commentaries and books on various cultural subjects is a very high degree of commitment to his profession as a critic (Minguet i Batllori ‘Sebastià Gasch, o l’espectacle’ 9). Although his first critical article – a paean to the Catalan painter Joan Miró – appeared in the prestigious Gaseta de les Arts in 1925 (Gasch ‘Els pintors’), the range of Gasch’s cultural commentary would not be limited to strictly contemporary trends. His keen knowledge of art history is apparent in the numerous articles that followed in such prominent venues as D’Ací i d’Allà, L’Amic de les Arts, La Nova Revista, and La Veu

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de Catalunya. Andrew A. Anderson has correctly pointed out that the target of his most strident critical attacks was impressionism. This critique, which arose from his awareness of the cultural past, took the movement to task for having made light and colour the supreme elements of painting, when for Gasch, the fundamentals of the art were to be found in form (Anderson 95). The social context of such criticism was one in which, in his eyes, Catalan artistic production of the moment had stalled aesthetically, rooted in a mediocrity thanks in part to a Noucentista legacy that had stifled innovation and artistic audacity (Minguet i Batllori ‘Sebastià Gasch i les avantguardes’ 16). Even though his general objections to impressionism arose from dissatisfaction with contemporary artistic production in Catalonia, Gasch’s discourse was not tied to the local or to a single national context. What one sees, rather, is a complex intermingling of foreign influence and local impetus that coincides with Barcelona’s own diversification as a cosmopolitan city. And while his resistance to the after-effects of Noucentisme may appear to expose a serious contradiction in Gasch’s thinking given that he was profoundly affected by purism – which pushed its own brand of classicism – I contend that the elements of mechanization patent in aspects of purist aesthetics are what set it apart in his eyes. Gasch often published his rebellious views in avant-garde journals, but his increasing reputation as a critic meant that his voice resonated also in more mainstream forums like the conservative La Veu de Catalunya as well as in the more liberal La Publicitat and Mirador. It is significant, too, that his criticism reached audiences not only in Catalonia but also in the artistic circles of Madrid, primarily through the pages of Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s seminal La Gaceta Literaria. Gasch occupied a privileged position in La Gaceta, and his texts avoided the journal’s ‘ghettoization’ of work by other authors and critics who dealt with the Peninsula’s peripheral cultures.4 Ironically, La Gaceta Literaria’s increasingly centralist (and falangist) editor, Giménez Caballero, considered the much-travelled Gasch to be an ‘exacerbated antilocalist’ even though he had published many of his articles previously in Catalonia and had displayed a strong sense of local specificity regarding Barcelona (Giménez Caballero 5). Evidently, the equally cosmopolitan Giménez Caballero appreciated Gasch’s ability to act as a conduit for other European styles and movements, primarily those from France, with which Gasch was most acquainted. Content-wise, Gasch’s contributions to the prestigious La Gaceta Literaria revealed his interest in the ability of new art to fuse the plastic

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with the poetic. As he had done earlier in Catalan language journals, he continued to laud Miró for his ability to capture interior visions through pictorial means. Along similar lines, and initially at least, Gasch heaped praise on Catalonia’s enfant terrible, Salvador Dalí, for the same attention that he gave to the subconscious.5 Later, however, he would reject Dalí’s forays into a full-blown surrealist style in which form became secondary to the subconscious-fuelled mental designs of the artist (Anderson 98). Even though Gasch commanded respect in Madrid, his constant battles over culture and new art in Barcelona led eventually to his bitter feud with Rafael Benet. While some have speculated that Gasch’s break with the avant-garde art world was triggered by an increasing conservatism in the critic, the hypothesis that simple disappointment and disenchantment with the cultural panorama of Catalonia caused Gasch’s disengagement is convincing (Minguet i Batllori, ‘Sebastià Gasch i les avantguardes’ 38). His shift to an appreciation of the entertainment world and mass spectacle did not occur overnight, though, and one can trace the growing importance that the critic placed on the vibrant phenomenon of jazz to his earlier ‘high-art’ writings. That his interest in jazz coincided with the Charleston – which superseded the foxtrot in Europe thanks to Josephine Baker – and the aesthetic repercussions of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925 fixes Gasch’s early criticism firmly in what I identify as the second phase of the Jazz Age in Barcelona, one that marks the start of a rapid gentrification process in which mass spectacle will become more and more a part of the Catalan capital’s experience. Towards a Theory of Jazz Theory Sebastià Gasch enjoyed close contact with the artistic and social trends of Paris through his regular correspondence with Joan Miró (Minguet i Batllori ‘Sebastià Gasch i les avantguardes’ 15). Partly as a result of this relationship, he was able to function as the prime receptor in Catalonia (and by extension, Spain) for the latest work of a diverse group of artists that included Severini, Chagall, Ernst, and of course, his friend Miró. Gasch’s reception and interpretation of the production of two others – Le Corbusier and the early Dalí – were key to the introduction of jazz and the concept of rhythm in his critical discourse as well as to his subsequent appreciation of these elements with regard to the city, the experience of which, it is important to remember, changed rapidly during the 1920s. As I pointed out in chapter 1, while cities like Paris

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and Berlin had begun their physical modernization earlier, Barcelona saw innovations like skyscrapers, the metro, and telephones, along with the increase in urban traffic, population density, and mass entertainment, later. It was only during the second half of the decade that its urban profile had begun to resemble its northern cousins. The year that jazz rhythm began to surface in Gasch’s criticism, 1926, was an important one in terms of popular entertainment in Spain. As mentioned in the previous chapter, not only was it the year that the Charleston arrived in the country (Vila-San-Juan 142), thus making Josephine Baker all the rage, but 1926 was significant also in that it marked the moment when the variety show spectacle began to give way to more elaborate revue productions (Retana 112). This growth in scale and complexity of the stage show along with the city’s growing appetite for film and the recognition of a star system speak to Barcelona’s integration with the processes of the West’s burgeoning culture of modern mass spectacle. Gasch was ready to take on the challenge of assimilating and critiquing the changing landscape and zeitgeist of his city. It comes as no surprise, then, that the beginning of his reception and use of jazz rhythm in his criticism not only coincided with the popularity of Baker’s rhythmic dance but, over time, would engage directly the spatial components of the thriving revues before encompassing urban space and the new modern experience as a whole. Call to Order In October 1926, Gasch published an article entitled ‘L’embranzida vers l’ordre’ (The Impetus towards Order) in the avant-garde journal D’Ací i d’Allà; in it he laid the groundwork for many of his later theories and, in so doing, demonstrated the extent to which Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit nouveau and Amédée Ozenfant’s purist theorizing had influenced him. Their effects were evident especially in his appreciation for the French architect’s functionalist approach to the built environment (Minguet i Batllori ‘Sebastià Gasch i les avantguardes’ 17). Divided into three parts, ‘Maquinisme,’ ‘Ordre contra anarquia,’ and ‘Proporcions,’ the article illustrates Gasch’s affinities with the tenets of purism as they relate specifically to the ‘plasticity’ of architecture. While the essay assumes a didactic posture overall, the first section is of especial interest because it fixes the critic’s discourse in physical space and evokes possible connections between the experience of the modern city and the spectacles of the Jazz Age in the critic’s early work.

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In Gasch’s opening paragraphs the critic describes how he experiences Barcelona as a pedestrian. What he finds particularly striking is the architectural juxtaposition of an electrical plant in Barcelona with the anarchic buildings of the city’s Paral.lel district. For Gasch, the plant’s clean lines, which are devoid of ornamentation, provide a lesson in modern construction. When he then speculates that the buildings erected for modern engineering are responses to a general cry for simplicity, he links this notion to the ‘exciting’ effect of machinery (62). By subsequently invoking Cocteau’s comparisons between music hall/theatre and jazz/music, Gasch subtly connects his valorization of industrial design in Barcelona with two other markers of the time: music hall performance and jazz. His point of enunciation, the Paral.lel, one of the centres of popular entertainment in the Catalan capital, reinforces this association and affirms the transferability of foreign aesthetic theories south to Catalonia. These links between theory, geographic location, and different performative styles are not gratuitous; they spell out, at an early moment in Gasch’s critical trajectory, a path that will mix different artistic modes and link the aesthetic effects inherent to their receptions to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the urban environment – one that would begin to tackle themes and subjects that other theorists of mass culture had already begun to engage in relation to other European cities. The fact that Gasch republished the bulk of this foundational article two years later in Castilian in La Gaceta Literaria under the suggestive title ‘De un orden nuevo’ (On a New Order) is evidence of how these ideas began to play an important part in the development of his thought (Gasch ‘De un orden nuevo’). Furthermore, that one of the key tenets of ‘L’Embranzida’ – that ‘L’obra plàstica és un fet lògic que ha de satisfer plenament certes necessitats fisiològiques’ (the plastic artwork is a logical work that must fully satisfy certain physiological necessities) – was consequently integrated into his most important article on jazz is also extremely noteworthy and indicative of the interpretive crosspollination that he practised in print. Gasch’s use of jazz as a critical tool through his citing of Cocteau is particularly interesting and instructive when one considers its context in a larger sense concerning jazz’s perceived disturbance of norms in central Europe. In this article, he formulates his own ‘call to order’ by making a ‘call for order.’ The irony is that, years earlier, critics like Clive Bell had made their own calls to order in England and France in an attempt to stem jazz’s influence and even Cocteau himself had moved away from it to such a degree that its impact was declared to have disappeared

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by 1924 (Milhaud qtd in Pilmer Taylor). Not so in Catalonia, where it was being valorized vis-à-vis rapidly changing artistic and urban spheres. This is not surprising given the important difference between the timing of the Age’s gentrification in France and in its Southern neighbour. As a consequence, Gasch’s call to expressly integrate jazz into the modern discourse without rejecting or disengaging from it shows a resistance to critical fashion and a desire to reflect accurately the specific urban and performative experience that mid-1920s Barcelona presented him. ‘L’embranzida’ thus demonstrates that the lag effect between cultural ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ is not cut and dried but is affected as well by jazz’s gradual entry into the European mainstream after losing its initial shock effect. Put simply, Cocteau’s writings on new spectacles in Paris from 1918 held a similar charge for Barcelona in 1926: Le music-hall, le cirque, les orchestres américains de Nègres, tout cela féconde un artiste au même titre que la vie. Se servir des émotions que de tels spectacles éveillent ne revient pas à faire de l’art d’après l’art. Ces spectacles ne sont pas de l’art. Ils excitent comme les machines, les animaux, les paysages, le danger. (Cocteau 63) Music-hall, the circus, black American orchestras, they all fertilize an artist in the same way that life does. To use the emotions that such spectacles awaken is not the same as making art according to art. These spectacles are not art. They excite like machines, animals, landscapes, danger.

Gasch takes Cocteau’s earlier reference to machines and integrates it with the purists’ later appreciation of mechanization. The fact that theory, spectacle, and urban development all converge in Barcelona at this precise moment helps set the experience of the Age in the Catalan capital apart from that of other cities in terms of its reception and manifestation in journalistic and essayistic texts. ‘Salvador Dalí’ A few weeks after the appearance of his ‘L’embranzida’ piece, Gasch published what may be considered a watershed article bearing the simple title ‘Salvador Dalí.’ While La Gaceta Literaria would print a different, Spanish-language piece with the same title a year later, the first one appeared in Catalan in Barcelona’s La Gaseta de les Arts. This earlier essay, in which Gasch proposes Dalí as the perfect antithesis for

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contemporary art, is remarkable especially for the critic’s valorization of the spatial aspects of Dalí’s work and for his direct invocation of jazz as a critical lens. Gasch frames his analysis by applauding cubism, a movement that he likens elsewhere to physical exercise or preparation and labels a type of gymnastics (Gasch ‘L’embranzida vers l’ordre’ 67). The day to day movements and efforts of an athlete in training may be distasteful to some, opines Gasch, but they work towards achieving better performances – which are more harmonious – and may lead, ultimately, to Olympic records, the attainment of which would be undeniably beautiful in his eyes (67). Cubism has had much the same effect in that while its apparent confusion of forms and perspectives may have displeased the everyday viewer who found him/herself in front of an example of cubist painting, what the intricate play of volume, depth, lines, and planes really led to was a subsequent rebirth of classical serenity as exemplified in works by the post-cubism Picasso and pre-surrealism Dalí. Gasch offers his fellow Catalan’s 1925 painting ‘Venus and the Sailor’ as a product of the physical regimen of cubism. He writes that ‘per la gimnàstica del cubisme, per la severa austeritat de “La Venus i el Mariner”, Salvador Dalí ha lograt l’eurítmia decisiva del seu neo-classicisme actual’ (68) (on account of the gymnastics of cubism, of the severe austerity of ‘The Venus and the Sailor,’ Salvador Dalí has achieved the decisive eurhythmics of his present neoclassicism). The influence of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant in such an observation is palpable; clean lines rise out of the cacophonous multiplicity of cubist aesthetics while the comfort of total design imposes itself in the wake of dada’s absurdist juxtaposition and collage. When combined with the characteristics of ‘The Venus and the Sailor,’ Gasch’s invocation of eurhythmics offers another avenue by which to explore the critic’s perception of the post-cubist period; by harking back to earlier aesthetic currents from European performative arts, his esprit nouveau–inspired outlook shows early signs of the interdisciplinarity that would mark his later work. Specifically, I suggest that the ‘eurhythmics’ reference may be read two ways. First, it can refer to the basic notion of harmony in terms of the lines and movement evident in the painting. Another way to consider it, however, would be as an allusion to the theories of Émile Jacques Dalcroze (1865–1950), a Swiss composer who developed a system of rhythmic gymnastics at the turn of the twentieth century. Such a reading would put Gasch’s references to cubist gymnastics and training in a new, practical, and spatially suggestive light. That Dalcroze had an important working relationship with his

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Swiss compatriot Adolphe Appia, the theorist of modern stage design and lighting, offers another enticing lead in terms of Gasch’s understanding and use of rhythm as a critical tool during both this initial period and then later, when he fully engages in a critique of various spaces of popular entertainment in Barcelona. And while it may be impossible to specifically equate Dalí’s stark landscape with Appia’s strippeddown, yet three-dimensionally dynamic stage, or the white slip on the artist’s goddess with the neutral tunics employed by the Swiss designer’s actors, Appia’s theories of light and rhythm do resonate in Gasch’s appreciation of the visual rhythm of the painting and its eurhythmic qualities. That these theories will become more apparent in the critic’s work in the years to come makes any possible allusion to them here even more suggestive and indicative of an important cross-fertilization of ideas based primarily on an understanding of physical space. Gasch’s next step in his appreciation of Dalí’s work from this neocubist/neoclassical period ties it directly to the base referent of the style of the Age: jazz music. Now, rather than refer once more to Cocteau’s eight-year-old writings, the critic relies on his own present reception of the music – specifically that of a recording of the American jazz band American Southern Syncopated Orchestra. He uses the rambunctious music as a template with which to compare Dalí’s work. Note especially how in a move that harks back to his admiration of industrial aesthetics a week earlier, Gasch’s description of jazz highlights its metallic qualities and, above all, its rhythm: Hi ha les queixes torbadores del saxofon, tràgicament esgarrifoses com la sirena del vaixell en dia de boira. Hi ha les sonoritats metàl·liques del banjo. Hi ha el timbal i els platerets, el klaxon i el cornbasson. Hi ha el terrabastall de crits, de rialles i d’interjeccions dels negres. I, sobretot, hi ha EL RITME! EL RITME!! EL RITME!!! sense el qual vera música no existeix. (69) There are the disturbing complaints of the saxophone, trembling tragically like the siren of the ocean liner on a foggy day. There are the metallic sounds of the banjo. There are the drum and the cymbals, the horn and the cornbasson. There is the tumult of cries, laughs, and the interjections of the blacks. And, above all, there is THE RHYTHM! THE RHYTHM!! THE RHYTHM!!! without which real music would not exist.

His enthusiasm for jazz is obvious, and the importance the critic puts on rhythm as the glue that not only holds music together but also

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defines it is even more so. How then, does he apply jazz’s rhythmic qualities to Dalí’s art? Gasch sees the gripping effect of music’s dynamic rhythm as part of the painting as well; he ventures that it creates an equal level of enthusiasm since, as jazz rhythm satisfies the ear, pictorial rhythm satisfies the eye. This overtly physiological component of rhythm completes the eurhythmic circle by connecting art in different forms to the body in a way that blurs the line between the senses while engaging a space of reception (the salon) at the same time. The connection between rhythm, space, and flesh, which had already become patent in the effect that Baker’s dancing had on audiences in Paris starting in late 1925, recurred frequently in Gasch’s writings on Jazz Age art and spectacles. ‘Embranzida’ and ‘Salvador Dalí’ – these two early, yet important articles in Gasch’s oeuvre – laid the foundation for the critic’s jazz-inspired appreciation of rhythm, space, and the urban experience of the Jazz Age. While his critical debts to Cocteau, Le Corbusier, and Ozenfant, as well as to Dalcroze and possibly Appia, may be part of his evolving discourse, what is most important here is that they serve a role in his own training; they form a part of the preparation that will contribute to his keen ability to juggle disciplines and draw coherent lines between them that is so evident in his later essays, the vast majority of which would be published in the newspapers and weeklies of the country’s most cosmopolitan city, Barcelona. Urban Space Gasch’s theories on perception and rhythm evolved out of the confluence of his critical receptions of modern art and new music. At first, they are confined to recorded jazz, but the incorporation of new subjects such as the variety show, chorus lines, and the live jazz performance into his critical vocabulary marks a key progression both in his own understanding of the modern urban environment and in the reception of Jazz Age aesthetics in Barcelona in general. This was the moment in which the visual apprehension of performances combined with the aural reception of jazz music and, most importantly, with the general rhythm that it propagated. In this way the space of jazz and the Age that it inspired became fundamental to understanding the aesthetic and behavioural codes that came in its wake. The way that Gasch deals with this intermediality is to use the notion of rhythm that lies at the heart of the jazz spectacle as a critical marker – one that refers to the musical realm but is not confined to it so that it could be extended to

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serve both in discussions of plastic arts and in his critiques of the larger space of the urban built environment as a whole. While his unflagging faith in Joan Miró’s aesthetic prowess may have been a feature of his career initially, this ability to analyse and synthesize the disparate spectacles associated with the rapidly developing mass culture indicative of the second part of the Jazz Age cemented his reputation and set him apart from other journalists and critics of the period. In this section I examine how Gasch’s particular views on the experience of the modern metropolis – especially that of Barcelona – influenced and inflected his writings on cultural phenomena. Through a consideration of the specific themes of visual media and his understanding of the ‘violence’ inherent in jazz rhythm, it is possible to trace the way in which Gasch’s aesthetic appreciation of the arts both transforms and lends itself to discussions of urban space and theories of perception. The key journalistic texts to consider in this regard are his lesser-known collaborations with Dalí and Montanyà as well as the sinisterly titled ‘Elogi a la violència’ from 1928 and 1930, respectively. Synoptics In order to better appreciate Gasch’s engagement with the city in general and the ‘Elogi’ essay specifically, it is fruitful to identify and examine the points that they share with the ‘Synoptic Guides,’ two relatively unknown but intriguing pieces that Gasch wrote with Dalí and Lluís Montanyà in 1928. Published virtually concurrently with the aforementioned Catalan Anti-Artistic Manifesto, these guides appeared in successive issues of L’Amic de les Arts (23 and 24) and tackled the visual zones of both cinema and commercial advertising in the public space. Like the Manifesto, they bore the signatures of the three young agitators, but whereas Dalí has been identified as the driving force behind their more famous and enduring collaboration, I contend that the guides’ form and themes may be read as being directly linked to Gasch’s increasingly urban-centric thinking and his assimilation of European critical trends related to performance, space, and art. The very notion of a ‘synoptic’ guide – from synopsis – entails a degree of comprehension in its comprehensiveness, a critical distance more apropos to the perspective of Gasch the observer and evaluator than to the vehement antics of Dalí the provocateur. The guides are interesting hybrids; by providing a mental (and pictorial) interpretation of their subjects, the author(s) embrace one of the

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central elements of a manifesto: that of the proclamation. Yet the synoptic aspect of a ‘guide’ points to a more conservative approach to its subject, one in which the goal tends more towards a sense of objectivity than towards the militancy frequently found in manifestos from this period. That they also have a visual impact thanks to the flowchart-like images that they contain lends credence to a reading of them both as avant-garde-inspired documents in a formal, typographic sense and as considered, critical treatises from a thematic point of view. The guides, then, serve as intriguing addenda to the Catalan Anti-Artistic Manifesto’s main attraction, yet at the same time, point to a state of reflection at work beyond the immediate ‘now’ of the Manifesto’s famous litany of ‘Hi ha …’ (There is …) declarations. I would suggest that the critic at work in that space was Gasch and that even though the thematic connections between the guides and the Manifesto are clear, the expanded theorizing evident in these treatments of cinema and advertising bear the art critic’s hallmarks, not least of all because of the striking importance of rhythm in both. The most intriguing aspect of the treatment of film in the first Guía sinòptica is the way in which the authors look beyond the by-then accepted reception of cinema as a new art that was replacing a supposedly moribund theatre and quickly developing its own aesthetic codes. They do not dwell on film’s increasing influence and vogue as a spectacle but rather consider what lies on the other side of the screen; that is to say they valorize the guts of filmmaking, its anti-artistic side. In so doing the three young critics underline cinema’s importance as industry: ‘El cinema no és una nova Bella Art. El cinema és, simplement, una indústria. I una indústria en una enorme activitat’ (Minguet i Batllori ‘Sebastià Gasch i les avantguardes’ 148) (Cinema is not a new Beautiful Art. Cinema is, simply, an industry. And an industry in an enormous state of activity). As part of the new industrial and increasingly urban reality of the time, cinema’s reworking of traditional artistic representation is part and parcel of a cultural streamlining or standardizing effect produced by and common to other industries such as the automotive sector, aviation, and phonograph production. While it is in the novelty of these forms of expression or activity that one finds an anti-artistic kernel, film is not immune to the putrefying influences of traditional ‘art.’ According to the authors of the Guía sinòptica de cinema, while the short comic film (which is anonymous and, most importantly, intense) may be their preferred film genre, some longer works such as those by Chaplin, Keaton, and Langdon do have value based on the physicality of the humour.

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Gasch, Dalí, and Montanyà are utterly dismissive, though, of directors such as Murnau, Gance, and Lang who made dramatic films. Along the same lines, the trio seems to recognize that the nascent star system, one in which music hall performers who had crossed over to film often took a lead, constituted a threat to the anti-artistic ‘purity’ of the new medium. For them, name and face recognition over action is part of the slippery slope leading down to the pit of ‘artistic’ production. The critics’ valorization of comic shorts or those longer pictures that relied on physical comedy rather than narrative exposition is in keeping with their emphasis on the mechanics or industry of film. The camera is a witness but not an interpreter and thus it serves its own synoptic purpose as a tool for transmitting images. A close reading of this first guide shows how Dalí, Gasch, and Montanyà break the medium into two parts. On the one hand one finds Fotogènia, the ‘nou valor de significat assolit per personatges i objectes pel sol fet de la transposició fotogràfica’ (photogenics: the new value of meaning captured by characters and objects by the sole fact of photographic transposition), and ritme: ‘música visual’ (rhythm: visual music) on the other (fig. 3.1). The first aspect, fotogènia, assigns meaning and value to the process of objectively capturing the image. It is no surprise, then, that along with the aforementioned comic films, the critics respect documentaries, newsreels, and scientific movies: ‘anotem la pel.lícula documentària, tipus Noticiari Fox, i els films científics, d’una emoció inenarrable’ (149) (we take note that the documentary film, the Fox Newsreel type and scientific films, [possess] an indescribable emotion) (Minguet i Batllori ‘Sebastià Gasch i les avantguardes’ 149). Here, one sees a mixture of both their disdain for traditional fictional representations – no matter the new medium – and clear echoes of New Objectivism.6 In terms of the evolution of Gasch’s criticism, specifically, it is in the second part of the guide’s cinematic equation – the side dominated by rhythm – where one finds the essence of the Catalan critic’s entire approach to representations of various types and, importantly, to the urban context in which works are created and received. There are echoes here of key avant-garde cinematic interpretations of the urban milieu, such as Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera and Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. It is important to add that in this first synoptic guide’s schematic breakdown, the ‘visual music’ of cinematic rhythm is further categorized as ‘successive expression’ (148). The industrial quality of celluloid frames pieced together and passing through a projector is suggestive of the rigour of the assembly line, which is

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CINEMA Manera inèdita i novíssima d’espressió. FOTOGENIA

RITME

Nou valor de significant assolit per personatges i objectes pel sol fet de transposició fotogràfica.

Música visual Expressió successiva.

Valor expressiu i plàstic

Sensualitat

Figure 3.1 Extract from ‘Guia sinòptica. Cinema.’

ironic in that the ‘anti-art’ of cinema affords the director, at the very least, the revolutionary ability to shatter established parameters of space and time through the editing process. Any contradictions notwithstanding, according to the critics, this successive expression founded in rhythm lends sensuality to the expressive and plastic value of the photographic condition of cinema. As I show in my analysis of Gasch’s ‘Elogi’ piece later in this chapter, his versatile interpretation of rhythm is deeply rooted not only in his appreciation of the jazz music that popularizes it but also in his reading of the modern city itself and the pace with which the metropolis develops and changes. Another connection to the city in addition to cinema’s importance as industry is the increasing ubiquity of movie palaces and how the popularity of film comes to condition more and more the patterns of urban leisure. Whereas the guide on cinema invokes an industrial aesthetic that speaks to commonalities with urban modernity in general, the guia sinòptica on commercial advertising, which L’Amic de les Arts published a month later, engages explicitly the space of the city: La publicitat envaeix el paisatge urbà. Un disc de fonògraf o una pipa, augmentats deu mil vegades, ocupen tot un edifici en construcció. Una ampolla d’específic, de dos metres, camina entre els vianants. Arran els llavis de la gent, passen les tipografies multicolors que corren amb els autobusos. Per la finestra del taxi, plouen del cel els anuncis del music-hall i, del cel dels cinemes, cauen mil fulles torbadores. Publicity invades the urban landscape. A phonograph record or a pipe, made ten thousand times bigger, occupies all of a building under construction. A specific bottle – two metres tall – walks among the pedestrians.

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Jazz Age Barcelona Almost touching the lips of the people, the multicolour prints that run alongside the buses pass by. Through the window of the taxi rain from the sky the music-hall ads, from the sky of the cinemas, fall a thousand turbulent sheets.

Note the critics’ take on the pervasiveness of advertising vis-à-vis the urban visual field. Advertising is omnipresent and is visible in a line-ofsight that extends from the sky down to street level, where human-sized adverts walk among the citizenry – a reminder of the way in which objects take on a life of their own in the world of publicity and marketing. What makes modern advertising appealing in the eyes of Gasch and his colleagues is how its images and typography are ruled at once by the laws of composition and economy. The reference to ‘economy’ is another clear allusion to the industrial make-up of the modern condition and carries a double charge; in addition to its connection to the market it assumes an aesthetic significance as a reference to a metaphorical economy of ornamentation. As if to reinforce this point, Gasch, Dalí, and Montanyà offer another flowchart as a way of describing the anti-artistic advertisement while streamlining their own commentary and distilling it into its own form of visual image (fig. 3.2). In contrast to their first guide, though, the downward descriptions are not left hanging; they are reincorporated in the encompassing term ‘Poesia.’ Furthermore, the critics conclude the article in a staccato form that reinforces the poetic angle of the piece while calling into question the very concept of the lyric in a modern urban context: ‘Anunci commercial – Publicitat – Propaganda. FONTS DE POESIA’ (Minguet i Batllori ‘Sebastià Gasch i les avantguardes’ 152). I would propose that Gasch and the others use the visual field of (properly anti-artistic) urban advertising as a filter, one that reconfigures what they consider rotten signifiers of beauty or inspiration, by aligning the aesthetic parameters of value according to new rules of composition in which consumption – in terms of the market – is a key constituent.7 This interpretation holds as well for their understanding of cinema as industry, as an activity whose scope reaches far beyond the projected image. That in both synoptic guides aspects of rhythm figure in the treatment of the dual visual fields that are engaged points to the importance of Gasch in their conception. That this overriding interest in rhythm as a metaphor for the experience of the Jazz Age city is grounded in the intense experience of one in particular – Barcelona – is even more suggestive and offers a bridge between Gasch’s collective work

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ANUNCI PUBLICITAT ANTI-ARTÍSTICA Lleis estrictes. Útil commercial Sorpresa Suggestió. Visualitat. Agilitat. Vivacitat. Aplom. Jovialitat

Elements simples ritmats. Colors sencers. Formes elementals. Qualitats inusitades. Canvis d’escala. Maneres físiques diverses. Explicativitat. Reacció psicològica ràpida, intensa. POESIA

Figure 3.2 Extract from ‘Guia sinòptica. L’anunci comercial.’

with Dalí and Montanyà and his own theories which, during the late 1920s, branched out from art criticism to encompass cinema, jazz, boxing, and the circus, among other themes. ‘Violence’ Later, in 1930, in his important capstone article ‘Jazz,’ Gasch would employ a new concept – violència – as part of the spatial aspect of his understanding of jazz rhythm. His use of this idea is another way in which he relates jazz – which, according to him possesses ‘all the violence of the reactions’ – to an urban experience above and beyond the direct aesthetic and musical ones of the performance itself (‘Jazz’ 9). However, the invocation of violence as part of his theoretical apparatus in that piece (which I examine in detail below) is the continuation of an idea that he had started to elaborate some four months earlier in an article in the Barcelona weekly Mirador in which he declared that ‘avui, tot incita a la violència’ (Gasch ‘Elogi de la violència’ 177) (today, everything incites violence). Violence here refers to the same reactive response to perceived stagnation that Gasch perceives in music. Specifically, in ‘Elogi de la violència,’ the critic deals with the lack of radicalism in the contemporary Catalan art scene. Gasch juxtaposes the ‘anaemic’ shows in the high art exposition locales with the dynamic spaces of a modern metropolis enraptured by the frivolous styles of an international and internationalizing Jazz Age. His direct consideration of the city marks a return to the

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appreciation for industrial design and mechanization that Gasch displayed earlier in his career when his criticism pointed to a synthesis between jazz and urban space even before he directly dealt with the jazz spectacle in situ. A brief examination of the other spaces implicated in this new urban ‘violence’ helps build a better understanding of Gasch’s awareness of the Age as a pervasive implementer of codes and sets the stage for an appreciation of his use of jazz rhythm as a means of coming to grips with the many changes that were occurring all over Barcelona. Among the important locales of the time that he cites in his composition on violence, Gasch lists the street, the metro, the tram, the football stadium, the boxing ring, and the bar as places where ‘respirem la violència’ (Gasch ‘Elogi de la violència’ 177) (we breathe violence). Through this connection of space and practice the term ‘violence’ comes to refer to the energy patent in the time – an Age powered by elements of an international jazz aesthetic that were not limited to specific spaces of musical reception but also incorporated those of industry, sport, and leisure. When one dwells briefly on these spaces, one notices that their dimensions in terms of public or popular access and/or display mirror Gasch’s own changing critical interests. The first three spaces that he mentions represent the arteries of the modern metropolis. Not only do they comprise different experiences of movement and navigation of the urban environment, they also represent zones that force citizens into close contact with strangers. They are spaces of crowds, transitory places of anonymity and intersecting urban trajectories. In addition, they symbolize the metropolitan energy created by the modern industry that Gasch held in such high esteem. They are spaces where this energy feeds on itself, where ‘els nervis, exacerbats i susceptibles, aprofiten totes les avinenteses per a produir-se rabiosament’ (177) (nerves, exacerbated and susceptible, take advantage of any chance to (re)produce themselves rabidly). The football stadium and the boxing ring are two other zones that Gasch mentions with respect to this spirit of excited violència. Both played important roles as valued and popular spaces during the spectacle-loving Jazz Age.8 In the former, the Catalan critic sees an interesting connection between spectacle and spectator, for it is in ‘[e]l camp de futbol, on públic i jugadors combreguen en un vast anhel de brutalitat’ (177) (The football field, where the fans and the players share in a vast longing for brutality). The word ‘anhel’ is intriguing on account of its dual meaning of ‘longing’ and ‘aspiration,’ which energizes

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both sets of participants in a common goal, blurring the line between the two and destabilizing the space of the spectacle. For its part, the boxing ring exhibits many of the same effects as the stadium. It is a site where ‘la bestialitat salta les cordes del ring i s’apodera dels espectadors enfollits’ (177) (brutality leaps the ropes of the ring and takes possession of the crazed spectators). In this case, a physical connection and response results from the seemingly controlled and contained violence of the spectacle and the secure space of the observers. The energy of the violència Gasch mentions is internalized both figuratively – in the sense that the metropolis affects and changes the citizens’ nerves and reactions to stimuli (à la Simmel) – and literally. The bar is another privileged space of the time that he mentions and that exemplifies perfectly this aspect of internalization. There, the ‘virulence’ of the cocktails that the patron imbibes ‘s’alia a l’agressivitat estimulant dels ritmes negres’ (177) (allies itself with the stimulating aggression of the black rhythms). One may, without too much difficulty, imagine the ‘cocktail’ itself as a performance of alcohol. The cocktail was a popular metaphor at the time and was a favourite of Gasch’s Mirador colleague, Josep Maria Planes. When, on one occasion, Planes enthused in print about the Bar Americà in the Hotel Colón, it was the cocktail culture of the Jazz Age to which he referred first and foremost: ‘Beguda inevitable: el cocktail. Conversa de cocktail. Moralitat de cocktail’ (Planes ‘El Bar’ 2) (Inevitable drink: the cocktail. Cocktail conversation. Cocktail morality). For Planes, a mouthful of cocktail taken in that international hotel space was tremendously evocative, as it made one ‘somniar amb una barri-barreja d’asfalt, de disc de gramòfon, de reclam lluminós i d’estrella cinematogràfica’ (2) (dream of a jumble of asphalt, a gramophone record, of a luminous advertisement, and of a film star). Strikingly, the elements of Planes’s Barcelona-based experience/dream correspond exactly to those that Gasch explores in his collaborative work and individual writings, a fact that illustrates to what degree the critic was in tune with the Catalan zeitgeist and sought to channel it through his journalism. Like many other European commentators at the time, Gasch identified jazz rhythms to a certain degree with aggressiveness and primitiveness. What is noteworthy about his commonplace and prejudiced description, though, is the context. His views come wedded to spaces of the Jazz Age that were also sites of violent energy where, once again, ‘[r]espirem la violència, la boca tancada, els narius dilatats, fins a

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omplir-nos-en els pulmons’ (‘Elogi de la violència’ 177) (we breathe violence, our mouth shut, our nostrils dilated, in order to fill our lungs with it). These locales that Gasch outlines in ‘Elogi de la violència’ are revelatory for their responsive and energized nature, and it bears repeating that all of them are public or spaces of popular ‘low’ spectacle. They are not the elitist, more private and exclusive zones of the ‘high’ art exhibitions that Gasch had frequented previously. They are zones where the very notion of spectacle is juxtaposed with the reactions of observers who, at least superficially and temporarily, absorb the metropolitan energy and threaten to become part of the ‘show.’ Consequently, one can see an intersection between popular taste and Gasch’s changing critical gaze in which rhythm plays an increasingly important role. That he links jazz to both the refinement of modern aesthetics and the physical experience of the time reinforces his importance as a mediator of the international Jazz Age as it was manifest at different class levels in Catalan society. Variety Space and Spectacle As I have shown, Gasch’s criticism referred to jazz rhythm yet also expanded into the umbrella concept that he called violència, an effect that allowed him to include a variety of under-appreciated spaces of the city in his journalistic explorations of the metropolis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This period around the Wall Street Crash but before the establishment of the Second Republic in Spain was the point at which the gentrification of the Jazz Age was reaching its peak. The rhythmic spirit of the Age that Gasch perceived would eventually peter out when faced with the stresses of the pre–Civil War period, but in the meantime, it had penetrated spaces and performances above and beyond those of the specifically jazz music-centred spectacle. The way that this rhythm of the city and the Age were manifest in music hall makes this hybrid space especially intriguing as a subject in Gasch’s theorizing of the period. Music hall entertainment was often synonymous with ‘variety.’ By the time that Sebastià Gasch began to valorize the space of the theatre in print, though, the variety show had lost prestige in the face of the more intricate and extravagant revue even as lower-scale taverns continued to provide more amateurish entertainment. Music hall expanded throughout Europe and America in the nineteenth century. From the burlesque bar and saloon shows of the United States, to the evolving

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cafés-chantants in Italy, to the more circus-inspired productions in Germany, the adaptable nature of what was a very popular spectacle is evident.9 It was in Paris, though, where the variété reached its peak. Famous locales such as the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère were sites where international names could be made or broken. And while the established traditions of satirical and topical songs continued, the infusion of the American jazz band into the variety mix marked a new phase of the international expansion of the music hall show. Serge Salaün writes that, until approximately 1900, the great popularity of the indigenous zarzuela made the introduction of foreign cultural forms, such as music hall, quite difficult in Spain (91). Nevertheless, after that point, music hall flourished, and he quotes one source as saying that in 1912 there were six thousand cabarets (or variétés) up and running in the country (91). As I mentioned above, Spain’s neutrality during the First World War contributed greatly to the consolidation of the entertainment industry. The brief economic boom resulted in stability and wealth for numerous influential figures in the entertainment sector. According to Retana, this phenomenon promoted a social climate in which many young women were able to find patrons for their forays into the world of the variety show (51). The popular songs, or cuplés, that these women performed evolved into a more ‘sentimental,’ institutionalized variety, as opposed to the risqué and suggestive numbers performed earlier in the century for audiences that were predominantly male (Salaün 91–3). During Europe’s Roaring Twenties, a time that had been prefaced by the popularity of ragtime music, international elements continued to penetrate Spain’s entertainment scene. Initially, the foxtrot reigned supreme and, according to García Martínez, became jazz’s entry point into high society. By the end of 1930, high society was also coming to meet jazz. Through his interest in a plethora of cultural activities and an increasingly wide social range of spectacles, Sebastià Gasch became the ideal mediator for the performances of this time. And although his attention was broadcast over a wide area of new subjects, he was able to maintain the high level of critical insight and perception that he had previously lent almost exclusively to the art world. Three key articles that appeared in Mirador between 30 October and 13 November bear this out and contribute to an understanding of the critic’s conception of ritme as it applies to both the specific space of the Jazz Age’s evolution, the music hall, and the city in general. These mini-treatises on different aspects of the revue, ‘Les revistes,’ ‘Els “sketches,”’ and ‘Les girls,’

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explore the music hall space, the spectacles that energized it as well as the way that they were perceived by the Catalan public. Revues ‘Les revistes,’ the first part of the music hall triptych, begins tellingly with the following statement: ‘Els nostres ulls exigeixen imperiosament les formes nues. Els nostres ulls demanen ardentment les formes reduides a llur geometria elementària i rebutgen categòricament les formes enfarfegades’ (Gasch ‘Les revistes’ 5) (Our eyes demand imperiously naked forms. Our eyes demand ardently forms reduced to their elemental geometry and reject categorically overloaded forms). In this way, Gasch posits the supremacy of the spectator’s gaze from the first sentence; the audience demands images in a space free of extraneous decoration and they do so in a manner that leaves no question as to the primacy of their position. While in this context the invocation of nakedness as a desired state points to the critic’s backlash against adornment of any type, the fact remains that many Jazz Age spectacles banked on a degree of voyeuristic titillation to fill their theatres’ seats (even if the shows were tamer than earlier cabaret entertainment put on for a predominantly male audience). In terms of performance theory, this concept once again draws a line between Gasch’s take on spatial rhythm and Dalcroze’s eurhythmics as well as with Adolphe Appia’s strippeddown performance area and dancers.10 Gasch’s critique of the music hall follows an anti-artistic tack in that the four main components of the revue that he identifies – the décor, the producer, the actors, and the lighting – are considered in terms of a base functionality that resists melodramatic representation. For instance, in his analysis of the décor, Gasch contends that contemporary spectators had acquired a visual culture that was highly geometric in nature. Accordingly, he views the arrangement of the stage space as the base upon which a temporary visual culture of the performance is erected even as he asserts that its role in the transmission of art is secondary. The Catalan critic stresses the need for a décor that does not distract the audience and calls for one that highlights the play of the actors. This act of passive ‘revealing’ or ‘facilitating’ on the part of the performative architecture of the show stands opposed to the baroque over-elaboration of the sets on which many revue productions relied.11 In contrast, Gasch describes a space in which the audience’s receptive gaze is free of competition, where the other factors that make up a

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show may take centre stage in order to effectuate the rhythmic experience that the critic exhorts. In order to bring about this preferred visual-spatial effect, Gasch considers it essential that the actors of the music hall revue reflect an aesthetic of reduced ornamentation as well. They too must be faithful to the ocular needs of a modern eye that has been conditioned by the mechanized metropolis and its penchant for clean stylization in architecture, advertising, and sports; accordingly, they must not cater to any frivolous aesthetic desires that could result in ‘un cos enfarfegat’ (Gasch ‘Les revistes’ 5) (an overloaded body). And while Gasch does not recommend that the actors be literally naked – merely that the wardrobe clearly reveal the lines of the body – here again, one sees a crossingover of aesthetic concepts that the critic first deployed during his years studying painting. The physical appearance of the actors in the show is linked to another key player in the arrangement of the space of the music hall spectacle: the producer. As regards the human mind behind the creation of a pleasingly rhythmic show, Gasch maintains his hard line concerning ornamentation and the need to preserve geometric purity: ‘L’estètica del producer no consisteix a enfarfegar cossos, sinó a posar en valor les línies d’aquests cossos’ (5) (The aesthetic of the producer does not consist of overloading things, but rather in valorizing the lines of these things). Of course, the producer’s responsibilities apply to more than just the wardrobe of the actors; they involve as well the whole composition of the stage and the rhythm of the massed bodies on that stage. Rhythm is once more part of the picture and is intrinsic to the show’s physicality, to the motion of bodies in tight coordination. Lighting, the last component of the revue that Gasch analyses in ‘Les revistes,’ touches the first three both figuratively and literally and also serves as a metaphorical bridge to the city at large. He touts the illumination of the hall and the stage as an integral part of the ‘modern’ spectacle in which the effect of the spotlight is fundamental. Its beam cuts and breaks the visual field by focusing the gaze artificially on an object and thus seizing a degree of aesthetic and receptive control. Not content with two or more principal projectors, Gasch demands more, appealing in the pages of Mirador for ‘light games’ that are more complex than the norm.12 The question of lighting touches on considerations of the nocturnal city in general and brings to mind the way in which public space was extended into or ‘constructed’ out of the night thanks in large part to the illumination of city spaces during the nineteenth and twentieth

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centuries. And while, for his part, Gasch derides variety show producers for ‘decorating’ rather than ‘constructing’ the spectacle of the theatre, he is not against adornment or advertisement provided that it is properly anti-artistic in nature. Ornamentation remains an important part of the spatial effect of the music hall both on stage and outside on its surface level – that is, in the way that it presents itself to the rest of the city. The neon sign of one popular venue that Gasch frequented, the Edén Concert, represents what one might imagine to be a good compromise. It dominated the Nou de la Rambla street in the seedy Raval district by occupying a visual plane above that of the streetlights. Rather than create heaviness in an aesthetic sense, though, it directed and captured the gaze of the passersby through the use of an illuminated arrow. This electric hoarding exemplifies how modern signage could play a part in luring potential spectators into spaces where their modern eyes could be satisfied by the equally modern spectacle as per Gasch’s new mantra: ‘Satisfer els ulls. Heus ací la missió de la revista’ (Gasch ‘Els “sketches”’ 5) (Satisfy the eyes. We have here the mission of the revue). ‘Sketches’ In the second article of his series on music hall entertainment, Sebastià Gasch defines the revue sketches, which are put on between main performances, as a type of ‘oasi espiritual en mig del desert visual’ (5) (spiritual oasis in the middle of a visual desert). According to the critic, the sketch has such an effect because a succession of highly visually taxing scenes can fatigue the spectator’s eye. Having advanced the notion of the revue as an ocular festival, now Gasch considers it equally important that the gaze not be impaired – hence his interest in the sketch as a space of respite. In this essay, Gasch grounds his critique of the sketch in the history of the form. He details the French version that the music hall critic Gustave Fréjaville described and then passes to the English variant, which was easily available to the citizens of Barcelona at the time since the production Wake Up and Dream had begun its run at the Palau de Projeccions on Monjuic Mountain (fig. 3.3). Between the French and English versions, Gasch clearly favours the latter for its quick scenes and ‘agility’ (5). Nevertheless, at the same time, he displays dissatisfaction with the genre in general; the legacy of old-style theatre productions was still far too evident in the modern music hall sketch for his taste.

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Figure 3.3 Scene from Wake up and Dream. Mirador 72, p. 5. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Gasch’s identification of traditional theatre and music hall as two polar opposites is telling and demonstrates once again the vehemence of his response to what he perceives as decadence in any art form. While Minguet i Batllori sees the critic’s tendency to categorize everything as indicative of his didactic bent, no one can accuse Gasch of not taking a stand or of not drawing a line. In this instance he states: ‘El teatre és la lògica. El music hall, l’arbitrarietat. El teatre és el realisme. El music hall, la ficció. El teatre és el previst, és l’esperat. El music hall la sorpresa, l’inesperat. El teatre és l’ahir. El music hall l’avui’ (Gasch ‘Els “sketches”’ 5) (Theatre is logic. Music hall, arbitrariness. Theatre is realism. Music hall, fiction. Theatre is the foreseen, the anticipated. Music hall is surprise, the unexpected. Theatre is of yesterday. Music hall of today). He is mindful, too, to include his umbrella concept of rhythm in the mix: ‘El teatre és el ritme lent. El music hall, per contra, és el ritme trepidant’ (5) (Theatre is slow rhythm. Music hall, on the other hand, is vibrating). The rhythm that emanates from jazz music and penetrates modern urban life beats at the heart of the new music hall sketch; it has an ability

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to preserve the gaze from fatigue through the constant acceleration of the pace of the performance. Nevertheless, it presents dangers also and in response to them Gasch uses his criticism of the music hall space in an unmistakable project of artistic renovation. For example, according to Gasch, the persistent display and performance of the old style ‘theatrical’ sketches means that the revue risks converting velocity into an ‘exasperating slowness’ (5). What is more, the critic explicitly warns that the gaze of the spectator cannot handle these brusque deviations in rhythm. Consequently, ‘Els “sketches”’ may be considered a text very much imbued with the flavour of a manifesto in which the established precepts of speed and rhythm, along with the interests of the modern spectator’s gaze in the production of spectacle, take precedence. In answer to his own question of what must be done to abolish the irregularity in the modern sketch, Gasch responds categorically: ‘Simplement dotar els sketches del mateix ritme dels quadros de conjunt’ (Simply endow the sketches with the same rhythm of the other scenes), the nature of which he had dealt with already the previous week in ‘Les revistes’ (5). Gasch offers more than simple exposés. He proposes drastic renewal. For the critic, this renovation of all facets of the space and spectacle of the revue is imperative in order to meet not only the demands of the spectator’s eye but also those of the modern tempo of representation itself. One can thus see how, step by step, he develops theories on what will become the most important facets of his Jazz Age aesthetic: the perception of performance, rhythm, and the energy of an arbitrary and surprising metropolis in which it all takes place. That this mediation of spectacle and city has its own staging ground in an essayistic form of journalism that can respond quickly to the changing face of Barcelona furthers the link between the manifestation of the zeitgeist and its apprehension in text and image among the pages of certain key periodicals. Chorus Girls Both the simple gesture and the ‘entire body-in-motion’ play key roles in Gasch’s understanding of rhythm in space, and when he refers to ‘bodies,’ he means those of the spectators as well as those involved in the production and presentation of a spectacle. In the Catalan’s opinion, they are all governed according to the norms or standards that he delineates in articles such as the ones examined in this chapter. Appearing a week after ‘Els “sketches”’ in No. 94 of Mirador, ‘Les girls’ singles out the impressive phenomenon of the chorus line from the

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ranks of other revue and variety show performers like the singer, the clown (one of Gasch’s favourite topics), and the illusionist. Singers, Gasch sustains, possess ‘diction’ that allows them to run the gamut of their emotions and expressions; all clowns have ‘instruments,’ whether they are physical accessories or, in the cases of the skilful ones, their own faces, voices, and exaggerated gestures; and for their part, illusionists make good use of their tricks in order to elicit responses from the crowd and confound the spectator’s eye (Gasch ‘Les girls’ 5). The showgirls, however, are different. They lack accessories and are impersonal. Gasch sees the chorus line as a counterweight to the strong personalities of the great singers and individual performers of the time such as Blanca Negri, Alady the clown, or John Bux. Unlike the situation of these entertainers who command personal attention, fame, and recognition, within the chorus line anonymity is the rule. Personality is not just suppressed, it does not exist. The girls are identical and, indeed, according to Gasch, their homogeneity is such that one can identify ‘un tipus únic de girls, un tipus standard, d’idèntiques caracteristiques’ (5) (a unique type of girls, a standard type, of identical characteristics). What is the performative effect of the girls’ lack of individual expression? Gasch does not hesitate to name the obvious – the legs of the chorus line – as their instrument of expression. Although these objects of exaggerated sexuality have been desexed, the creation of an impersonal, collective, rhythmic body inscribes them with performative power.13 The legs of the chorus girls ‘write’ the new aesthetic of the rhythmic spectacle in space just as Miró’s painting, Keaton’s cinema, and Hylton’s jazz do on the canvas, on the screen, and in the club, respectively. Gasch pursues the specifically spectacular aspect of the kickline and concludes that the chorus line legs ‘no es cansen de teixir i desteixir, amb una precisió singular que voreja les matemàtiques, els més bells arabescos, les més audacioses combinacions de línies harmonioses, les més perfectes figures geomètriques’ (5) (do not tire of weaving and unweaving, with a singular precision that borders on mathematics, the prettiest arabesques, the most audacious combinations of harmonious lines, the most perfect geometric figures). Such attention given to a mechanical repetition of movements synchronized to music and light obviously points to another bridge between the space of spectacle and the modern urban context. More than that, though, it marks Gasch’s engagement at a theoretical level with a cultural dialogue on the aesthetics of performance and mass spectacle that was taking place all across Europe.

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The kickline as a cultural phenomenon was a popular subject for critics during the first third of the twentieth century. One such observer, the cultural commentator Siegfried Kracauer, considered it in the German press in 1927 and for his part asserted that the chorus line girls were no longer ‘individual girls but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics’ (Kracauer 405). Kracauer also remarked on their desexualized nature and considered it in terms of space as well as the (remote) possibilities of eroticism: ‘The mass movements of the girls, by contrast, take place in a vacuum; they are a linear system that no longer has any erotic meaning but at best points to the locus of the erotic’ (405). According to Gasch, though, the girls were more than just an erotic ‘locus.’ They also pushed artistic boundaries in a distinctly spatial manner; for beyond the exact symmetry shown by the girls, ‘No hi ha res més a la vora de l’abstracció plàstica, de l’abstracció arquitectònica’ (‘Les girls’ 5) (There is nothing more at the boundary of plastic abstraction, of architectonic abstraction). The symmetry that Gasch describes in the kickline is his starting point for a comparison of the chorus line girls to other manifestations of art and, by extension, to modern aesthetics in general. For Gasch, chorus line is a clean, ‘plastic’ art that represents the music hall version of the plastic/expression dualism found in painting and cinema. On this point, though, Kracauer’s take is more politicized in that the German regards the girls’ collective motion not as plastic potential but rather as a form of mass spectacle, the end result of which is ‘the ornament, whose closure is brought by emptying all the substantial constructs of their contents’ (Kracauer 405). Levin explains that Kracauer ‘reads the geometry of human limbs as an ambivalent historico-philosophical allegory, insisting that they are also a mise-en-scène of disenchantment’ (Levin 18). In this sense, one sees a divergence between Gasch’s theorized project of artistic and spatial renewal through coordination/rhythm and Kracauer’s criticism of such displays. It should also be stated clearly that while Gasch’s articles on the music hall and the later one on jazz music lay groundwork for further theorizing, it is a promise that is not realized. In the last part of ‘Les girls’ Gasch explores this ‘plastic art – expression’ binary by using the cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as matrices; it is a foray into film that seems odd initially but that presages the ideas Gasch will bring together in the ‘Jazz’ article that he publishes in Madrid during the same month. His application of these syncretic ideas to the chorus line does work, thus revealing once more Gasch’s belief in a fluidity of aesthetic categories and genres and his

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faith in interdisciplinarity as a critical journalistic tool. Consider, for instance, that Gasch equates the anonymous chorus girls with the eminently recognizable film star Keaton, whom he describes positively in no uncertain terms as: ‘fred, impassible, desinfectat i esterilitzat […] creador excels d’una poesia plàstica que viu únicament per les qualitats sumputuosament fotogèniques dels seus elements. […]. Plasticitat absoluta, pura, crua, neta. Deshumanitzada’ (5) (cold, impassable, disinfected and sterilized […] sublime creator of plastic poetry that lives solely for the sumptuously photogenic qualities of its elements […]. Absolute plasticity, pure, raw, clean. Dehumanized). Chaplin, on the other hand, belongs to the opposing camp as ‘el titella treballat per totes les metzines sentimentals’ (5) (the puppet worked by all the sentimental poisons). When considered through such juxtaposition, the girls offer a truly abstract and dehumanized art that projects the paradigm of the collective over the individual. The chorus line is animated human rhythm that paradoxically becomes dehumanized through its mechanical attributes. The human machine – the body in performance – nevertheless succeeds in replicating the desired rhythmic necessities of the spectator’s eye: geometry, cleanliness, and purity of form. The girls both respond to and help create the type of rhythmic space that Gasch champions while avoiding – one assumes – the same type of emptying out of meaning that Kracauer perceives in similar mass spectacle. ‘Les revistes,’ ‘Els “sketches,”’ and ‘Les girls’ reflect the evolving artistic considerations of Gasch and especially his predilection for interdisciplinarity. Taken together, Gasch’s three articles on the variety show should be considered as treatises on the form, performance, and spaces that relate to the new Jazz Age spectacle as it was manifest in accordance with modern aesthetic concerns. The unifying concept of rhythm is present at every step and while his interest in it can be traced back to his early writings on modern art, it is at the height of the Jazz Age in Barcelona during the late 1920s and early 1930s that the idea emerges as a fundamental principle that ties aesthetics to praxis, interior spaces of reception, and the urban context at large. In mid-1930, Gasch would finally assemble his varied ideas on rhythm and the Age and bring them together in an essay simply entitled ‘Jazz.’ ‘Jazz’ Gasch’s article ‘Jazz’ appeared on 15 November 1930 in La Gaceta Literaria. Critics have largely overlooked this substantial essay, which is

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unfortunate, as it is an important and revealing condensation of many of the theories and critical notions that he had espoused in various places during the late 1920s and marks their first translation into Castilian. ‘Jazz’ is true to Gasch’s foundational critical perspective in that it relates initially to his familiar subject of painting. Importantly, though, the piece also encompasses the fields of cinema and music, especially in the latter’s live exhibition. Like the recorded American jazz band in the 1926 ‘Salvador Dalí’ essay, the live jazz show serves as a template for Gasch’s critical gaze on the Age – here, fusing three different forms of art under the standard of the physiological and the rhythmic. He presents jazz as a significant force, one whose qualities permit critical explorations above and beyond the immediate experience of the music itself. The timing of the appearance of such a consolidation in print of Gasch’s ideas is notable given that the article came out during a time of transition both for the critic and the Spanish state. Not only was Gasch embracing ‘popular’ spaces of entertainment, on a larger scale, ‘Jazz’ coincides as well with Barcelona’s partial disengagement from the apparatuses that had comprised the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera’s government and with the aforementioned ascension of the revue as an important Jazz Age spectacle in the music hall. Gasch’s jump from arts criticism to popular culture did not occur overnight. Likewise, as I have endeavoured to show in my analysis of Gasch’s earlier works and those produced during the year leading up to the publication of ‘Jazz,’ one can see how the critic’s active exploration of the nature of painting and the mechanics of reception foreshadowed this critical drift. His changing gaze is especially noteworthy in one particular essay from May 1929 in which he comments on the perspectives of the painters that he despised. In that piece, entitled ‘Pintura neta i pintura bruta’ (Clean Painting and Dirty Painting), Gasch divides contemporary artists (especially the Catalan ones) into two rather facile and juvenile camps: the ‘clean’ and the ‘dirty.’ Not surprisingly, the first category refers to artists that Gasch admired and promoted; the second, to the so-called obscure painters (7). ‘Obscure’ has a double meaning in that the painters are neither relevant to the current trends as identified by the critic – and reinforced by his reference to an important foreign collector’s predilections, a gesture that illuminates briefly the role of the market in production matters – nor do they possess anything approaching the international cachet of a Miró, Picasso, or Gris. These ‘dirty’ painters are obscure on both the ‘national’ and ‘international’ stages.

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That Gasch subsequently describes the obscure painters’ spirits as ‘obtuse’ and their retinas as ‘opaque’ in this article is interesting not simply on account of the critic’s indulgence in geometric vocabulary characteristic of a literary avant-garde that harboured vestiges of cubism. Rather, Gasch touches on the core of the so-called visual arts: the gaze, the gaze of the artist – and now, that of the critic – and the problematic relation of a work to its context, its ‘movement,’ its space. This gaze is both physiologically and spatially conditioned. In the first instance, Gasch believes that although the eye was not the exclusive organ of perception, it facilitated the physiological rhythmic effects of performed music and of cinema, as well. He regards it as key to the apprehension of new arts that respond violently to those that have fallen into decadence. Gasch’s invocation of retinas and the gaze thus help establish a link to his consideration of the many varied elements and spaces of the Jazz Age in his particular site of reception, Barcelona. Gasch elaborates on his ideas regarding the gaze, performance, and space in ‘Jazz,’ and his first order of business is to return to his notion of how the appearance of rhythm in art is linked to the functioning of the human vision machine: the eye. Once more he refers to Ozenfant, who asserted that ‘La composition doit nous faire stopper’ (qtd in Gasch ‘Jazz’ 9) (Composition should stop us in our tracks). What the French painter and, in turn, Gasch seem to be alluding to is that the plastic arrangement and application of paint in a picture must possess what Paul Virilio identified much later as a phatic value, one that creates ‘a targeted image that forces you to look and holds your attention’ (Virilio 14). Through his affirmation of the physical effects of art, a recognition of the dynamic three-dimensional quality of painting as a medium, Gasch assumes a space of reception in which emotional and physiological factors work on the interchange between subject and a dynamic object. As a result of this shared space, the empirical necessities of the viewer become primary. Satisfy the physical and sensorial needs, he urges, and then, importantly, disable and immobilize them.14 When he insists on an immobilization of the senses, Gasch seems to demand that the work of art or performance exist in a temporary stasis, insulated from time itself and impervious to distraction within its space.15 He reinforces this concept by commenting on composition in painting and, for the first time in the article, evokes rhythm. Gasch builds on the base he began in his Dalí piece some four years earlier by explaining now how the rhythm in composition satisfies one’s eyes by literally guiding vision within the space of reception. Even though in ‘Jazz’ the critic expresses his theories

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first in an abstract manner, he founds the ideas behind them in his appreciation of more mundane spaces of performance. Jazz music enters the discussion, somewhat obliquely at first, via Gasch’s treatment of cinema, in which he recognizes an analogy between cinematic rhythm (‘rhythm in time’) and musical rhythm. Here, the Catalan critic makes recourse to Dulac and Vuillermoz, who describe film, respectively, as both a ‘visual symphony of rhythmic images’ and a medium that ‘is written and orchestrated like a symphony’ (qtd in Gasch ‘Jazz’ 9).16 In Gasch’s mind, rhythm is keyed at both a visual and spatial level through geometric, ‘pure’ composition in painting, and in an ordered succession of cinematic images that evokes parallels to music yet still abides by its own standards regarding the transmission of meaning. He continues along these lines by observing that just as cinematic rhythm (and the rhythm of composition in painting) is necessary for the viewer’s eyes, musical rhythm is essential for one’s ear. As in the Dalí piece, Gasch describes rhythm as the primary element of music. This time, however, the critic elaborates its effects more thoroughly. Music, with its own rhythm, creates ‘a state of absolute passivity’ similar to the ordered images of the optical field dominated by visual rhythm (9). The effect is not limited to the primary organs of reception (eyes, ears) but, rather, exerts a power over one’s complete physiognomy, immobilizing one’s faculties. According to Gasch, musical rhythm occupies one’s being. This take-over of the physical body is predicated on a sense of pervasiveness in the space of reception that threatens the integrity of sensorial borders – something that suggests further a suppression of defences and the creation of what may be thought of as an auditory equivalent to the phatic image. One may speculate that even the blasé attitude of the urbanite, who is constantly assaulted by the sounds and sensations of the metropolis, is put under pressure and that the organized rhythm of jazz thus gives meaning to experience that is normally meaningless. This state of ‘occupation’ by the music would seem to defeat the facet of the blasé attitude that comprises ‘an indifference toward the distinctions between things’ through a forceful focusing on the spectacle itself (Simmel 35).17 Gasch sets his sights next on the decadent state of music in general – just as he had done regarding painting when he had criticized impressionism for dissolving form in light on the canvas. In his opinion, music had been progressively forgetting its own essence in rhythm. However, like cubism riding to the rescue of the plastic arts so as to train them and forge a new, more aesthetically pleasing form, musical delivery

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was at hand and there was hope: jazz was reinvigorating music through a return to rhythm. Gasch classifies jazz not as a reaction per se but more as a weapon for the avant-garde to use in order to combat the impressionist-like qualities that seemed to have penetrated music and painting alike. In an article like ‘Jazz’ it is not hard to see how Gasch’s critical lexicon grows through his cross-pollination of terms and ideas founded in both response/renewal and their manifestation in distinct media. Consequently, the reader comes to understand that jazz, as catalyst and link between disciplines, takes on great importance in Gasch’s conception of art and rhythm, which are no longer confined to the music and its performance. On account of its ability to jump across artistic boundaries and become implicated in the spatial and physical dynamics of the reception of the aesthetic object, it represents something larger: the encompassing power of a style and spirit of an Age, the power of the city that is its staging ground, and an energy patent not only in the art galleries and salons but, increasingly, in the sites of popular culture and everyday activities. The important progression in Gasch’s spatial engagement with jazz rhythm is manifest in the critic’s specific mention of a live jazz performance. Earlier in his career, when he raised the possibility that an appreciation of jazz could inform a critical appraisal of art, it was a recording that had inspired his thinking. Now, a live show by jazzman Jack Hylton and his ‘Boys’ becomes his referent. This is an important shift; it combines the receptive gaze with the entire body in the aesthetic and kinetic experience of jazz. Accordingly, Gasch uses the physical reception of live jazz to supply anecdotal proof of his theorizing. He quotes renowned music hall critic Maurice Verne to support his point: La acrobacia cadenciosa de los muchachos de Jack Hylton arrastra una sala hacia el estado patológico […]. Un trémolo de máquina asciende, que denuncia los pies escondidos de los espectadores, golpeando histéricamente, sin saberlo quizá, el tapiz del music hall … El ritmo, el ritmo … (9). The cadenced acrobatics of Jack Hylton’s boys whip a hall into a pathological state […]. A machine-like tremolo builds, which denounces the hidden feet of the spectators, beating hysterically, without realizing it perhaps, on the carpet of the music hall … Rhythm, rhythm …

Gasch is now able to meld his ideas of physical effect and rhythmic affect in his conception of jazz as a practice that embodies so many of his

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own established beliefs about art. As is his custom in his journalistic pieces, the conclusion to ‘Jazz’ contains a concise summary of the points that he hoped to convey, and in this case, the essay’s form approximates a rhythmic cadence. He states: ‘el Hylton’s jazz no se dirige únicamente al oído, no es únicamente al oído, no es únicamente un arte del tiempo, sino que se dirige también a los ojos, es también un arte del espacio. Un arte rítmico y plástico al mismo tiempo. Este jazz es un verdadero espectáculo (9) (Hylton’s jazz is not directed solely at one’s ear, not solely at one’s ear, it is not only an art of time, it is also directed at the eyes, it is also an art of space. At once, both a rhythmic and plastic art. This jazz is a true spectacle). Consequently, the extension of jazz becomes clearer; it is an aesthetic embodiment of an encompassing form of rhythm that directly establishes its importance in considerations not only of time but also of the space of the spectacle: ‘Atracción de los ojos […] [jazz] se dirige también a los ojos, es también un arte de espacio’ (9) (Attraction of the eyes […] [jazz] directs itself also at the eyes, it is also an art of space). Jazz feeds off and creates a state of energized violència, which emerges from the music and its performance, as well as from the urban built environment in which it takes place and affects the viewer. Conclusion Gasch’s articles about art and popular spectacle raise inevitable questions regarding the critic’s position vis-à-vis the growing alienation that many theorists saw occurring as the aesthetics of what became known as the ‘culture industry’ took hold. In the case of Theodor Adorno, this phenomenon was seen to be manifest as much in commodity fetishism as in the ‘disempowering machinery of the rational-technical monolith of modern capitalism that dominated every waking and sleeping moment’ (Witkin 2). That Gasch did not expand his theories beyond a journalistic concern for the moment of reception, or the limited era in which aesthetics were developing, ought not to be held against him. He was not a Catalan Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, or Teodor Adorno. Nevertheless, his influence in Catalonia and Spain should not be underestimated or dismissed. Gasch simultaneously developed and condensed his theories in journalistic texts published for the most part in Barcelona but with important forays into the cultural scene in Madrid, and although he was not the only critic to work in both spheres, given his stature and position as a prime receptor of foreign trends, his was a singular case. While Gasch did have close contacts in Paris and

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was well known in the Barcelona art scene, his critical gaze migrated to local bars, taverns, and music halls. This movement was a reflection not only of his critical breadth but also of how the Jazz Age spectacles themselves entered the mainstream. That Gasch found a strong component dedicated to rhythmic expression and the body in the Jazz Age aesthetic should not surprise us, given that his shift to spaces of popular entertainment put him in direct contact with performances of the time that highlighted these aspects. That he should see it so strongly manifested in the Barcelona of the 1920s and 1930s is a testament to his engagement, on the one hand, with the artists of his age and, on the other, with his own metropolitan surroundings. If, then, as Minguet i Batllori postulates, Gasch presaged a synthesis between high culture and popular culture (Minguet i Batllori ‘Al marge’ 22), it came about in large part because of his dedication to spaces of spectacle and his attention to rhythm. Rhythm, an often-quoted concept during the time, was an idea that fitted well with considerations of the modern metropolis, where the pace of life was increasing and crowded public events embodied and captured the perceived energy of the period. Sebastià Gasch’s detailed interdisciplinary rendering of rhythm’s precepts and its manifestation in the spaces of the Catalan capital are an important component of the reception of international styles in Barcelona. And while his observations and writings only skirted the political engagement that came to be a principal feature of the journalistic response to the Jazz Age and dictatorship in Catalonia, Mirador, one of Gasch’s prime venues, and the subject of chapter 4, would be much more active in connecting the Age’s urban experience to the political renaissance of Catalanism.

4 Vantage Point: Barcelona’s Mirador (1929–31)

The cultural practices that accompanied the jazz style to Barcelona and that would subsequently inform the growing appreciation of technology, sports, and mass spectacle in the city’s experience of the feliços vint became more and more prevalent as the 1920s came to a close. Their popularization and eventual gentrification effectuated a profound impact on the life of Barcelona. Played out in clubs throughout the emerging metropolis and eventually expanding to inflect how citizens saw their city, the Jazz Age lifestyle was concentrated, nevertheless, primarily in the areas of the entertainment industry: the Paral.lel, Raval, and, to a certain extent, the bourgeois Eixample. Recognition and engagement of this new reality was spotty at first, as spaces associated with the live jazz spectacle and the city’s emerging cocktail culture were treated only occasionally in mainstream newspapers; they were more frequent subjects of satirical journals or, as I detailed in chapter 2, an eclectic paper such as El Escándalo. With the arrival of the literary and cultural weekly Mirador, however, these spaces and activities found a much more dedicated, ample, and integrated expression. The journal’s reception of the Jazz Age in Barcelona merged this international style’s base aesthetic and behavioural codes (Art Deco inspired aesthetics, an emphasis on frivolity, the burgeoning cinema scene, etc.) with the specific reality of the Catalan capital during the last throes of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and beyond. Crucial to my reading of how this period and its mediation in Barcelona were unique is the way in which the politically active editors of Mirador combined Catalanism with both a deep concern for the built environment and an appreciation for the vagaries of cocktail culture. What is more, whereas four years earlier El Escándalo’s editors had worked under a dictatorship at its height, those

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in charge of Mirador were able to ride out Primo de Rivera and thus could see a transformative potential in their contributions to the visioning of a Catalan Republic that would never truly be realized. For these reasons, the paper must be considered a key player in the expression and textual manifestation of a Jazz Age Barcelona that was seeing its nationalistic intellectuals becoming more and more politically capacitated and motivated. Specifically dedicated to ‘literature, art, and politics’ (fig. 4.1), Mirador appeared weekly between 1929 and 1937. The changing cosmopolitan nature of Barcelona deeply penetrated the urban imaginary that the paper strove to project and influence. As regards Mirador’s treatment of the international Jazz Age style, it refers constantly to the urban specificity of the Catalan capital. As a result, the mediation of what was an international trend is anchored to the city, not only in as much as journalism is an urban form and practice, but also in that the metropolis and its events manifest within the parameters of the politically charged frame of the editors – a frame informed by the global, yet ultimately determined by the local. The localized expression of Catalan culture was not new. As Resina has pointed out, in the absence of ‘official’ cultural forums, earlier modernista journals (such as L’Avenç) took on the ostensibly public role of modernizing culture in the decades surrounding the turn of the century (Resina ‘Modernist’ 388). However, if cultural modernity in Catalonia entailed a growing sense of nationhood and of difference in relation to the Spanish state, then the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in the 1920s re-imposed what could be seen as a pre-modern cultural condition. Or, at the very least, by stifling the creation of links between the arts and statecraft, the seven years of dictatorship placed a modernizing Catalan culture in stasis.1 In the case of Mirador, what is unique is not so much that it takes an intense interest in the local. Rather, it is the sheer multiplicity of the journal’s role in the public sphere that stands out, functioning as it did as a mediator of political desire, popular entertainment, and, most of all, of the past, present, and future urban experience of the city. Mirador first hit the streets on 31 January 1929. Its appearance marked a new phase in a political process that had begun years before and that forcefully advocated the strengthening of the expression of Catalan culture and the furthering of the political cause of Catalanism. The journal’s founder, Amadeu Hurtado, was a strong supporter of these aims, and had long been involved in both print media and the fight for

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Figure 4.1 Mirador masthead. Mirador 1, p. 1. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

increased Catalan sovereignty. In 1916, he was instrumental in the acquisition of the Barcelona daily La Publicidad, only to leave shortly thereafter on ideological grounds. In 1922, after having become an early supporter of Acció Catalana, Hurtado helped ‘regain’ the newspaper for the movement and it was subsequently catalanized, becoming La Publicitat. Acció Catalana founder Antoni Rovira i Virgili, for one, would subsequently laud their efforts: ‘Una colla d’amics havem guanyat aquest diari per Catalunya’ (15) (We, a group of friends, have won this paper for Catalonia). Hurtado was astute enough to recognize the growing importance of print media and mass culture during the 1920s and realized that a ‘house organ,’ such as a daily or a weekly, provided political movements with an excellent way of getting the message out (Huertas and Geli 14). For the bulk of the 1920s in Spain, however, the dictatorship imposed a censorship of the press that severely curtailed – if not completely suppressed – political dissent. As a result, Hurtado and his colleagues were effectively silenced within Catalonia for a good part of the decade.2 Eventually, Hurtado established Mirador as the 1920s were coming to a close and as cracks in Primo de Rivera’s hold on power were deepening. Basing his new journal on what he considered the French and English model of combining culture and politics, Hurtado gave the chief positions of director and editor-in-chief to two prior La Publicitat editors who shared his politics and cultural vision: Manuel Brunet and Just Cabot (Huertas and Geli 26, 10). Consequently, Mirador strove from the outset to become a decidedly ‘European’ journal with a definite Catalanist bent even as it initially struggled with state censorship. This emulation of foreign models at a journalistic level paralleled that which was happening at the level of social codes and spatial practice in the city at large.

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Mirador arranged itself and, hence, the experience of the city and its spaces in a highly structured manner. Made up of eight pages, the journal presented sections that were clearly delineated and that rarely varied from what became a stable, ordered pattern. The first page was dedicated to politics: national, international, or local. A photograph would almost always accompany the lead story. Also part of the first page was a stylized editorial cartoon by Bon, Castanys, or, later, Apa, and the often scandalous and gossipy ‘Mirador indiscret’ feature. Inside, the second page ran longer ‘interest’ stories that dealt regularly with aspects of the modern city; this page was anchored on the right margin by Josep Maria de Sagarra’s popular column ‘Aperitiu’ (Aperitif). Page 3 was a forum for more political commentary and the ‘Mirant fora’ (Looking Out) section, where goings-on in other countries were detailed. Literary matters found their space on the fourth page. Criticism and short stories were both early staples of this section, as were various announcements related to the artistic community. Page 5 was dedicated to music and theatre and was the usual haunt of Sebastià Gasch. It dealt with everything from opera to bawdy music hall, from international ballet to the increasingly popular Barcelona flamenco scene. Articles dedicated to cinema were initially found on page 6 (they later moved to 4) and generally included both movie reviews and pieces dealing with the burgeoning field of cinematic theory. Under the banner ‘Les arts i els artistes’ (The Arts and the Artists), page 7 covered everything from painting to urbanism. The last page was primarily used by advertisers and is notable for the conclusions that may be drawn regarding Mirador’s target audience, namely that the readers were very cultured and possessing of a certain amount of disposable income (Huertas and Geli 56). As is evident in the lay-out that I have just described, the journal devoted considerable amounts of time, energy, and column space to the arts and urbanism. And while the (post-Primo) local government tried to promote culture in Catalan society through civic events such as the Diada del Llibre and the Fira del Dibuix, Mirador saw the need to assume a proactive role from the very beginning of its run. Whether it was advancing the arts by allotting them textual space or by organizing a cinema club or various contests, Mirador’s editors saw themselves as diligent participants in the culture wars both in the dictatorship’s last year and then before and during the Republic.3 This engagement in the cultural life of Barcelona and Catalonia as a whole is the journal’s most significant aspect. The way in which it considers this political facet of artistic production grounds the often extravagant and international themes of the Jazz Age style in the real and potential spaces of the built environment.

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The Leisure City Mirador’s excursions into politics were connected intimately to its awareness of the city both as a dynamic, constantly changing site of spectacle and novelty and as an architectonic space of future possibilities. But while the Barcelona International Exposition (which I study in detail below) was a key event in this regard and a significant part of Mirador’s coverage of the city during the crucial period of 1929 and 1930, it was not the be-all and end-all. The rest of Barcelona would receive ample attention also – especially the areas in which the bar- and theatre-oriented nocturnal activities associated with the Jazz Age took place. New forms of social life were part and parcel of the modern city, and in their book, Huertas and Geli identify a direct link between an increased standard of living and the popularity of associations such as casinos, ateneus, excursion centres, and sports clubs (13). What they point to without explicitly naming is the increase in leisure time experienced throughout Western Europe following the Great War. This time, which had always been available to the rich and contributed to their enjoyment of Barcelona’s First World War boom, becomes more and more attainable and popularized during the 1920s with the advent of the ‘mass’ white- and blue-collar workers.4 To the associations that benefited from the leisure time enjoyed by this new stratum of society, one can add the mass spectacles of sporting events and cinematic or musical productions as well as the cocktail culture that grew concomitantly. As Vila-San-Juan observes astutely, many jobs were created directly in response to the particular aesthetic needs of the time; consider for example the many new posts for musicians, dancing girls, and barmen that the Jazz Age City required to fuel itself (Vila-San-Juan 88). Not surprisingly, the increasing popularity of Jazz Age spectacles results in an expansion in critical reception of the shows. Various articles in Mirador from 1929 bear this out. Early in the journal’s run, for example, Josep Maria Planes wrote often on jazz and its relation to the city. On one occasion, he broaches the theme of spectacular authenticity in this new music and lauds Levi Wine and his Black Orchestra for playing the Principal Palace with ‘pure rhythm’ while eschewing the melodious jazz of ‘Show Boat’ that was ‘heard everywhere these days’ (Planes ‘Levi Wine’ 5). Some months later the critic comments on the American style of a jazz-inspired performance like ‘Tip-Toes,’ in which jazz is equated with agility (Planes ‘El jazz’ 5). In that same piece he states explicitly that jazz and the artists who play it create a youthful,

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sportive, and healthy impression (5). Articles like those by Planes and others (in specialized journals such as Mirador, but also increasingly in dailies) show how textual space came to be dedicated to interpreting spectacles and sites intrinsic to the zeitgeist. As I laid out earlier, I see the textual space of journalism as another manifestation of the Jazz Age, one that helps link it to both local spaces and imaginaries through the mediation of what was once solely international. Just as the phonograph captured the live jazz performance and propagated it, literary and culture critics apprehend various moments of the spectacles in particular spaces and retransmit them, thus placing them in a continuum that functions not only at the level of the physical newspaper itself, but also at that of social and cultural discourse. In that vein, Mirador 76 contains an interesting article entitled ‘El jazz que sentim poc’ (‘The Jazz We Rarely Hear’). A translation from the French La Revue Musicale, it provides insight into the larger reception of jazz in Europe. The unnamed author complains about the increasing orchestration of jazz and that the European public is being provided with only a ‘denaturalized’ variety (‘El jazz’ 7). This ‘betrayal’ of jazz as art is, according to the critic, a result of mass consumption by listeners not capable of savouring ‘l’art més refinat i més salvatge a la vegada del jazz d’improvisació, del jazz “hot”’ (7) (the more refined and at the same time savage art of improvised jazz, of ‘hot’ jazz). An article such as this one speaks directly to the phenomenon of gentrification to which the textual manifestation of the Jazz Age city contributes in a significant way. As one of the interfaces of the aesthetic and its spaces of performance, journalistic text facilitates adoption and adaptation by participating in a new mapping of the urban environment. Importantly, in the case of Barcelona and Mirador, this mapping also contains a political element that inflects an overall reading of the age and the city in which it is played out. This duality is what makes the manifestation of the Jazz Age in Barcelona especially compelling. City Bars When one considers the urban spaces and spectacles of the Roaring Twenties, the nocturnal city – both marginal and more mainstream – comes to the fore. By the early 1930s, Mirador had published various accounts of the increasingly vibrant atmosphere of the city at night. Often, the stories were quite visual in that they incorporated photos and drawings in addition to evocative text. Sebastià Gasch, for one, turned

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the so-called bad taste of the marginal into fodder for the development of his own critical approach to modern art. Gasch’s interest in the city’s peripheral zones greatly informs his appreciation of the spectacles of the Jazz Age, and even though his pieces for Mirador deal mainly with shows and performances, he also provides occasional accounts of outings into the heart of nocturnal Barcelona. The red-light areas and marginalized city districts, such as the Barceloneta, a working-class fishing neighbourhood, were of great importance to him critically in that they provided a contrast to the spent energies of the upper-class art scene. Early on in Mirador’s run, Gasch writes to this effect, describing how he and painter Joan Miró found the crudeness of a tavern to be particularly invigorating. As I point out in the previous chapter, this switch from salon to tavern by such a leading critic is an important step in the mapping of the city and should not be underestimated. In the citation that follows, note especially how the commentator valorizes the local kitsch over the Art Deco movement that influenced him earlier in his career: Joan Miró i jo, en un bar, una taverna, durant les nostres frequents ‘randonnées’ pel districte cinquè, ens emocionen més profundament que la gràcia alada de molts fresquistes italianitzants. L’estil anomenat ‘loge de concierge’, d’un mal gust definitiu, fa vibrar més intensament les nostres cordes sensibles, que tots els interiors Arts Decoratives 1925 que ens pugui oferir qualsevol moblista a la moda. (Gasch ‘L’elogi del mal gust’ 171) Joan Miro and I, during our frequent randonnées in the Fifth District, would get more profoundly excited about a bar, a tavern, than about the winged grace of the most Italianate frescoes. The style known as ‘concierge house,’ done in a most unmistakably bad taste, makes our nervous systems vibrate more intensely than all the Arts Decoratives 1925 interiors that any designer could offer us.

The tavern or bar was an important space for cultural observers and critics, but an appreciation of it was not limited to the energetic present. Earlier in 1929, Jaume Passarell, another frequent writer in Mirador, made a different yet fascinating contribution to the paper’s affirmation of the city’s metropolitan nature by looking at the subcultural aspects of the urban past as it was embedded in Barcelona’s bars. In his article, Passarell focuses on the history of the Bar del Centro, which he considers a ‘democratic’ bar even if it was little more than a damp basement that ‘wasn’t good for anything’ (Passarell 2). An old haunt of the last

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bohemians in Barcelona, the Bar del Centro was the first cabaret to feature tango and was also where cocaine initially became popular in the city.5 Especially interesting about the piece is the manner in which Passarell superimposes the now non-existent bar and its history onto contemporary urban geography. Through this strategy, the spaces of the past rough-and-tumble cosmopolitan city of the First World War boom time continue to resonate in the literary and popular memory of the present, their legacy acting as a historical – and potentially political – rationale for the continuation of the current spatial practice of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In many ways, the Bar del Centro stands as a monument that, although no longer there, passes into urban mythology through its subterranean/subaltern profile and continues to be cited and invoked as a touchstone for a burgeoning metropolis coming to terms with a new phase in its cosmopolitanism. For his part, when Planes enthuses about the Bar Americà in the Hotel Colón (fig. 4.2), it is not the urban past but the cocktail culture of the present Age to which he refers first and foremost: ‘Beguda inevitable: el cocktail. Conversa de cocktail. Moralitat de cocktail’ (Planes ‘El Bar’ 2) (Inevitable drink: the cocktail. Cocktail conversation. Cocktail morality). To him, a mouthful of cocktail taken in that international hotel space is tremendously evocative of the vibrant ‘now.’ The cosmopolitan nature of the cocktail hour in the centre of the city further comes out in the eclectic materialism of the bar, among the displayed objects of which figure English lighters, Swiss Pernod, Dutch gin, American tobacco, and Italian vermouth.6 Planes was prolific particularly when it came to documenting the nocturnal scenes of Barcelona and he had an affinity for the bars and night spots that featured live jazz bands. In one of his most memorable articles, he describes the café scene at a popular locale: ‘La nit d’un dissabte constitueix sempre al Café Català un espectacle que val la pena no deixar-se perdre. […] Tothom balla amb molta violència’ (Planes ‘Gran Café’ 2) (Saturday night is always a not-to-be-missed spectacle at the Café Català […] Everybody dances with a lot of violence). Here, ‘Saturday night’ functions metonymically for the whole jazz scene as Planes’s depiction of the dancing as ‘violent’ invokes as well questions of the popular perception of jazz music and consideration of the energies of the metropolis in general.7 Crucial, also, are the critic’s additional highlighting of the international flavour of the space and the city and his juxtaposition of language, laughter, and jazz music. For instance, he observes that

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Figure 4.2 Bar Americá, Hotel Colón by Junyent. Mirador 106, p. 2. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona. el Cafè Català, sobre un fons inconfusible de localisme, accepta i absorbeix tots els aires internacionals; […]. Tothom crida alhora: en català, en alemany, en andalús, en holandés … Les noies fan unes grans rialles que, com un ganivet ben esmolat, esqueixen per un instant la cortina melòdica del metall del jazz. (2) on an unmistakable base of localism, the Café Català accepts and absorbs all of the international airs; […] Everyone yells at once: in Catalan, in German, in Andalusian, in Dutch … The girls let out great laughs that, like a well-sharpened knife, momentarily rip the melodic curtain of the jazz’s brass section.

Planes’s depiction is, once again, of a truly cosmopolitan scene, one in which local space, like that of the more artificial Exposition site on Montjuic Mountain, is internationalized, yet not effaced. In this case, the jazz acts as both background to and catalyst for the Babel/babble of  the cabaret and introduces the same international element to the

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moment as was evident in Francesc Madrid’s reading of the Fifth District in general from 1926. Josep Maria Planes was also the one to document the actual moment of change between the ‘feliços vint’ and what would be known in American terms, at least, as the Dirty Thirties (fig. 4.3). As Mirador’s chosen chronicler for the New Year’s celebrations of 1930, he became the journal’s voice for what had traditionally been the noctambulist’s night of nights. His article, published two days later, provides a vivid résumé of the various activities that evening and, among other things, offers readers another evocative glimpse into a cabaret at the high water mark of the Jazz Age: ‘Escena de cabaret. Smokings, senyores en gran soirée, xampany, ostres, jazz, xibarri, atmosfera carregada’ (Planes ‘Les nits’ 2) (Cabaret scene. Tuxedos, ladies in grande soirée, champagne, oysters, jazz, bustle, charged atmosphere). On this occasion, Planes’s staccato style replicates the frenetic atmosphere of the last night of the 1920s – the final night of the year of the ‘international’ Exposition, and what was, perhaps, the last big party before the economic repercussions of October’s financial crash rippled across Europe.8 Boxing: Sport and Subject of the Age The critical reception of urban spectacles, nightlife, and diversion in the 1920s goes hand and hand with the rise of professional sport. While Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht points out that the quintessential Jazz Age spectacle of boxing introduces a new style of discourse in journalism (Gumbrecht 46), the sport’s treatment in Mirador is very much in keeping with that of other spectacles of the late 1920s and early 1930s. That is to say, with the journal having come into being after boxing had already established itself as a major international sport, the approach to it is often one of critical detachment. A good example of this slightly removed attitude may be found in Vicens Bernades’s provocatively titled article ‘L’esport que mata’ (‘The Sport That Kills’) from April 1929. Bernades wrote his piece in the wake of the death of a French fighter at Barcelona’s Olympia. The author, a sportswriter and militant for Acció Catalana, criticizes both the sport’s brutality and the ‘braintrust’ that controls boxing in the city (3). Accusing the organization of sanctioning unfair fights and of exploiting the boxers, he points his finger at managers, gym teachers, and journalists alike for their complicity in what he calls ‘el negoci de carn jove’ (Bernades 3) (the business of young meat). His critique of the allure of fame and fortune that the

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Figure 4.3 ‘New Year’s Eve nights’ by Bon. Mirador 49, p. 2. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

sport holds for young people is insightful and fully cognizant of the victory of spectacular image over the grim reality of the pugilist’s life. In this way, the article, and by extension Mirador, stand apart from the customary reception of the sport. Another early piece about boxing, this time by Antoni Vilà i Bisa, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Crítias,’ continues the discussion along these same lines as he considers the sport’s nature as surface spectacle. Vilà i Bisa asserts that while boxing is much more dramatic than it was some fifteen years before, the sport has degenerated as a result of a change in the perception of what the spectators desire. The blame for this shift, which was based on the belief that violence (especially knockouts) was what the public really wanted, is laid once more on the promoters. In Vilà i Bisa’s opinion, these unscrupulous businessmen undermined the integrity of the sport by continually pitting experienced boxers against rookies so as to maximize the violence of the matches. However, the critic’s strident posture is weakened somewhat by his contention that the public, which continued to flock to bouts regardless of the mismatches, did not really desire this sort of violent show. The audience tolerates it, he maintains, simply because they do not know any better (Crítias (Antoni Vilà i Bisa) 3). Vilà i Bisa’s recognition that a match can be a beautiful spectacle when contested between two fighters of equal talent is romantic; his attitude towards the public, though, betrays a naïveté regarding the growing sensationalism inherent in the massification of popular culture and sport, a phenomenon that Mirador both observed and helped perpetuate through its coverage.

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Manuel Brunet’s article ‘L’espectacle i la filosofia d’un gran match de boxa’ (The Spectacle and Philosophy of a Prize Fight) from December of 1930 is exemplary in its treatment of boxing as just this sort of mass entertainment: a decidedly urban spectacle with cosmopolitan repercussions. Brunet wastes no time in making his point, as evidenced in his opening lines: Els grans espectacles esportius han fet néixer en els barcelonins el gust per les grans concentracions de gent. Gairebé m’atreviria a dir que l’excitant principal no és el programa ofert, sinó l’aglomeració de gent. Diríeu que l’espectacle és un pretext, el mirall on la ciutat vol contemplar-se enorgullida, com si es tractés d’una manifestació de força. (Brunet ‘L’espectacle’ 2) Large sporting spectacles have given birth to the Barcelona dwellers’ liking of large concentrations of people. I would almost hazard to say that the principal excitement is not the program that is offered, but rather, the agglomeration of people. You could say that the spectacle is a pretext, a mirror in which the city wants to contemplate itself, proud of itself, as if it were all about a show of force.

Rather than offering a detailed description of the actual match or entering into a polemic regarding the fairness of boxing, Brunet’s piece revolves around this central, civic aspect of mass sport: the power of the spectacle to draw urbanites to it and the subsequent attraction of the crowd as crowd. The end result of this approach is highly characteristic of his writings. That is, the experience of the city comes to the fore. More specifically, Brunet offers a cosmopolitan reading of the space of the spectacle in which one sees how a degree of Catalan specificity is maintained within the international whirlwind in which the match operates. In Brunet’s account, Montjuïc stadium becomes the nexus of the city on the day of the fight, the space where the rush of the metropolis concentrates during the match. Taking into account the perspective of the individual, Brunet enumerates the two elements that most impress the urbanite in this space: the agglomeration of people and the high volume of automobile traffic (2). However, it is not simply the creation of a human and mechanical mass that fascinates, but also the fact that, within the assembly, recognition is possible. He observes: ‘Després de  contemplar la ciutat, els ciutadans convertits en multitud van poderse contemplar mútuament dintre l’Estadi’ (2) (After contemplating the city, the citizens, converted into a multitude, were able to mutually

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contemplate themselves inside the Stadium). This point raises interesting theoretical questions regarding the nature of the mass/crowd and whether the collective thus assembled still allows for individuation. It would appear from Brunet’s description that it does. Just why this is so is hinted at through the author’s continued focusing on the nature of the audience. It is important to note that in the case of this international match described by Brunet, the crowd is not limited to those physically in attendance. This is because another integral part of the spectacle on Montjuïc that day is the presence of twenty-two telephones, specifically installed around the ring, for use by foreign and national journalists alike. With these booths occupying the same ground and visual field as the fight, the battle for information distribution becomes as much a part of the show as the physical contest between the boxers.9 The goal of wiring the stadium for radio and newspaper coverage is to reduce the delay in the transmission of the action from a question of days to that of minutes or of seconds. Some of the telephones staffed at ringside connect directly to editors’ offices in far-flung cities; others link the stadium with plazas in Rome, Milan, Naples, Buenos Aires, and Paris, where round-by-round results are posted on blackboards for these foreign audiences. Through its attention to the diffusion of information concerning the bout, Mirador’s article completely shifts the spectacle’s focus; not once in the entire piece does Brunet even mention who was fighting or why. The fact that he does not feel the need to name the combatants supports my claim that the actual match is secondary to his take on the event as much as it implies that Mirador readers surely would have known to which fight he was referring.10 Thus, the boxing match becomes more than a sporting moment; it is an event, an urban occurrence, the international nature and reach of which take precedence over the contest itself. An important component of the cosmopolitanism of this event is the inclusion in the article of commentaries made by two barcelonistas in attendance. The pair gush at the idea that together with the fight, the name of their city is being transmitted all over the world by wire and medium wave. It is interesting to consider what their comments directly imply: namely, the realization that, in the instant of the electronic connection, when the sports world tunes into the Catalan capital, this city, so used to receiving and mediating the international components of the Age’s aesthetic, literally becomes a transmitter. As a result, it is possible to read Brunet’s observations of the boxing event in this light:

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as a moment of affirmation and electronically aided enunciation of the Catalan metropolis to a global audience. This reading also helps explain how, given the conscious specificity of place projected in and from the stadium, the individuals within the physical mass retain their own ability to recognize themselves as an audience within an audience. Coverage such as that given to the bar scene and a typical 1920s sport such as boxing shows how Mirador created coherent lines of journalistic interpretation within what could be occasionally the cacophonous form of a newspaper (although here the fact that it was a weekly was an advantage, as the barrage of information and images was less than would be the case with a daily). The intense interest in Barcelona’s civic and social past combined with the recognition of the surface appeal of internationalizing trends is indicative further of the way in which the journal primed its audience for the types of specialized political commentary on the Catalan capital that it would infuse in its outlook on the Age. This experience of mass culture (and a culture of masses) in Barcelona came to a climax during the International Exhibition of 1929. The fair was a constant referent for Mirador in the first two years of its existence. In the second half of this chapter, I will show how the Expo directly influenced the reception of the Jazz Age spectacle in the city as well as the extent to which the journal used the event as a catalyst both for a reclaiming of Montjuïc mountain and the further reimagining of the built environment of Barcelona as a whole, thus politically capacitating the Jazz Age in the city in the revival of Catalanism. The Exposition World’s Fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were ‘Internationals’ for commodities. Sizeable meetings, they drew together the latest products of ingenuity and labour and exposed them to the public gaze in vast modern pavilions on elaborately conceived precincts. Once the disparate components of a fair were in place, the exposition became a fantasy world of economic possibilities, reification, and visual extravagance. Under a dictum of ‘look but don’t touch,’ the ensuing phantasmagoria would effectively outweigh any real commerce whilst ‘the show’ was in progress (Buck-Morss 85–6). In this manner, the optics of a fair took both symbolic and literal precedence over its economics. Acknowledging the important visual components of the international exposition phenomenon is essential to a reading of fairs as cultural texts indicative of specific – and at times, contradictory – modern projects and

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shifting subjectivities in an increasingly mediated society such as that of early twentieth-century Western Europe. In her book on collective memory and the city, Boyer perceptively expands on the visual possibilities of expositions when she posits them as stage-like spaces where spectators could easily compare ‘one image to another, contrasting the difference between nations and gauging the distance between the past and the present, the so-called developed and the backward’ (Boyer 257). Far from negating the past in favour of a promising future, expositions relied surreptitiously on the temporal tension that Boyer identifies as part of their visual seduction and monumental appeal. For more than one hundred and fifty years, national and municipal governments in Europe and elsewhere risked massive debt in anticipation of attracting nations, vendors, and especially crowds that they hoped would flock to witness the latest in modern achievements, thus solidifying the hosts’ claim on a degree of propriety over the future (Gilbert 20). Gradual advances in transportation infrastructure combined with increases in leisure time and disposable income among the working and middle classes meant that the once exclusively elite activity of tourism could play a major role in the elaboration of these international events. Accordingly, advertising became more and more pervasive: rail stations were adorned with posters, whilst hoardings displayed iconic images of the host cities and promoted the glamour of sightseeing. The press was another important factor in the relationship between an exposition and its spectators. Although the newspaper’s role in the articulation of modern urban life and the elaboration of political processes has been well documented, its importance to the visibility and reception of expositions has been somewhat overlooked and underappreciated. In addition to journals published by the fairs themselves, multiple editions of metropolitan papers could provide relatively instantaneous coverage of special events and hence duplicate the sense of topicality and immediacy that an exposition strove to epitomize. Dailies and weeklies contributed to the cultural mapping of the fairs by including pictures from the sites, reviewing the architecture, suggesting itineraries, and supplying the all-important particulars of where, how much, and for how long. Through the combination of these multiple roles, the press exercised its power as a mediator of the international exposition phenomenon, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. A World’s Fair was an immensely important event in the economic, political, and social life of a modern city. It was an occasion before and

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during which questions of commerce and nationhood as well as collective experience and the nature of the modern spectacle intersected. How these convergences played out in the specific case of Barcelona and the Catalan capital’s International Exposition of 1929 reveals a confluence of optics, politics, and competing national subjectivities in a modernizing country under a dictatorship. The Barcelona Fair was much more than a simple trade show or celebration of the future. It was at once a statement on modernization and the crowning moment of the Roaring Twenties in Barcelona. Any discussion of the urban spaces of the Jazz Age and textual mediation in Barcelona must return to the fact that, when Mirador made its appearance, the city was on the verge of the opening of this massive event that would mark the height of the Age in the Catalan capital. Years in the planning, the Fair touched the entire metropolis, and eventually influenced even the ways in which the city was physically viewed.11 As a result, its timing, execution, and after-effects are important factors to consider when examining how the event was mediated as a collective urban space by Mirador. While the editors of the journal neither favoured Primo’s policies nor subscribed to the ‘official’ word on Barcelona, they nevertheless dedicated ample textual space to the Exposition and to how it contributed to both the built and spectacular environments of the city. In this way, the journal’s textual coverage of the Fair dovetails with consideration of other spaces within the metropolis, revealing in the process the problematic intersection of ‘foreign’ (Castilian) authority, international entertainment, and local urban concerns. As I mention above, Mirador was born during Miguel Primo de Rivera’s last year in power and only a few months before the official opening of the Exposition. It would be misleading, however, to say that the Catalanist Mirador opposed the event on the grounds that the dictator and a centrally minded executive had hijacked a project that had long been in the works. Rather, the paper viewed the Fair as a definite way of drawing attention to the city and revelled in the energy that it created. In this manner, as a space of performance and entertainment, the Exposition site held sway both in the city and the journal’s pages for roughly a year and a half.12 The Fair was still charged, though, with political importance. Even as a space of diversion, its aesthetics resonate beyond the site’s physical and temporal boundaries. Acknowledging the political ramifications of the Expo is crucial, then, to a greater understanding of how Mirador approached the spaces of the city as a whole during this vibrant period of Barcelona’s history.

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The building and staging of the 1929 Fair were eminently political acts in two distinct ways. Originally proposed by architect and later president of the Catalan government Puig i Cadafalch in 1905, and with construction on Montjuïc beginning in 1917, the Exposition was envisioned as a way of showcasing Barcelona internationally in an attempt to once again imbue the city with the same cachet it had acquired by hosting the Universal Exposition of 1888. It was meant to be a project that would revitalize Barcelona. Of course, when Primo de Rivera came to power in 1923, this concept was deemed completely unacceptable by a man who saw Catalan specificity in any form as a supreme threat to national unity. For this reason, construction of the site on Montjuïc was halted for four years. Then, when the government eventually decided to go ahead with the Exposition, the Fair was forced to compete directly with another event, the smaller Iberoamerican Exposition that took place in Seville at roughly the same time. To top it all off, the continuing censorship of the press muted criticism of those who had taken over the preparations and, partly as a consequence of this, Primo was able to enjoy a final year in power relatively free from strife. Joan Grau and the ‘Up-Town’ Jazz Show In terms of its popularity and reach, it was not until the 1929 Exposition and performances by the Jack Hylton Orchestra at Montjuïc’s Palau de Projeccions that the curtain really went up on the jazz spectacle as mass entertainment in the city (Papo 15).13 Intrinsic to this growth was the power and significance of the live show, which Mirador’s radio and record critic Joan Grau, like Planes before him and Gasch shortly after, would stress in his pieces on jazz around the time of the Exhibition. One retrospective article that he published after Hylton’s second visit a year later, in 1930, is particularly illuminating. There, Grau recognizes that Hylton’s band had become famous in large part because of their recordings but nevertheless, he feels compelled to emphasize the effect of seeing the group play live. He states: ‘cal advertir la sorpresa que proporciona aquest jazz al que no està habituat a aquestes orquestres, i és la gran importància que tenen com espectacle’ (Grau 5) (one has to acknowledge the surprise that this jazz elicits in one who is not accustomed to these orchestras, and this is the great importance that they have as spectacle). Even though for Grau these choreographic aspects of the show may be part of an unstated objective of getting the audience to dance, their role in avoiding monotony in the music is also of interest.

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In his mind, the way to hold and command the attention of the audience relies on three important components. Foremost, the band must play already well-known and popular dances (the foxtrot and the Charleston to name two); secondly, pieces of movie soundtracks should be included; and finally, he insists that all of these elements be performed with perfect musical execution (5). What are the implications of Grau’s observations? First, he seems to suggest that, in order to be successful, jazz performed on a scale larger than that of the clubs and watering holes of the Paral.lel and Raval (that is, at the Exposition site) must involve cultural cues and hooks that are themselves products of mass entertainment. This in turn would appear to dilute the inherent effects of the experience of live music and anchor the spectacle firmly in the popular and known – in the referential. As a result, I would suggest that in Grau’s interpretation, the site of Hylton’s Barcelona performance becomes very significant, thereby linking space and spectacle in an important way. The Palau de Projeccions was the theatre and cinema of the Exposition, a place where the international was literally continuously on display. According to P.R. Desclau, the Palau was a ‘comfortable’ theatre, whose productions (such as the English hit Wake Up and Dream) attracted ‘tot el Barcelona elegant i amant del music-hall de qualitat’ (Desclau 5) (all of elegant and quality music hall loving Barcelona). Evidently, then, the Palau was more than a literal step up from theatres such as the Apolo or the Arnau, which were situated down the hill on the lower-class entertainment strip of the Paral.lel. Thus, when Grau recounts Hylton’s success at mixing fragments of Hollywood Revue and Singin’ in the Rain with more ‘traditional’ jazz, he is alluding to an aspect of this jazz that reaches beyond the music. He is identifying a quality of recognition inherent in the space of spectacle that affects the audience as much as the physical experience of the show.14 Grau’s ideas, which are heavily dependent on the level of sophistication of the receptor in terms of exposure to other spectacles, point to the gentrification of the previously underground or more marginalized jazz scene in Barcelona. The expectations of the audience as related to the space thus come into play. Thanks to Jack Hylton, cinema’s use of jazz in film, and the high-end Palau de Projeccions, the jazz spectacle is dragged literally ‘up-town’ from the proletarian areas of the Raval to the Exhibition scene on Montjuic. Grau’s commentaries are interesting also for the fact that he identifies a symptom of the decline of the Age itself: a rehearsed, stale levity, in

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which jokes always fall on the same note. He sees this in the forced ‘humorous optimism’ that forms part of the Hylton Orchestra’s show and which he recognizes only after having seen them perform again. Ironically, the same type of cultural familiarity that contributes to the band’s success is also symptomatic of the superficiality of the emotions of the performance. Even though the two Barcelona gigs that he cites are separated by a year, during which Wall Street crashes and Primo de Rivera resigns, they are practically identical. One important element has changed, however; the aura of performative authenticity has been breached: ‘aquestes facècies de bon humor tenen ben poc d’espontànies, tot i voler semblar-ho’ (Grau 5) (these good-humoured wisecracks are not very spontaneous even though they try to appear to be). That this gentrification and expansion of the audience of the jazz spectacle coincides with the beginning of the economic and political hangover of the early 1930s must not be overlooked; it is a concept that will feed Josep M. de Sagarra’s post-mortem appraisal of Jazz Age Barcelona in Vida privada, which I examine in the last chapter of this book. The Poble Espanyol Even more than the big-name spectacles that attracted crowds to the Palau de Projeccions, national and foreign tourists alike sought out the pastiche-like Poble Espanyol, one of the better-known attractions on the Montjuïc site.15 Aesthetically and architecturally it is of great importance – and not simply because of its popularity. Even though the Exposition of 1929 was dedicated to the modern values of industrial and artistic progress and vitality, the Poble was designed as a monument to (Spanish) national craftsmanship and design. In my reading of it, I contend that amidst the international trappings of the fair, it commandeered the ‘local’ aspect of the Expo site’s cosmopolitan mix of foreign and national. Mirador’s subsequent engagement with the site as a whole responds to the challenge to Catalan specificity inherent in this dynamic. Creating a mock village housing ‘natives’ for the Barcelona fair was not a novel idea. The practice of displaying indigenous peoples at Exhibitions dates back to at least 1867 in Paris, where exhibits dealing with North Africa used people in tableaux vivants. Then, in 1878 – again in Paris – the fair site featured an Algerian Bazaar space as well as  a  popular ‘Cairo Street’ attraction. It was not until 1883 and the colonial-themed Internationale Koloniale en Uitvoerhandelstentoonstelling

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in Amsterdam, however, that this form of display was institutionalized. There, for the first time, dwellings from overseas colonies were built and inhabited during the day by ‘savages’ (Mattie 60). After Amsterdam, these villages became common features, and as Burton Benedict observes, the practice of showing people at fairs took on multifaceted meanings in that they spoke to scientific, imperialistic, and moral issues all at once (Benedict 28–9). Taken as part of this tradition of colonial exploitation, the Poble Espanyol thus acquires a more sinister charge, especially considering the way in which its original theme was changed at the hands of Primo’s centralist dictatorship. While it may be possible to argue that the Exposition’s packaging as a touristic event should be interpreted as a depoliticizing action, a superficial covering of the space and, hence, of the past with the surface appeal of mass spectacle, I would suggest that this same superficiality of form is at the root of the Poble’s aesthetic effect. It is reflected in the supposedly temporary, yet ostensibly permanent nature of the Poble’s trappings and encourages consideration of the specifically monumental nature of the Poble Espanyol within the politico-cultural context of the site. In his 1903 book, The Modern Monument, Riegl characterizes monuments in two broad camps: the intentional and the unintentional. The former describes deliberate attempts at designing memory and commemoration whilst the latter takes on its aura of value and importance as a result of the passage of time. In the case of the Poble Espanyol, one sees a curious mix of the two. I believe that the Poble’s role in the process of political inscription through monumentality needs to be emphasized, especially in light of its provocative spatial aesthetics.16 Without a doubt, the Poble may be seen as a ‘homey construct beyond the home,’ one that binds Spain and its peoples in a preindustrial village (Epps 172). Intriguingly, though, the artificial traces that contribute to a reading of the site as uncanny also permit its consideration as a political structure. As Epps observes, the ‘little homecomings’ that the Poble Espanyol engenders among the Spanish tourists must be counterpoised with an international gaze that is potentially taking in a condensed Spain and Catalonia for the first time (172–3). Hence, visually, the Poble becomes both reminder and primary representative of the local. It is an intentional monument or sign that acts as a reminder of a totalizing, unified state as the arrangement of fine examples of ‘Spanish’ architecture and the active presence of skilled artisans collapse the regional distinctions they ostensibly attempt to celebrate. Unity is achieved through dissolution, since the place of work, the living conditions, and even the pace of

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daily life are harmonized to the artificial rhythms of the Exposition’s opening and closing hours. As is plainly evident from its name, the Poble Espanyol glorifies Spain’s architectural history – not that of any one city or region. And while it is difficult to assume how individual visitors – Barcelona residents as well as those from elsewhere – personally reacted to the amalgam, it must be noted that the main entrance to the site is wholly Castilian in appearance. The imposing Ávila gate opens onto the Plaza Castellana, which in turn leads to a prototypical plaza mayor that does not include a single building modelled after one from Catalonia.17 Consequently, from the outset of the visitor’s foray into the town, there is a symbolic, yet explicitly visual architectural break with the true ‘local,’ the Catalan national and geographic space.18 This condition becomes even more relevant when one considers that, according to architect Francesc de P. Nebot, Ignasi Girona, president of the Institut Agrícola Català, proposed the original idea for an architectural ‘town’ at the Exposition in 1915. Nebot himself drew up plans not for a ‘Spanish Town’ but, rather, a Catalan one. In an interview conducted by Mirador at the end of August 1929, he states that it was to have been ‘compost amb elements d’arquitectura usats a Catalunya des de l’època romana fins a últims del segle divuit, a fi de donar a conèixer, a la vegada que la història de l’agricultura, la història de la casa catalana, al voltant de la qual s’és aquella desenrotllada’ (‘La paternitat’ 3) (composed of architectural elements used in Catalonia from the Roman times to the end of the eighteenth century, so as to bring to light, at the same time as agricultural history, the history of the Catalan house, around which all developed). That this initiative was transformed into a project that reinforced the artistic and architectural unity of the State comes as no surprise considering Primo de Rivera’s enmity towards the possibility of a pluralistic Spain. This fundamental change from a ‘Catalan’ to a ‘Spanish’ town also entailed a change in the perception of and engagement with the concept of rurality. In keeping with Riegl’s classification system, the Poble may be interpreted as well as an example of an ‘unintentional monument.’ Paradoxically, this ‘unintentionality’ had also been fabricated. In addition to their rural origins, the buildings chosen as models for the site were valued both for their artistry and for their antiquity, a historical value gained through the passage of time. This preindustrial amalgam is only seemingly politically neutral in its guise as tourist attraction. By reconstructing an idealized past architecturally and giving symbolic importance to rural Spain, the site represents an erasure of the centrifugal

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national forces manifest in the rise of Barcelona and Bilbao as important economic and industrial centres in the country. The reminding aspect of the Poble is centripetal, an architectural fortifying of national unity and of a Spanish locality gained through force. Recreation through reminiscence becomes an agent of the past’s imposition on the present as the turreted walls containing the Poble reinscribe the many years of Barcelona’s own arrested development as a captive city. Where exactly is the harm in a hokey, although formidably constructed and genuinely popular, tourist site such as the Poble Espanyol assuming the mantle of ‘local’ in a cosmopolitan Fair that sought to trumpet Spain’s modernity? One could say that the danger lies precisely in the spatial implications of this status as monument. If, as Gadamer asserts, monuments hold what is represented ‘in a specific state of presentness,’ the modern creation of the unified State in the guise of the past transcends mere diversion (Gadamer 129). Worse still for the specifically Catalan subject, it enters fully into the sphere of entertainment and trivializes the real political and social consequences incurred by the process of forced unification. Complementing Gadamer’s notion of presentness in this case is Lefebvre’s view of the monument. He considers monumental space as offering those in society an ‘image of membership’ (Lefebvre 220). This raises the question: what image is conveyed to the Catalan, Spanish, or foreign tourist who wanders the streets of the Poble Espanyol? As Epps points out, Barcelona was virtually eclipsed in the Poble, yet, conversely, Seville took centre-stage in the Plaza de España at the rival Exposición Iberoamericana (171). The Poble Espanyol may have been the most spectacular example of a rural influence in the campaign to attract tourists to Spain and underline the country’s unity, but it was not the only one. A parallel exists between the Poble’s celebration of the non-industrial or pre-modern Spanish interior and the fledgling Parador system that Primo de Rivera’s government instituted in the second half of the 1920s. The first Parador, or state luxury hotel, appeared near Ávila in 1926. By 1928, the Patronato Nacional de Turismo had established a Junta de Paradores y Hosterías del Reino that sought to create a network of hotels in regions lacking such services (Read and Manjón 13). While the Junta’s first contribution was the cosmopolitan Hotel Atlántico in Cádiz, its main focus was on rehabilitating old castles, monasteries, and palaces (13). By the end of 1932, there were six more sites operating in the provinces of Toledo, Madrid, Salamanca, Jaén, and Ciudad Real (all outside Catalonia). Whether intentional or not, the Poble’s rustic packaging mirrors the official policy of attracting tourists to rural areas that had

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been recently opened up by the regime’s massive public works and subsequently activated culturally by the Parador chain. The reconstruction of buildings from all over the Spanish state was, then, modernity both disguised and denied. The Poble was and is a product of the twentieth century masquerading as something much older and more worn. And while during the Exposition the nearby Palau de Projeccions would show the latest in mass entertainment – films, large-scale music hall performances, etc. – the Poble Espanyol projected its audience/citizens backwards in time, defeating the modern Catalan metropolis through its compressed environs and the rustic façade it bestowed on the growing activity of international (and interurban) tourism. The Poble Espanyol, Mirador, and Montjuïc Reclaimed If the Poble Espanyol may be read as both a reminder of Barcelona’s walled captivity and as a literal, architectural image of a fortified Spanish unity, how did the catalanist and urban-minded Mirador mediate this potentially provocative space? The journal tackled the existence and symbolic implications of the Poble Espanyol in two different ways. First, the editors solicited reactions to the Poble in a survey conducted two weeks after the opening of the Fair. Then, the paper attempted to supplant the dictatorship’s appropriation of the local, signified as it was by the castilianized Exposition and its main attraction, a ‘Spanish Town’ originally slated to have been ‘Catalan.’ Mirador accomplished this latter point by stressing the reclamation of Montjuïc. In addition to redressing the historical grief the mountain denoted, this move also marked a step in the modern dialogue between Catalonia and abroad as the journal looked to capitalize on the international cachet the Exposition had conferred on Barcelona as a whole. This last tactic carried over to the post–Primo de Rivera period but is important, nonetheless, for an examination of how the periodical engaged the challenge to Catalan modernity that the dictatorship set in motion and then how it tried to set the table, so to speak, for a possible Catalan Republic. The Survey The question of what to make of (and later do with) the Poble was broached quickly. Less than two weeks after the official opening, the

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journal’s editors led with a front page survey in which they polled various artists and critics to learn what each of them would do with the town following the Exposition. If, on account of the censorship, the editors did not feel free to make their opinions known regarding the attraction, the space they accorded numerous critical voices was a statement in itself. While there were cries from Rafael Benet and Màrius Aguilar to destroy it, certain respondents, including the well-known J.V. Foix, who had set up shop in the town as a representative of the typically Catalan, offered that the Poble needed to be consolidated and vitalized (Mendelson 39). A not-so-forgiving Benet suggested donating it to the local fire brigade so that it might be used for training purposes. Aguilar was equally vehement in his belief that it should be torn down; in his words, it was ‘un pastitx. Una mena de mostrari. Com a atracció, ja està bé, però res més que com a atracció. Així és que, acabada l’Exposició, ja no té raó d’existir’ (‘Què en farem’ 1) (a pastiche. A collection of sales samples. As an attraction, it is OK, but as nothing more than an attraction. That is to say that, once the Exposition is finished, it will not have any reason to exist). Meanwhile, in the other camp, a priest suggested holding a procession there for revitalization purposes. A group of musicians also submitted that, although far from the Plaça Reial (the Municipal Band’s usual venue), by playing in the Poble, they could inject some needed energy. Mirador regular Joan Sacs saw the Poble Espanyol – so popular and renowned for its antiquated exteriors – as an ideal locale for a museum devoted to the modern interior. Sacs’s views, in particular, reflected a strong nationalist sensibility regarding the notions of preservation and future utility. He believed that any museum should first and foremost be dedicated to Catalan furniture and design, with other Hispanic furnishings and articles from abroad being included only afterwards (1). Although Mirador did take the interiors of the various pavilions very seriously, as evidenced by the two-part series by Josep Mainar, ‘El mobiliari a l’Exposició,’ Sacs’s words may be interpreted as a barb at the Exposition’s Bellas Artes exhibit that travelled between the Barcelona and Seville fairs as proof of the artistic glory and history of a united Spain. For his part, rather than covet the town’s insides, the director in charge of the Poble Espanyol, Lluís Plandiura, valorized the exterior above all else and saw a potential for profit in its visual artificiality. In the survey, he proposed renting the space to movie producers and revealed that both Paramount and Metro studios had already made inquiries to that effect as early as May 1929 (1).

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Mirador’s survey provided an interesting forum for dissenting views on the value of the Poble Espanyol. The overall hostile response to it was in keeping with the political orientation of the journal and displayed a clear rejection of what was considered a symbol of the centrist project. The articulation of a desire to fill the town with examples of Catalan artistic production is indicative of the disconnect between the Expo and the city. According to this line of thought, only once it had been imbued with some sort of culturally relevant civic life could the Poble Espanyol be brought into the Catalan metropolis. This point foreshadows the journal’s desire to recapture the encompassing exposition space and bestow upon it the proper sense of locality required if modern Barcelona (and hence Catalonia), rather than a unified Spain, was to be affirmed. The sculptor Rebull’s final comments provided the survey with an incisive coda. According to him, it was imperative to ‘Tornar les cases del Poble Espanyol a llurs pobles’ (1) (Return the houses of the Poble Espanyol to their towns). Rebull’s simple sentence once more invokes the idea of the Poble’s ‘impossibility’ and inauthenticity in catalanist eyes as he makes light of its pre-industrial presence in the metropolis and muses on a fanciful return of simulated stones to towns from whence they never came.19 .

Integrating Montjuïc Mirador’s second response to the Poble Espanyol and to the usurpation of Catalan subjectivity that it and the Spain-centric Expo represented was to plan actively for the site’s integration into the greater urban area. It is clear that the journal did not object so much to the ephemeral and spectacular nature of the fair as it did to the fact that the diversion for the  urban masses should come at the expense of the articulation of Catalonia’s historical difference. Mirador considered the Poble and the rest of the Expo through the lens of the long-term needs of the capital and its citizenry. That mass entertainment figured into these plans is evident especially in the journal’s praising of Bohigas’s spectacular central fountain, which they named one of the marvels of the Fair and hoped would continue to entertain after the Expo had concluded. While such importance given to a fountain may sound trivial, the concern with the Exposition’s permanent physical legacy to Barcelona, in terms of both recreation and a more rational ‘pure’ urbanism, was not idle banter; on the contrary, it was front page and headline material for Mirador.

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The salvaging of parts of the Expo precinct notwithstanding, the encompassing space of Montjuïc came to represent the greatest recuperative potential for Mirador. Thus, it is significant that the editors named the Montjuïc Gardens as the Exposition’s ‘marvel of marvels’ (‘Els jardins’ 1). The valorization of a stable, urbanized, and tamed rural space such as the mountain clashed with the temporary nature of the architectural monumentalism incarnated by structures like the Poble Espanyol and the overwhelming, baroque Palau Nacional. Here one sees a clear difference in the modern projects of Spain and Catalonia at the time. Whereas Primo de Rivera valorized the rural in an effort to justify historically and politically the unity of the Spanish state, Catalonia’s appreciation for it was in accordance with the trajectory of a specifically Catalan modern experience, one in which language, geography, and religion served as the original foundations of the Renaixença. What is more, aspects of the ingrained nationalist concept of Catalunya – Ciutat are nowhere more closely observed than in the relationship between Barcelona and Montjuïc. How did the paper achieve a Catalan ‘branding’ of the development of the mountain? First, they made it abundantly clear that those in charge of the Exposition had not created the present gardens, but rather that they were started prior to the dictatorship. The editors stressed the fact that the city had begun to enjoy them eight years previously and they took pains to underline that a junta made up of members from various political parties had launched the planning process (‘Els jardins’ 1). One may read this claim of nonpartisan political solidarity as a further marker of an ‘us vs. them’ perspective, one supported by the editorial’s closing paragraph in which politics and geography mix and in which Montjuïc is described as a place free from the rigours of (urban, rational) symmetry and as being both ‘seigniorial’ and ‘democratic’ in nature (1). Although Primo de Rivera fled Spain in early 1930, the second Republic was not proclaimed until 14 April 1931. During this inbetween period censorship loosened, but constitutional normality in Catalonia was not achieved. Mirador took up the larger question of the future of Barcelona early in 1930 in a front-page article entitled ‘Els problemes de la postexposició’ (The Problems of the Post-Exposition). Despite the fact that this notion had been broached before, most notably in an October piece by Nicolau M. Rubió i Tudurí, the change in the nature of the Exposition made this editorial even more salient. With the ‘International Exposition’ now just the ‘Exposition’ (fig. 4.4), the editorial stated that a reduction in status could be beneficial to the city

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regardless of the danger of visitors considering the scaled-back Fair as nothing more than an event ‘in liquidation’ (‘Els problemes’ 1). They reasoned that with the international focus gone, Barcelona had a chance to recoup its social investment and recast the Expo as a truly local event, in this way defeating any legacy of the dictatorship’s imposition of the Spanish as the local and reaffirming Catalonia as subject. As during the previous year, Montjuïc surfaced constantly as the most important part of this recasting of the Exposition. The fair was credited with starting a process that Primo de Rivera had interrupted and that had to be continued; Montjuïc, they claimed, would be more beautiful after the Expo than before (1). That said, for the editors of Mirador, the Expo was not the be-all and end-all. Just as the journal considered Montjuïc in terms of the city as a whole, so too did it label other urban concerns as fundamental to the post-Expo period.20 Apparently more urgent than questions regarding which pavilions to preserve or further assessments of the event’s touristy packaging, these needs echoed in their concise analysis of the Exposition as a ‘bluff,’ whose gains would only appear over the long term, a period that would hopefully fall under catalanist control (1). The ‘Barcelona Exposition’ closed on 15 July 1930. Freed from the shackles of censorship, Mirador’s editorial two days later commemorated the Fair in its entirety but was hard-hitting in its appraisal of the overall results. First, regarding the dictatorship’s initial predictions of millions of North and South American visitors, the editors scoffed and labelled the Iberian Peninsula a cul-de-sac, far removed from European mass transit. Then, in an even blunter assessment, they opined that the Exposition had been in dire need of ‘uns alts funcionaris més intel·ligents’ (‘La clausura’ 1) (some more intelligent civil servants). Finally, although they harped on the massive amount of public money used to finance the Fair, what seems to have rankled the most was, again, part of the optics inherent to events of this nature, namely, that the dictatorship had treated the Barcelona Exposition as an appendix to Seville’s competing Exposición Iberoamericana. As in International Expositions in other cities, ultimately, questions of how the hosts were seen – the perception aspect of an important civic exercise in visuality and visibility – determined and conditioned the reception of the gathering as a whole. In the case of Barcelona’s 1929 Fair, the Poble Espanyol, a draw that had become the showcase attraction, reconfigured drastically the civic dimension. Though not totally effaced, Barcelona was minimalized; the local element in the

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cosmopolitan mix of the Exposition did not acknowledge the industrial modernity of the host city; rather, it celebrated a folkloric, preindustrial unity that at best stereotyped and at worst nullified the Catalan modern experience and heritage. This approach engaged a conception of the rural-as-History that was an integral part of the dictatorship’s own modern process, one in which physical modernization of the State trumped any accompanying nationalist desire that contested or complicated Spanish unity. Mirador and the Mapping of the Urbanists’ Barcelona ‘Page 7’ Mirador’s concern for the reintegration of Montjuïc in Barcelona may have been focused through the lens of the Exposition, but, as I note above, it was not the paper’s only excursion into the emerging fields of urbanism and city planning. Rather, the journal reserved space explicitly for explorations of the practical elements of city experience. Architectural projects (such as the Montjuïc stadium), new trends in urbanism, examinations of monuments in the plazas, as well as feuilletonlike pieces on urban characters all appeared or were discussed in the pages of Mirador. Likewise, the experience of city surfaces, the store windows, facades, and conditions of the streets themselves were also fodder for comment by a variety of authors from a variety of perspectives. Political angles regarding these seemingly innocuous elements of city life were never too far from this ‘surface.’ On various occasions, especially during the efforts to shore up the fledging Catalan Republic and Statute, consideration of civil semiotics – street names, visual emblems of the city, and the symbols of the Catalan nation as they were physically manifest in its capital – appeared in print.21 As a manifestation of the responsibility assumed by the journal, the built environment of Barcelona was a theme that crossed the usually rigid page boundaries and permeated articles of all types. This far-reaching coverage of the city notwithstanding, the majority of the pieces published in Mirador regarding architecture and related matters appeared on page 7; it was there that a critical mass of urban dialogue was achieved. It is there also where the discussion of the built environment in Barcelona beyond the Exposition and its site must begin. The man whose voice was most often associated with the articles on page 7 was architect Màrius Gifreda i Morros, and in one of his first

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Figure 4.4 Exposition advertisement. Mirador 52, p. 8. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

pieces for the journal, he presents clearly his opinion on the state of the built environment of Barcelona. For Gifreda, the streets of the city speak to a ‘chaotic architectural spectacle’ and are the workplace of only two or three architects whose efforts could ever be guaranteed to be aesthetically pleasing (Gifreda ‘Exposició’ 7). While certainly critical of parts of the established metropolis, this early article is, nonetheless, extremely optimistic. The source of his hope is an exhibition put on by a group of young architects that Gifreda covers for Mirador. The critic expresses a sense of great potential for the aesthetic future of the city based on their work, and the fact that Josep Torres Clavé and Josep Lluís Sert, who soon would be key figures in the GATCPAC, were part of that specific student body is proof of Gifreda’s eye for talent and just reason for his optimism.22 As this early example illustrates, from the beginning of Mirador’s eightyear run, there is a discernible push on page 7 to explore a Barcelona that was still to be determined. This is not to say that redesigning the existing

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city or the established architecture is ignored. On the contrary, concurrent with the development of the new ‘science’ of urbanism many contributions appear in this textual space that engage directly with inventive theories of renewal. In this sense, the potential for novelty and innovation inherent in the energies and style of the Jazz Age may be seen in the animus for emerging trends in the period’s architecture – even if the trends that would eventually coalesce during the Republic were very rationalistic in form. During the late 1920s, though, this rationalism had yet to take hold, especially in this young generation of architects. A quick glance at the same architectural students that Gifreda mentions is particularly illuminating as their various projects, which he examines in issues 13 through 15, reflect clearly the links that the Age fostered between disciplines, spaces, and functionality. Among their projects one finds plans for a hotel, a summer beach home, a sports club complex, an airport, and a perfume factory. The sports complex is especially noteworthy for the types of ‘sports’ and services it accommodates; a list that includes swimming, billiards, a barbershop and cinema, a casino, a bar, and a room for poker and chess (Gifreda ‘Els arquitectes’ 7). Reforming the Map As well as giving breath to the possibilities of a city built according to the modern, sympathetic eyes of Barcelona’s own young architects, Mirador opened its pages to considerations of existing spaces that posited their reform. In two compelling cases, journalistic text is juxtaposed with the cartographic image of the city in the form of aerial-view maps that aim to provide a totalizing perspective of the areas in question. The tensions that arise from this juxtaposition and from the designs and implementation of the diagrams offer important insights into how the built environment is approached by two of the journal’s most important contributors, Manuel Brunet and the aforementioned Màrius Gifreda. In the first case, Gifreda serves as pointman for a proposed redevelopment of the Old City. In an article authoritatively titled ‘La Futura Barcelona Vella,’ he evokes an air of urgency by breathlessly affirming the need for a general reform plan for the old quarter (Gifreda ‘La Futura’ 7). This article, which details the evolution of the orginal pla Baixeras as it was re-evaluated by various architects and urbanists, is remarkable for its visual complexity. The accompanying image (fig. 4.5) shows a map of Josep Vilaseca’s redesign of Barcelona’s Old City. New avenues – marked by solitary letters – are superimposed on the map. At

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the same time, known landmarks and buildings are identified by handwritten numbers creating what is at once an eminently recognizable plan, yet one that is clearly altered, with zones both complicated and privileged by the architect’s shorthand. These main avenues, widened by as much as twenty-five metres, according to Gifreda’s text, seem to be much in the style of the already constructed Via Laietana, (described as a ‘scar’ on the area). Streets built to accommodate seven lanes cut across both the Raval and the Gothic quarters, linking them in the centre of the Rambla. The whole space is thus to be opened up to automobile traffic while supposedly safeguarding historic buildings and, Gifreda proclaims, creating ‘remarkable’ vistas reminiscent of Paris’s Hausmann (7). Here, though, the physical template is more or less preserved and the text (word or letter) becomes the urbanist’s imaginary surgical tool with which to cut through the tangled medieval streets. The palimpsestlike qualities of this article’s map, along with the sense of urgency with which it is presented, make it representative of the journal’s dual concern for the distinguishing historic nature of the city and the future growth or renovation that is perceived as being so sorely needed. In the second case of interesting cartography, Mirador’s commitment to the urban reform of the built environment is shown to be such that even the editorial staff would get involved in promoting change. In an article from September of 1930 deemed sufficiently important to be included on page 3, Manuel Brunet himself enumerates Mirador’s urban enthusiasm. His piece does not deal with anything glamorous – no new plazas or extensions of major thoroughfares are presented.23 Rather, his laudatory words appear in response to the planned creation of a city body dealing with the technical aspects of urbanism and development. Once again, the ‘chaotic’ nature of the city and its suburbanization are cited as the reasons for urgent action.24 That no other news organization had bothered to cover the establishment of the new agency emphasizes the sense one gets that, within the pages of Mirador, the city, in all its facets, exists as both overriding theme and exclusive purview of the journal (Brunet ‘Per la ciutat’ 3). Regarding the picture that accompanies Brunet’s article (fig. 4.6), it is important to note that it details neither an expanded carrer Major through the borough of Gràcia nor a redesigned Sant Gervasi (both problems that he insists could have been averted had such an agency existed ten years earlier). Rather, the attached photo is a reproduction of a map of the walled Barcelona dating back to the beginning of the 1800s. Intriguingly, nowhere in the article is the walled city even mentioned.

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Figure 4.5 ‘The future Old Barcelona.’ Mirador 66, p. 7. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Figure 4.6 Map of early nineteenth-century Barcelona. Mirador 84, p. 3. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

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The appearance of the map thus creates an odd juxtaposition between the title of the piece, ‘Per la ciutat futura,’ and the visual manifestation of the city, that of two centuries before. As with Gifreda’s article, this odd mix suggests a definite process of memory recuperation and hints that the repercussions of such a long urban ‘house arrest’ imposed by the military and a succession of centralist Madrid governments were still being felt in 1930. This idea is not far-fetched; nine issues previously, Mirador’s lead story dealt with the eventual cession of the Montjuïc Castle to the city, an act that they hoped would represent Barcelona’s ‘entrada en una nova era de llibertat individual i social’ (‘La cessió’ 1) (entry into a new era of individual and social freedom). The irony here is doubly acute in that a year later the Spanish Republic would deny Catalonia’s requests for complete sovereignty and then, following the Nationalist victory in the Civil War, the city would be occupied by the military once again – with the castle functioning as a prision. At the same time, the totalizing perspective evident in both maps is one that definitely lends itself to a re-imagining of the urban context according to the modernist values of control and organization, which is the process at the heart of each article. Barcelona, they sustain, on account of a chaotic history of growth and development, must be organized according to the new reality. The text details the processes necessary for transformation, and while, in one case, the encompassing image of a map aids in their visualization, in the other, the historical memory of the city is reinscribed/reprinted as a reminder of past impediments to expansion. What is more, it is interesting that the word ‘futura’ appears in both titles. Its use mirrors the journal’s dual conception of the built environment of the Catalan capital. That is to say, the word is imbued with both a prescriptive quality (‘La Futura Barcelona Vella’) and, paradoxically through the inclusion of the old map in the second case, a historical one. Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí’s Imaginary Iberia One of the most intriguing figures to appear on page 7 and one whose writing would also present a mixture of the new, the old, modernist rationality, and nationalist imaginings, was Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí. A landscape architect by trade, he was a writer who, during the 1920s and 1930s, served as head of the Parks and Gardens Department of Barcelona (Huertas and Geli 199). Like many of Mirador’s contributors, Rubió i Tudurí was also a strong supporter of Acció Catalana.

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Among his many articles in Mirador, one stands out as a prime example of how the political scope of the journal fused with the concept of national urban space and what may be interpreted as a response to the stifling centralism that was seen to have choked Barcelona’s development for so long. Published in July of 1931, ‘Un projecte de capital federal’ (A Project for a Federal Capital) details a hypothetical Republican federal capital to be located at a neutral site, preferably halfway between Madrid and Barcelona. The plan is very detailed (see figures 4.7 and 4.8) and features models of a Le Corbusier–like domino layout of buildings located between the River Ebro and a giant airfield inscribed with the name ‘Iberia.’ Rubió i Tudurí makes no apologies for the aesthetic appeal – or lack thereof – of the project. Its purpose, he explains, is to serve a function, not to be pleasing (Rubió i Tudurí). Of course, this imaginary city of Ibèria is an unrealized monument to true federalism; it exists only on the architect’s blueprints and in the pages of Mirador. Nevertheless, in its proposal lie the seeds of the political and cultural battle for which Acció Catalana and, consequently, Hurtado’s literary journal fought. Having considered various ways in which Barcelona’s built environment was manifest in the pages of Mirador, one can see how Rubió i Tudurí’s Iberia project along with Gifreda’s and Brunet’s unique mappings stand as prime examples of the scope of architectural and national desire that Mirador hoped to convey. Barcelona, the cosmopolitan city, as with Catalonia, the unrealized country, would always be a work in progress, a social project open to international currents, yet aware of the city’s own resonating urban heritage. Conclusion In 1931, a year after the International Exhibition’s second phase had closed, Barcelona was still extricating itself slowly from the political aftermath of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. The Roaring Twenties were technically over, sentenced to a slow death by the Wall Street Crash and an increasing politicization of Catalan society that would eventually result in a return to the social violence that had characterized the late 1910s and early 1920s. Nevertheless, this was a time of relative calm, and thus reflection on the recent past was just becoming possible. In this vein, journalist Andreu Artís published an article on music and Barcelona in Mirador’s 10 December 1931 issue. His piece matches the Ramblas – the Catalan capital’s famous central pedestrian thoroughfare – to music

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Figure 4.7 Nicolau Rubió i Tudurí’s ‘Federal capital project plan.’ Mirador 128, p. 2. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Figure 4.8 ‘Detail of project: Commercial District.’ Mirador 128, p. 7. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

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from various periods of the city’s modern history. Artís has keen eyes and ears and he lays out a brief, yet comprehensive list of popular music and dance, from the pas-doble, xotis, vals, and tango, to the jazzy xàrleston of the present day. His use of such an emblematic civic area as the Ramblas is telling; it is a key space in the city, a zone that is at once a lively border between old Barcelona’s two faces – the Barri Gotic on one side, the seedier Raval on the other – and a thoroughfare that leads from the sea towards the renovated Plaça de Catalunya, a focal point of the burgeoning metropolis’s development. Artís’s description of contemporary Barcelona in the article is precise and he leaves no question as to the extent of the connection that he perceives between urban life and jazz. For him, jazz has surpassed the musical performance. Like Sebastià Gasch previously, Artís sees everyday life in modern Barcelona as being infused with the very essence of the musical style that had brought the Charleston to the city and revolutionized not only dance but life in general: ‘La Rambla dansa. En el jazz fantàstic, tothom hi té instrument. Els venedors de dècims, els cridaners de la premsa nocturna, els clàxons dels automòbils, els altaveus de la ràdio, les campanes dels tramvies …’ (Artís 2) (The Rambla dances. In the fantastic jazz, everyone has an instrument. The dime-sellers, the loud shouters of the night-time press, the automobile horns, the radio speakers, the bells of the trams …). A marked sense of immediacy permeates his descriptions as he articulates the urban ‘now’ through reference to a plethora of visual, social, and cultural markers that includes blinking signs, soda bottles, talk of sports, crimes of passion, and political intrigue. In this fashion, the journalist responds to one of the tenets of the Jazz Age aesthetic – its emphasis on the present, its spontaneity and syncopation in urban improvisation and experience – while predicating it in Barcelona and, more specifically, showing how it has been absorbed into the lifestyle of the Catalan capital’s inhabitants. As a literary journal, Mirador did more than just report the news that was created by privileged, artistic elites. Through its political engagement with Catalanism, the journal, its editors, and its many contributors helped consolidate various aspects of Catalan culture within the urban sphere of Barcelona. In this way, Mirador must be considered an important mediator of the Jazz Age aesthetic as it was manifest in a form specific to the Catalan capital between the last year of the dictatorship and the early years of the nascent Republic. From coverage of the seedier nightclubs and bars to the tony International Exposition, through to the attention given the built environment itself, the journal examined

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urban spaces in detail while transmitting the experience of the spectacles that took place in the city. Mirador’s heyday coincided with the zenith of the Age. The hangover of the 1930s, a decade that began relatively brightly, would see the cultural landscape change completely.25 Primo de Rivera died in exile in March of 1930. Just over a year later, on 14 April, the Catalan Republic was proclaimed with Francesc Macià as its first president. The euphoria of what many saw as Catalonia’s freedom from the Spanish state did not last, however, as the Republican government in Madrid refused to accept a Catalan Statute that provided complete autonomy. The political haggling dragged on and was duly covered by the independence-minded editors of Mirador. Catalan political and cultural sovereignty was then denied once more – in a much more violent fashion – following the Nationalist victory during the Spanish Civil War. For its part, Mirador persisted until 10 June 1937, when it disappeared, only to be replaced some months later by another journal, Meridià, whose publication run ended early in 1939. While Mirador and the lives of many of its contributors ended in the tragedy that was the Spanish Civil War, as I have tried to show in this chapter, the first three years of the journal’s existence were replete with an immense commitment and contribution to the vibrant cultural life of the city of Barcelona. The Jazz Age reverberated through its pages just as it had done through the city’s streets: with the intensity of the ‘now.’ The vision that the journal proposed was grand: from the urban renewal of Barcelona to the bulwarking of Catalonia’s culture and an affirmation of political sovereignty. Mirador was a cosmopolitan mix of international influences tempered by the specificity of the urban experience of Barcelona and its spaces, both mental and physical. In the end, that project was dashed, but while it lived, it had no better expression than in the pages of the journal whose main office commanded a bird’seye view of both the Plaça de Catalunya and the Rambla, at the fulcrum between old and new.

5 An Age in Pictures: Imatges (1930)

Introduction Nineteen-thirty was as much a transition year for Barcelona as it was for Catalonia in general. For even though Miguel Primo de Rivera had fled to France in January, authoritarian rule persisted in the form of General Dámaso Berenguer’s so-called dictablanda (bland dictatorship), which put off political and social normalization in Catalonia until the arrival of the Second Republic in 1931. Meanwhile, the culminating event of Spain’s Jazz Age, 1929’s Barcelona International Exhibition, had shed part of its moniker and morphed into the more locally oriented and simply titled ‘Barcelona Exhibition.’ These events, at the same time as the effects of the Wall Street Crash that had abruptly ended the Roaring Twenties in America, exerted themselves progressively on the Catalan capital. The combination of gradual – rather than instant – political, cultural, and economic changes lent a tentative air to the first year of what would come to be known in the West as the ‘Dirty Thirties.’ The Second Spanish Republic and its rising tide of political tensions were still a year away, and with domestic economic concerns in the runup to the Second World War replacing the international and cosmopolitan stylings of the decade that had just ended, what remained in Catalonia – and in Barcelona particularly – was a unique moment of subtle consolidation of the social changes that had occurred during the city’s unique experience of els feliços vint. Thus, while 1930 may have stood technically on the downward side of the Jazz Age’s pinnacle, it was still too early for the process of retrospective evaluation and criticism that the hangover years would later elicit. In June 1930 the aforementioned second and final phase of the Exhibition came to an end, thus concluding what had been a varied

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modern spectacle unlike any other that Barcelona had seen. From the artworks on display in the Palau Nacional to the architecturally condensed Spanish state embodied by the Poble Espanyol, to the shows and films viewed at the Palau de Projeccions and Carles Buigas’s universally acclaimed Magic Fountain light show, the sheer visuality of the fair had burned itself into the city’s collective retina. Its end also meant the completion of the print run of the Exposition’s official gazette, the Diario de la Exposición Internacional, and its visually compelling counterpart, Barcelona gráfica, which had developed gradually over the year and a half that the paper had existed. As one could expect from an official organ, the Diario sang the Fair’s praises relentlessly as it doled out updates on activities, offered interest stories, and provided a visual record of the event through an increasing use of photography. This visual aspect of the paper is important and intriguing especially given that the Diario had recourse to the work of the Exposition’s official photographer, the immensely talented Gabriel Casas.1 The visual void that the closing of both the exhibition and its graphic apparatus created was not long in being filled; for just as one element in Barcelona’s field of vision faded, another came into being with the emergence of a new forum for information on the city and its inhabitants: the graphic weekly Imatges. The appearance of this paper signalled at once both a renewed journalistic vitality in Barcelona and the continuation of a process of adaptation of international codes of representation and behaviour. While the conventional Catalan press remained a mix of conservative and liberal daily broadsheets (La Vanguardia, El Noticiero Universal, and La Veu chief among them), and Mirador had staked its claim as the literary and artistic journal of record, Josep Maria Planes’s illustrated weekly promised something different to readers: a mix of politics, sports, and everyday life coverage that relied heavily on the skills of some of the city’s best photographers, a group that included Casas, Gaspar, and, to a lesser extent, Esmeu and Garrigosa. In addition to providing a forum for these photographers’ talents, Imatges also gave the young reporter Irene Polo her start in the business. The leader of this energetic crew was Planes, the journal’s influential editor, and, as is evident by the frequency with which his name appears in studies of this vibrant time in Barcelona’s history (including this one), the writer was a significant fixture in the city’s increasingly cosmopolitan scene. That he would finally acquire his own forum at such a key transition point for Catalonia and its capital is testament to both the way that his personal development matched that of his adopted city and the esteem

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in which he was held by the other central figures of Barcelona’s intelligentsia. Understanding his role in the city’s journalistic and social life is an important facet of my interpretation of how Imatges succeeded in naturalizing important elements of the Jazz Age’s cosmopolitan ethos. Josep Maria Planes Born on 1 February 1907 in the Catalan town of Manresa, Josep Maria Planes moved to the capital of Barcelona when he was eighteen and did not waste any time in making a name for himself. He arrived in the city with some journalism experience already under his belt and quickly became a fixture at the Hotel Colón’s well-known terrace tertulias (informal intellectual gatherings). There, he came into contact with the editor of the La Noche newspaper, Màrius Aguilar, who gave him his first job in the burgeoning Catalan metropolis. It was while working at La Noche that Planes would meet another prodigious figure of the journalism scene in Barcelona at the time, Francesc Madrid (Finestres 22).2 The young Planes was keenly interested in the vibrant nightlife that Barcelona was experiencing and was in tune with how jazz and the societal codes of behaviour that went with it were becoming a part of the city’s vernacular practice. What is more, he understood clearly the syncretic nature of the Jazz Age and the way that it nurtured already existing cosmopolitan elements in Barcelona’s urban fabric. Consider, for instance, ‘Jazz-Band: Bernard Shaw a Toscanini, pasando por Paris y Madrid,’ one of the few Spanish-language pieces that he would publish in his career. In this pre-Imatges article, which came out on 3 May 1929 in La Noche, Planes quotes Bernard Shaw’s suggestive formula in his discussion of why some sectors of European society were resisting the music’s popularity: ‘Cock-tails + post guerra + aviación + T.S.H. + inmoralidad ambiental = Jazz Band.’ In the citation and the article that accompanies it one sees all of the elements of the time condensed into one equation: urban centres; an understanding of a postwar period in which living intensely and perhaps immorally was the order of the day; the new combinations of liquors in the cocktails, which resembled the same social mixing that was occurring in built space, and the exciting frontier of the sky conquered at last by daring airmen/women.3 Like most writers at the time, Planes did not contribute exclusively to one paper or journal; in addition to his work at Aguilar’s organ, he also wrote several articles for El Día Gráfico, which came out in the mornings and whose editorial offices were located in the same space as both La

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Noche’s and those of the sports-oriented paper La Gaceta Deportiva. After getting his feet wet at La Noche and its sister journals, Planes then contributed in 1926–7 to the satirical paper Papitu, which had been closed since 1923 due to its salacious content (Finestres 28). As Finestres points out astutely, Papitu was Planes’s first encounter with satirical journalism and would serve as a training ground where he could hone the skills that would be put to good use some five years later in his own influential satirical weekly, El Be Negre (The Black Sheep). By 1928, Planes was contributing as well to L’Opinió. In his column, which he signed with his own name but wrote under the title ‘Xarivarí,’ the author focused on the vagaries of daily life in a customs-andmanners style that foreshadowed the type of article that would bring him even more success and visibility when he became a frequent voice in Amadeu Hurtado’s Mirador, founded in 1929 and for which L’Opinió served as a brief precursor. His contributions to this artistic and literary journal gave Planes a great deal of exposure, and his many engaging studies of Barcelona’s clubs and watering holes made his name synonymous with the vibrant nightlife of the time. In total, he would publish one hundred and thirty-three articles in Mirador throughout his career. The pieces vary considerably in form, given that Planes was as adept at interviewing as he was at writing in-depth investigative reports or critical reviews of the many spectacles playing in Barcelona at the time. When Josep Maria Planes began his editorship of Imatges in 1930, he was at what may be considered the mid-point of a career that, tragically, was to be cut short by the renewed ‘social violence’ that plagued Barcelona during the years of the Second Republic. The fact that Imatges folded in the fall of its first year did not discourage him, and he continued both to seek out editorial opportunities and to develop his critical voice. Planes hit his satirical stride with El Be Negre, a journal that he headed from 1931 to 1936. Even with this editorship, however, he maintained his customary high profile and presence in the Barcelona intellectual scene by continuing to publish in Mirador and other venues. In the end, however, his critical stance on the thuggish tactics of Catalonia’s anarchist unions would be his undoing. As a result of two series of articles that he published in La Publicitat in 1934, Josep Maria Planes found himself in the anarchists’ sights. It took two years for them to act on their simmering anger, but when they finally did it was deliberate and brutal. Planes was assassinated by anarchist gunmen on or around 25 August 1936.4 His career was short, but the work that he left behind

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serves as an invaluable window onto the social life of Barcelona during the time. Imatges in particular is very evocative because in addition to the textual element inherent to any paper, its emphasis on the visual and ways of seeing the city show the breadth of Planes’s own vision of the modern metropolis and the strategies of representation of the everyday that it comprises. Imatges Planes based his graphic weekly Imatges: Setmanari gràfic d’actualitats on the Parisian Vu, which was also the precursor of America’s Life Magazine (Finestres 47). While the journal lasted only six months, it broke new ground even as it spoke at the same time to an established Spanish and Catalan tradition of mixing photography with interest stories that could be found in titles such as Estampa and Crónica, as well as in Catalonia’s own D’Ací i D’Allà, which emulated a more English model in its approach to its material (47). For his part, Finestres, in his study of Planes’s career, is effusive in his praise of the weekly; Imatges was the voice of the street, of the city, of the urban fever; it was a cosmopolitan, modern journal that was both innovative and avant-garde (47). It is hard to argue with him, and as I hope to show in this chapter, this weekly, which boasted an editorial board that included such established names and rising stars as Màrius Aguilar, Màrius Gifreda, Ignasi Soldevila, J.M. de Sagarra, and Irene Polo among others, marks an important moment both in the evolution of Barcelona’s urban life during the Jazz Age and in the city’s response to it during such a liminal period as 1930.5 How to Read a Graphic Weekly A common feature of many new journals or newspapers is the desire or need to justify their existence. Often, this wish manifests in the dedication of editorial column space to proclamations of intent, the identification of readership, and a general positioning of the paper in question. These mini-manifestos help a paper stake out its intellectual or ideological territory and find space in what may be a flooded – or at least well-served – journalistic market.6 In the case of Imatges, which burst on the scene in just such a competitive environment, even though it was following ostensibly in the footsteps of the well-regarded journals like Vu and Life, the special political and social circumstances surrounding the timing of its appearance resulted in Planes preparing and releasing

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Figure 5.1 Masthead of Imatges 1. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

a four-page, out-of-series text-and-image flyer in which he highlighted various aspects regarding the intentions of the journal. That this flyer may be best described as an attempt to instruct the public on how to read this image-intensive newspaper is both intriguing and in keeping with the general climate of instruction in the burgeoning field of documentary in Spain that Jordana Mendelson describes admirably in her book on the subject, Documenting Spain. While this conscious act of positioning the reader/viewer conforms to the informal journalistic conventions of the time, it is highly revealing also in terms of the way in which Planes and his crew perceived the type of modernity that their undertaking entailed. Two specific examples – the first, a commentary by Planes in another paper; the second, from this advance flyer – are exemplary in this regard. In an article entitled ‘Sobre Imatges’ published in La Rambla de Catalunya on 16 June 1930, five days after the first instalment of his new journal, Planes explains how he would like the public to view his contemporary weekly. Specifically, the editor wishes that readers would approach his journal ‘amb el mateix desinterés patriòtic amb que llegim una novel.la francesa, amb què fumem una cigarreta turca o amb què engolim un cóctel cosmopolita’ (Planes ‘Sobre Imatges’ 11) (with the same patriotic disinterest with which we read a French novel, with which we smoke a Turkish cigarette, or with which we gulp down a  cosmopolitan cocktail). How should one read this statement? Of particular interest here are Planes’s tone and the absolute maturity that

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it assumes in the Catalan posture vis-à-vis foreign influences, products, and styles. I would suggest that the author’s invocation of them is not predicated on the rubbernecking enthusiasm of a citizen confronted with the new but rather on the disinterest intrinsic to the more measured, refined, and established blasé outlook. Planes actively dissuades his readers from being gawking badauds – the blasé’s opposite – and herein lies a key element for my interpretation of Imatges; it is less a box of wonders than a naturalized document of modern life in Barcelona, one in which the shock of the spectacle has faded and what one might call the dull drone of modern life has been brought to light not through an envious gaze towards how others live, but by training the lens on the local variant of late or post–Jazz Age modernity. In this way, Imatges is political not only in the conventional sense that it is leftist, but also in a more metaphoric manner in that it presents the polis to its own citizens (or at least, those who can afford the forty centimes) as an exercise in mirroring and subtly inflecting daily practice. At the same time, by tweaking the banal through the modernizing and often avant-garde lenses of its photographers, Planes’s journal is didactic; it teaches modern aesthetics surreptitiously, through normalization and the juxtaposition of the ordinary with the camera in occasionally startling ways. More often than not, the visual architect of this construction is Gabriel Casas, whose work I discuss in detail later in this chapter. In response to the reasonable question of whether the blasé outlook is justified in Planes’s expectations of his early 1930s Barcelona readers, I would argue that, given the experience of the city before and during the International Exhibition, the editor’s willed disinterest in his journal’s readers’ posture towards what he openly admits is a Catalan version of Vu is not out of line. Considered within the same historical continuum, it is also evidence of an evolution in the way that specialized periodicals ponder and engage the city. For instance, many of the reasons for the shock and, at times, outrage of the new that El Escándalo expressed had been gentrified and rendered regular while Mirador’s initial edge in terms of urban development and exploration of the nocturnal city had faded slightly with the Fair’s end. Tragically for the residents of Barcelona, however, the next paradigm shift in terms of moral shock would be the large-scale carnage of the Civil War, which loomed on the horizon and which would be prefaced by the brutal bienio negro.7 The connection between the blasé condition or outlook and the vaguely defined nationalism/patriotism that Planes cites is one that bears further exploration in terms of the editor’s aspirations for Imatges and how

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he wished the journal to be read. In this regard, his words in the promotional flyer for the journal are particularly illuminating. First, the editor refers to the aforementioned need to fill a journalistic lacuna in Catalonia and names specifically Vu, Estampa, and Crónica as graphic weeklies published outside the region that could serve as models of the type of project that he has in mind. According to him – and in a slight variation from his other declarations – at the heart of this interest lies a patriotic element in that he sees the need for a local counterweight to contrast the invasion of foreign values that had been imported to Catalonia and Barcelona during the Roaring Twenties (Planes ‘Promotional Flyer for Imatges’ 1). This initial positioning takes on a more nuanced meaning when one considers the political reality of Catalonia and the region’s lack of democratic normality following Primo de Rivera’s departure. Thus, when he mentions the need for a ‘represa de la vida política i de reobriment de total llei de perspectives’ (restart of political life and [for] a reopening of all sorts of perspectives), his reference to the collective life of Catalans in the context of Imatges makes the journal a visual bridge to a national conscience that is manifest in daily (or better yet, given the paper’s publication schedule, weekly) practice (2). Technology plays a part in this bridging, and Planes acknowledges the importance of the development of rotogravure printing in the reproduction of images. He implicates the vagaries of the market too, when he proclaims that: ‘Ara més que mai, convindrà que el gest i els posats dels nostres homes públics, dels nostres grans escriptors, dels nostres grans artistes, tinguin una aureola de popularitat. Ara més que mai, serà necessari que el reflex material de la nostra vida col.lectiva faci funció de consciència nacional’ (2) (Now more than ever, it will be necessary that the gestures and airs of our public men, of our great writers, of our great artists, have an aura of popularity. Now more than ever, it will be necessary that the material reflection of our collective life be a function of national conscience). Planes’s vision is not a closed one, however, and in his brief on the types and breadth of articles that Imatges will contain he assures the public that the news will be presented in all of its innumerable facets, whether they come from Catalonia or abroad. Nevertheless – and here one sees the didactic element that I mentioned come to the fore – he understands the need to give preference to the Catalan subject’s desire to see him/ herself reflected: ‘I es cabalment [sic] per satisfer l’ànsia del públic que ell mateix tal vegada no sap expressar, que donarem a les coses catalanes tota la claror dels nostres reflectors’ (3–4) (It is fundamental for satisfying the anxiety of the public, which they themselves perhaps do not know

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how to express, that we give all the clarity of our spotlights to Catalan things). Planes ends this section of his flyer with another assurance to the readers who are able to afford his journal by telling them plainly that he and his team will work with firm but discreet perseverance so as to raise the overall level of popular taste. In this way, he hints at involving his future audience in a social project that would activate the existing cultural capital of Catalonia that had been held in stasis during the dictatorship and at the same time would respond to that from abroad in the mature, measured fashion Planes evidently prefers. The question of the price of Imatges is one that the editor cannot avoid. At forty centimes it was expensive; a fact that he attempts to mitigate by pointing to the smaller Catalan language readership pool that in turn generates less total revenue, especially when one considers the added costs of producing a graphic intensive paper like his. At the same time though, Planes is optimistic that any demographic disadvantage that may exist will be overcome quickly by what he terms ‘the interest, rhythm, and modernity’ that only his journal can offer the Catalan public (4). His optimism here is like that of many first issue editorials. He is aiming high and is not timid about asserting the importance of his journalistic and aesthetic project. At the same time, of course, by valorizing the paper and the future readers in such a way, he softens further the sting of the paper’s high price. In his concluding remarks in this advance flyer Planes brings the questions of economics, patriotism, and modernity back together in a way that will foreshadow the New Objectivist ideals to be found in the work of Imatges’s primary photographers, especially Gabriel Casas, whose pictures recall in certain ways those of New Objectivity pioneers Albert Renger-Patzch and August Sander. Along this syncretic line, Planes declares the following: No volem pas que compreu Imatges per patriotisme. No entra en les nostres intencions demanar el favor del públic per raons sentimentals. Volem imposar Imatges pel seu valor, per la seva agilitat, per la seva modernitat. La nostra màxima ambició és que el comprador d’Imatges no pugui tenir la sensació de que compleix amb un deure, si no al contrari, que fa un petit negoci. (4) We do not want you to buy Imatges out of patriotism. It does not enter into our intentions to ask the favour of the public for sentimental reasons. We want to impose Imatges for its own value, for its agility, for its modernity.

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Our greatest ambition is that the purchaser of Imatges not have the feeling of following through on a duty, but rather on the contrary, that he/she feel that he/she is doing a business deal.

Thus, even though he invokes the patriotic spirit of a Catalanism beginning to retake its shape in the wake of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, his inclination towards a mature vision of urban modernity, one in which the economy is present not only as a tidy metaphor but as a practical force, makes him loath to lean on sentimentalism as a crutch. Planes’s ‘lessons’ on how to read his graphic weekly, such as they appear in the flyer and in his La Rambla comments, point to a well thought out posture towards his target public and make a didactic claim even as they invoke surreptitiously a civic duty grounded not in patriotic language but in the practice of consumption. That this posture and the success of his endeavour rely ultimately on the quality of the images that comprise Imatges means that any discussion of how the journal functioned during the transitional year of 1930 – in a Barcelona on the last legs of its Jazz Age experience – must take into account the photographic documents themselves. Once again, Planes’s advance flyer is a good starting point for such an analysis. The four-page mini-issue offers a condensed collection of disparate photos juxtaposed and superimposed in such a way as to create a visual cacophony. Yet, just as the editor’s text serves as a manifesto for the new journal, so, too, does this array of contrasting and striking images act as a visual proposition for the reader/viewer. The connection between the new journal and the city of Barcelona is patent on the first page, where the cover image is one of a series of city blocks from Barcelona’s modern expansion area, the Eixample district, with the stylized masthead of the magazine superimposed on the buildings (fig. 5.2). The angle of the text is dynamic; it follows the street diagonally from the bottom left of the picture to the top right. This mixture of text and image on the first page is clean and communicates clearly the metonymic statement that Imatges is part of the bourgeois environment. Pages 2 and 3, however, offer a visual jumble that comprises a multitude of different shots: a zeppelin heading into the distance, the artist Rosinyol with another man visible only as a blanked-out silhouette, a shot of children dressed as elves playing instruments, a close-up lowangle tilt of another zeppelin, rows and rows of cars on a barge, rows and rows of planes, a row of dancing girls leaning back on chairs with their legs high in the air, and, finally, an extreme close-up of a mastodon

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whose segmented trunk replicates the row motif. In the middle of page 3 sits an incongruous circle-framed shot of a little girl kissing a young boy in the snow. Page 4 has the well-known Cordoba street photograph from the Poble Espanyol juxtaposed with a soccer scene of players challenging for a header that in turn overlaps an aerial view of the Columbus statue at the bottom of the Rambla. Also visible are a native mask and a stylized Greek figure. With the exception of the cover montage, the images in the flyer are separate from the text in that there is no direct connection to Planes’s editorializing. Nevertheless, the selection signals the eclectic nature of Imatges’s subject matter at the same time as it hints at some of the aesthetic underpinnings discernible in the photographers’ styles. The predominance of rows of repeated objects or forms, for instance, is reminiscent of the machine aesthetic at work in the New Objectivity’s explorations of the everyday. In terms of the photographs’ relation to the specific context of Barcelona, however, there is more of a connection. Shots of specific locales, such as the Exposition site and the Columbus statue, are obvious, while the zeppelin images recall the visit of the Graf to the city in 1929 just as the dancing girls represent the rise of mass spectacle in Barcelona. Thus, the visual amalgam in the flyer offers dynamically presented visions of practice, spectacle, and the built environment in a way that bombards the reader just as Planes dictates how these images are to be read; it is a forceful shot across the bows of established Catalan language journalistic practice. There had been sporadic eruptions of this type of modern representation in journals like Mirador, Barcelona Gràfica, and others, but never in such a sustained manner as would be the case with Imatges. The Photographers The two principal photographers for Imatges were Josep Gaspar i Serra (1892–1970) and Gabriel Casas i Galobardas (1892–1973). Gaspar was a well-known filmmaker who began his career very early. At the age of sixteen, after a stint in Paris learning about photography, he was already filming his own shorts on local festivals involving bulls (Doria 134). He had a knack for being in the right place at the right time and, as a result, bore witness to the events of the Setmana Tràgica, during which he filmed the burning of convents and was able to sneak into the castle on Montjuïc where the anarchist and founder of the Modern School, Ferrer i Guardia, was being held (134). His early career was full

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Figure 5.2 Image from out-of-series publicity flyer for Imatges. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Cituat de Barcelona.

of travel as he continued making documentaries and ventured into feature films, at one point working for Goldwyn in New York as a cameraman (134). As Doria observes, upon his return to Barcelona in 1919, he had a very American understanding of the film industry (134). During the 1920s he continued to balance his work as cameraman or director of photography on features with making bullfighting documentaries. During this time he also shot aerial documentaries. The combination of the later economic downturn in the film industry and a poorly received version of Rusiñol’s L’auca del senyor Esteve forced Gaspar back into photography in order to make a living. This is the period in which he contributes to Barcelona Gràfica and Imatges. Like Gaspar, Gabriel Casas spent time living in the Americas; between 1914 and 1917, he was based in Argentina. His early career as a photographer revolved around sports and the growing world of shows and spectacles; by 1925 he had both his own studio and a union card that allowed him to collaborate with Barcelona’s many newspapers and

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sports journals (Doria 131–2). In 1929 Casas served as the official photographer of the International Exposition, a job that he followed up though his collaboration with Planes and Imatges. By 1933, Casas was busy preparing posters for the left-wing political group Acció Catalana Republicana. His partisan work would continue during the Civil War as he put his talents to use at both the Generalitat’s Department of Culture and the Commissariat of Propaganda. Following the war he spent time in jail for refusing to swear loyalty to the Francoist regime before opening another studio in which he concentrated primarily on industrial and publicity photography (132). Casas died in 1973. Picturing the Age The first issue of Imatges came out on 11 June 1930. Immediately remarkable in the new journal are both the quality of the images from an aesthetic point of view and that Planes’s desire to open new perspectives on the city and its citizens was put into action immediately. That these new perspectives would rely on the novel photographic perspectives and angles that he had at his disposal was clear, and they served to enhance even the most banal of stories. In this way Planes’s vision for an openingup of Barcelona and Catalan society during the immediate post-Primo period melded with the emerging photographic vision of Casas, Gaspar, and others. That this dynamic was not restricted to grand reports on the city and urban plans but was also in evidence in the many stories that dealt with the everyday is further proof of Planes’s posture towards what he considered Barcelona’s mature engagement with modern life. An article in the first issue regarding which type of hat various wellknown Barcelona residents prefer is a good example. Although one might be tempted to dismiss it as typical summer fluff, the piece is interesting visually not on account of the disembodied heads of various city luminaries that are pictured, but rather for a stylized shot of the brims of many hats in the bottom left corner. The photographer has shot them from a low angle in such a way that this unusual perspective makes the reader contemplate a common object from a whole new viewpoint. This treatment of a simple hat foreshadows the dynamic approach to objects, people, and the built environment at large that readers of Imatges will encounter in the majority of its issues. This novel attitude towards the photographic subject is trumpeted as well on the cover of the first issue (fig. 5.3). Here, Casas shoots from on high so as to capture a candid shot of the president of the Diputació,

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Maluquer i Viladot, getting into his car seemingly unaware of the lens observing him. The composition of the picture is excellent; Casas frames Maluquer with a tree trunk and branches in a way that contains and shields the politician even as the act of photographing him combined with the pitch of the shot makes him vulnerable. I would suggest that such vulnerability has a special resonance in terms of the risk and violence inherent to Barcelona’s public life and that, even though Primo de Rivera may have been gone and the anarchist question quelled through brutal crackdowns, the political context that had shaped Catalan responses to their city, leaders, and fellow citizens must not be excluded entirely when considering the documentary practices of the period – whether they have to do with the political, entertainment, or urbanistic realms. An important feature of Imatges, and one that helps set it apart from the other graphic journals it imitates and to which it responds, is that the photographer is almost always included in the textual commentaries or stories that accompany the pictures. That is to say, when the author of a given piece speaks in the first person, he/she uses the nosaltres form that reflects the presence of more than one person. This phenomenon is not a journalistic variant of the ‘royal’ or ‘editorial’ ‘we,’ since the photographer’s actions relating to the process of taking pictures and documenting events are often mentioned in the text. In this way, Imatges involves the reader with the pictures of the city and citizens at two distinct points in time: the moment of reception, when he/she opens the magazine and takes in the photos, as well as the moment when they were created, through the recounting of the photographic process. At times, this procedural element is even more emphatic, such as when the camera is mentioned directly by someone being quoted in the story or when the journalist writing the text recounts how Casas or Gaspar, for example, poses his subjects. Thus, while the journal informs readers it also teaches them as a matter of course about the elaboration of the product that they are holding in their hands. I consider this to be another manner in which Planes defeats the badaud effect of the new and helps inculcate the blasé sensibility that he finds so attractive and aspires to see in his readership. Planes is not above dealing in sensationalism, however, and given that his overarching subject is Barcelona during the tail-end of the Jazz Age period, he can hardly avoid engaging the locus of so much of the  popular lore of the time: the Fifth District. As has been evident throughout this book, the Raval’s presence during Barcelona’s Jazz Age

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Figure 5.3 Front cover of Imatges 1. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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– as a mysterious zone, a motor for immorality, and a site of performance – is hard to escape. Imatges is not immune to its pull either, but in the first issue of his journal Planes takes it on with a different attitude from what had previously manifested in journalistic treatments of the neighbourhood. And while his approach is reminiscent of that of El Escándalo some five years earlier in that it is didactic, rather than help build a mystery and then reveal it for the purposes of titillation, Planes seeks to dispel the mythic element of the Fifth District altogether. In doing so he reflects the temporal specificity of Imatges and unknowingly starts a phase of reconsideration of the zone that would be continued in devastating fashion in Sagarra’s Vida privada, the subject of the last chapter of this book. Planes’s corrective piece is entitled ‘La llegenda del districte V’ (The Legend of the Fifth District), and in it, he contends that the real zone has nothing to do with the one for which Barcelona has become so infamous. Again, like Francesc Madrid and the implied reader of El Escándalo or Sangre en Atarazanas before him, Planes and the photographer Casas tour the area at different times of day and night in search of the reasons for its seedy reputation. Casas documents the trip with several impressive photographs which, when combined with Planes’s text, reveal the state of the Barrio Chino in 1930. A key stop for the pair is La Criolla, a nightclub that has long been a part of the nocturnal circuit in the Fifth District. When, upon arriving in the vicinity, they see people distributing publicity cards that proclaim in five different languages that La Criolla is the most popular and ‘typical’ bar in Barcelona, Planes can only respond with an ironic ‘Aneu a saber!’ (Well, who knew?) that betrays his disagreement with their notion of ‘typical’ (Planes ‘La llegenda’ 12). He continues in a sardonic tone and in so doing, points his finger not at the authors who glamourized the area but rather at those involved in the rise of mass tourism – travel companies that sell images: ‘Mentrestant … els lladres, els carteristes, els terribles assassins, on són? Una parella d’anglesos que tenim a la taula del costat, sembla que els cerquen. Aquest bona gent perdrà la nit. L’Agència Cook i el Baedeker els han ensarronat’ (12) (Meanwhile … the thieves, the pick-pockets, the terrible assassins, where are they? A pair of Englishmen whom we have at the table next to ours seem to be looking for them. These nice folks will waste their night. The Cook Agency and Baedeker have tricked them). Even though La Criolla may no longer be the place it was in terms of danger and titillation, it is still a site of late Jazz Age performance, as  is evident in Casas’s dynamic photo of a jazz band in mid-set that

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accompanies the Planes piece (fig. 5.4). This shot is revealing and important in many ways. First, it contributes to Imatges’s mandate to reflect different aspects of Barcelona’s collective life, in this case, taking on the world of entertainment. That said, however, the composition of Casas’s photo is especially compelling in that the angle here is highly unusual and innovative. By taking the picture from the middle of the band and shooting outwards, the photographer places the reader on stage with the protagonists of the Jazz Age spectacle. When combined with Planes’s attack on the past reception of the bar/neighbourhood this visual posing of the reader/viewer in such a way represents the ultimate in the gentrification of the Jazz Age in Barcelona. Not only is the bourgeois citizen no longer frightened to attend such a show or venture into this area, now thanks to Casas and Imatges, he/she can visualize him/herself as being on the stage with the group. This, at the same time as the viewer sees him/herself reflected in the photo as part of the audience. In this way, the Jazz Age spectacle is further naturalized as part of the urban practice of those who live in Barcelona through a dual process of visualization and actuation that feeds off itself thanks in part to the graphic representation of the dynamic in a forum such as Imatges. The specificity of the ‘local’ in Barcelona’s experience of nightlife during this time is on display at the pair’s next stop on the nocturnal phase of their tour. The destination this time is the Los Gabrieles bar, a club that features flamenco within a distinctly modernist space. This mix of the ‘castizo’ or ‘pure and authentically Spanish’ with the cosmopolitan stylings of modernist aesthetics that at once draw on the local vernacular and on international trends/movements is a heady one. Unlike the Villa Rosa, another well-known bar that employes a total Andalusian theme, Los Gabrieles stands as a unique manifestation of Barcelona’s syncretic approach to cosmopolitanism. Casas’s photo of the bar captures a dramatic contrast in lighting and illustrates well the cubist-inspired paintings that the music hall artist Nanin had put on the walls (fig. 5.5). The shot also shows the incongruity of the flamenco performance in such a modernist/expressionist space by featuring the performers in the dead centre of the image. That the players are virtually subsumed by the décor in Casas’s photograph gives Los Gabrieles a much darker feel than the Criolla before it. Nevertheless, it is not enough to convince Planes, who takes pains to try to dispel the aura that the Barrio Chino has acquired. The interior shots of the different bars are complemented by two photographs of the streets of the Fifth District, the first of one during

Figure 5.4 On stage at the Criolla night club. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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Figure 5.5 Interior of the Los Gabrieles bar. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

the day, and the second, an external picture of La Criolla again, but this time at night. By alternating between diurnal and nocturnal shots, Planes reinforces further his conclusion that the Raval is merely dirty rather than nefarious or exciting. The effect is one of virtually turning on the lights, showing the readers briefly what is really there, and then switching them off again. The nocturnal resonance of the area is thus the one that persists but not before it has been corrected or adjusted through Planes’s commentaries and Casas’s photography. Consider, for example, how Planes describes what he sees in the cold light of day; he is particularly harsh with the women of the night: Aquelles velles horribles de la nit, ara, a la llum del sol, s’expliquen molt més, i quant veieu llurs opulències evolucionar pesadament entre els coves de verdura, trobeu que l’atmosfera literària es va descolorint, descolorint … Ha estat una llàstima que fossin els literats els que ‘descobrissin’ el districte V. Fóra molt millor que l’hagués descobert la Comissió d’Higiene. (14)

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Those horrible old women of the night, now, in the light of the sun, are understood much more, and when you see their opulence evolve heavily between the caves of greens, you find that the literary atmosphere discolours, discolours … It has been a pity that the literary types were the ones who ‘discovered’ the Fifth District. It would have been much better if it had been the Hygiene Commission that had discovered it.

Casas, for his part, allows his lens to do the talking and shows once more his predilection for high-angle shots. His photo of a central street in the Fifth District at 11 a.m. is taken from quite a height and reveals a brightly sunlit street with vendors stretching into the distance (fig. 5.6). In the bottom right of the frame six people look directly at the elevated camera. In this scene, the camera(man) definitely seems to be an interloper and a threatening presence. Notice, for instance, how one woman holds her hand out protectively so as to keep back her son; it is an unnecessary gesture, for he is transfixed already and static in the camera’s sights. Planes’s irony regarding what he sees as it relates to the neighbourhood’s reputation is blatant: ‘En el cor del Districte V, a les onze del mati. Tot aixo no fa pensar gens en la cocaina, oi?’ (12–13) (In the heart of the Fifth District at 11 o’clock in the morning. All of this doesn’t bring cocaine to mind at all, does it?). As for the photograph that returns the reader’s gaze to the nocturnal Raval, it is another inspired shot on account of the dynamism of its contrasting shadows and lights (fig. 5.7). Planes’s caption is descriptive yet again ironic: ‘En ple carrer de Cid, els vianants, la nit, i el rètol lluminós de “La Criolla” s’esforcen a donar qualitat literària a la foto’ (13) (In the middle of Cid street, the pedestrians, the night, and La Criolla’s illuminated sign make an effort to give a literary quality to the photo). As in the daytime picture, Casas uses the reflective qualities of the cobblestones, here counterpoising the sign with the bright street at the bottom centre of the image. All of this reflected light has an effect on the human subjects who are lined up across the middle of the frame: the faces of all but one are blanked out, obfuscating their features and underlining at once the anonymity of the denizens of the Fifth District and their lack of remarkableness. The contrast also works metaphorically as the contrast between neighbourhoods in Barcelona, a visual disparity that is borne out at an architectonic level as well (and that I deal with in greater detail in the following chapter). This first issue of Imatges ends with a striking photo taken for a story about a local dance studio. The piece offers a look inside the Pauleta

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Figure 5.6 ‘In the heart of the Fifth District at 11 a.m.’ Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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Figure 5.7 Night shot outside of La Criolla nightclub. Imatges 1, p. 14. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona and Núria Casas Formiguera.

Pamies dance school, the best of its kind in Barcelona. Aside from the fact that it establishes the type of behind-the-scenes story that Imatges will often feature, what makes it notable is, again, Casas’s work with the camera. The final image of the inaugural issue is an important one for the way that it consolidates the photographer’s general use of contrast in this specific issue as well as for how it foreshadows some of the techniques and visual styles that both he and the editor will pursue during the course of Imatges’s run. The picture in question is a low shot of Pauleta Pamies taken through the legs of five of the girls that she is teaching; it is a shot that makes the youngsters appear to be showgirls (fig. 5.8). The difference between the white legs and the black suits that they wear is so marked that their legs seem detached. What is more, the lack of visible space between the girls in the line then makes the overlapping effect appear to be a case of photomontage. Even though, in this case, it is just a matter of the camera’s angle, the effect is one of manipulation and slight

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dislocation, two techniques employed at the level of the photography and editing that will predominate in the way in which Imatges approaches both human and material subjects in general. The stories and features in Imatges run a wide and varied gamut from pieces about specific areas and structures of the built environment of the city of Barcelona, through features on elements of the Age in general, and also to a handful of specific events in the life of the city that created an especial resonance. Regardless of the theme, however, the visual engagement with the subject remains paramount and the photograph the tool for the training of Barcelona’s modern eye according to an aesthetic that reinvigorated the way that the city saw itself and surreptitiously contributed to the normalization of the Roaring Twenties’ social changes during a key liminal period in the Catalan capital’s modern history. Reintroducing Barcelona As part of its coverage of Catalonia’s capital city, Imatges reintroduces the citizens of Barcelona to many of their metropolis’s iconic buildings, such as the Palau de la Música, the Sagrada Familia expiatory temple, the Ritz Hotel, the França Railway Station, and the Biblioteca Nacional. The journalists’ approach to the established built environment is often predicated on the ‘seen from within’ perspective that they employ in the first issue. As ever, though, it is in the photographic documentation of these edifices that one finds the real innovations in terms of how the city manifests or is pictured. Once more, Gabriel Casas stands out in this regard. Casas takes compelling shots that sometimes require a rather risky dedication to his profession so that he may photographically amass elements of the city’s built environment and reformat them in a way that consistently challenges staid and static views of the urban milieu. Casas’s proclivity for interesting angles that both complement and challenge the viewer’s previous conceptions is clear in the stories that deal with two of Barcelona’s Modernista masterpieces: the Palau de la Música (1905–8) by Domènech i Muntaner and then Gaudí’s Expiatory Temple Sagrada Familia (1882–). In ‘L’Orfeo Català vist per dins i el mestre Mollet, vist de la vora’ (The Catalan Orpheum Seen from Within and Master Mollet, Seen from the Side) by Melcior Font, Casas’s originality and industriousness become part of the text, thus reinforcing the presence of the photographer in the story at both the time of creation and reception of the journalistic artifact. For instance, upon observing

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Figure 5.8 ‘Pauleta’s “girls.”’ Imatges 1, p. 24. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona and Núria Casas Formiguera.

the way in which Casas has positioned himself so as to get a high-angle shot of the Palau’s massive organ, Font observes that ‘Quan En Domènech i Montaner va fer el Palau de la Música, no devia comptar amb que, un dia, un fotògraf, se’l miraria d’aquesta mena de manera’ (5–6) (When Domenech i Montaner built the Palau de la Música, he must not have foreseen that one day, a photographer would have

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looked at it from this type of way). Casas’s style is not one of traditional aggrandizement, however, and as is clear from this piece, his interest in the myriad objects that are contained within the urban environment can trump human subjects. Consider for example how he shoots Maestro Millet, conductor of the Orfeó (fig. 5.9). The composition of the picture is such that the man competes with a siphon in terms of grandeur. Interestingly, the siphon in the shot of Millet takes centre stage on page 5 and is as tall as the massive organ pictured below it. One can read the influence of the Jazz Age style at work here in Casas and Planes’s mise-en-scène of the bottle, which was used to spritz up cocktails and was often employed as a metonymic symbol for the bar culture of the time. The jazz connection is furthered by Font’s description of Millet’s movements as ‘a form of jazz that is used for Bach’ (6). The ‘intrepid’ Gabriel Casas is also behind the camera for the next issue’s story by Màrius Gifreda on Antoni Gaudí’s famously unfinished temple (Gifreda ‘La Sagrada Familia’). Once more, the actions of the photographer are documented in the text as the author comments directly on the way in which Casas climbed higher and further out on beams in order to show the readers of Imatges this iconic building from new angles. By just the third issue, Casas had already established his own style or auteurship in terms of his approach to buildings. His love of acute angle shots is clear. It is an aesthetic that is obviously informed by a conception of New York–style heights – an idea that had come up one week earlier in Casas’s brief piece entitled ‘Els nostres gratacels?’ (Our Skyscrapers?) in which he displays the power of perspective and angle before engaging the reader directly with a joke. In this one-page article Casas shoots Cambó’s house and the Barcelona Telefònica building from extreme low angles so as to make them appear like skyscrapers. Then, in the text, he sustains that if the reader were to imagine a low-lying horizontal suburban building put on its side, then Barcelona would have a real one (Casas 20). If the images of the buildings that Casas treats initially in Imatges are notable both for his use of dramatic angles and his willingness to risk his own personal safety for the shot, subsequent treatments of wellknown elements of the built environment in Barcelona are remarkable because of the way that he introduces his twin interest in the multiple object. This fascination is signalled in Imatges 4 in a special feature on the Ritz Hotel that eschews the architectural aesthetics of the exterior and instead takes the reader into the building’s depths (Planes ‘El que consum’). The story is yet another ‘behind-the-scenes’ piece that

Figure 5.9 ‘Mollet and siphon.’ Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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demystifies part of the social practice of Jazz Age high society. Casas’s accompanying photos are very fine and illustrate sharply his proclivity for ordered massiveness. For instance, on the three pages of the report one finds a variety of photos that, rather than privilege the people at work, favour objects such as stacks of plates with a seemingly disembodied chef’s head between them; rows of flowers; countless wine bottles standing on shelves; multiple plates of torrades, and the intricacy of lobster platters. Even when the chefs are more visible, as in a nicely composed shot of them working, the depth of field means that the stoves and their hanging pots become the centre of attention rather than their human users toiling away beneath them. By issue 8, Casas’s unique approach to his subjects was such that the differences between his style and that of the other main photographer of the journal, Gaspar, were evident. Stories in this issue on the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Estació de França serve as good illustrations of this. The photos by Gaspar in the first instance are long shots – the piles of books are prevalent but they don’t receive the same treatment that Casas would have given them and the four pictures are traditionally laid out, without any special montage or effects (Schop ‘La Biblioteca de Catalunya’). When one compares this treatment with the photos by Casas in ‘Una nit al mar amb Barca de pesca’ (A Night at Sea with a Fishing Boat) by Joaquim Vayreda i Aulet and ‘226 trens entren I surten cada dia per l’Estació de França’ (226 Trains Enter and Leave the Estació de França Every Day), however, Casas’s category shows. In ‘Una nit’ a picture of fish laid out in ice is superimposed over another shot of the men sitting, which covers the corner of a shot of the boats in the surf. Even a simple long shot of the beach and boats on page 9 is framed on the left by the mast of one of them, thereby giving an added depth and complexity to a basic image. This type of manipulation of the mise-enscène is not developed in the photos by Gaspar, which is surprising given his training and experience as a filmmaker. As for the station piece, Casas’s first contributions are more traditional: dynamic long shots of the tracks with a steaming train arriving on page 19; trains in the station and the curvature of edifice evident from his position; the hall of the station with a large amount of the image dedicated to the marble floor, which creates a sense of greater space that corresponds nicely to the caption that states that over one hundred and twenty thousand passengers have passed through it in one day. On page 20 Casas again demonstrates his proclivity for rows of items, showing first a collection of handles and then the electric map that tracks the movements

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of the myriad locomotives. The horizontal lines on the right of the image contrast with the vertical handles on the left. This contrast seems to merge in the third image on the page, a photomontage that resembles a cockpit made of the wheels of a train, dials, and the top of the rail car. As the caption describes it: ‘El reportage de l’Estació de França ha inspirit al nostre company Casas aquest curiós “fotomontage”’ (Schop ‘226 trens’ 20) (The Estació de França has inspired our colleague Casas [to create] this curious ‘photomontage’) (fig. 5.10). Along with these excursions to and examinations of iconic buildings, Imatges also turns its reporters and photographers loose on other parts of Barcelona’s urban environment; thus, the port, the tram system, and the city’s industrial past as well as elements of daily life get attention. Casas’s appreciation for objects – and machinery especially – becomes even more acute in ‘Confidències d’un 58’ (vint-i-quatre hores d’un tranvía)’ (Confessions of a 58 [twenty-four hours of a tram]), a report on streetcars by Prous i Vila. Among his photographed subjects here figure a worker pictured beside a motor, the motors themselves, piles of tickets, and the basket of coins. The best photo from this feature, though, is a compelling one in which a worker is seen at the extreme left of the frame adjusting machinery that seems to engulf him; the contrast is such that man and machine appear to be one and, indeed, the mechanic’s head is counterpoised by a metallic wheel on the extreme right of the photo (Prous i Vila 9) (fig. 5.11). Casas manages to capture the same sort of complexity at the port in photos that accompany Josep Maria de Sagarra’s article ‘Visions del port’ (Visions of the Port). Even though these shots are relatively calm by his standards, he does employ the industrial objects of the locale – chains, wheels, and the like – so as to represent the complexity of a part of Barcelona that had been a source of exchange and movement, both legal and otherwise, throughout the city’s history. Like the tram system, the port exerts an important influence on the city at large, and this power is translated by Casas through his attention to the intricate details of what it comprises materially. Another element of this economic reality of the city is the industrial legacy that the chimney represents. Gifreda tackles this theme with a paean to the city’s chimneys that appears in the 8 October issue. Casas’s photos threaten to steal the show from Gifreda’s text, however, as the photographer highlights the verticality and dignity of the structures in a series of photos shown over a striking two pages. An interest in objects within the city extends beyond the objects’ basic life, as it were, as the journalistic gaze of Imatges takes into account the

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Figure 5.10 Photomontage by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

Figure 5.11 Tram mechanic. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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spent as well as the rediscovered thing. This manifests in stories on pawn shops, and especially in relation to the material detritus of the just finished Exposition. In the first case, Irene Polo’s story on casas d’empenyo explores part of the underside of the frivolous age. Then, in other stories, Navarro Costabella offers a look at the spotlights employed on the Expo site before Joaquim Vayreda i Aulet considers the liquidation of the merchandise from the Expo hotels that had been constructed on the Plaça Espanya. Gaspar’s shots of the lights in action and during their servicing are good, but in terms of composition they do not surpass the same type of treatment that Casas gave these machines while he served as the official photographer for the Expo paper. In the piece by Vayreda i Aulet, the visual theme that the photographer Esmeu establishes is one of multiplicity (rows of sheets, beds, books, etc.) presented in a Casaslike style. The message is clear and the image serves as a reminder that the crowds and energy of the Fair that once called all of these objects into use have now passed, leaving them behind as markers of the material needs of a singular event in the history of the city. Images of the Age In addition to the specific focus on Barcelona and the city’s urban landmarks, edifices, areas, and even detritus, Josep Maria Planes dedicated space to more general elements of the Age, such as mass spectacles, aviation, the glamour of the grand hotel, radio, and advertisements, as well as such frivolous pursuits as the journal’s aborted beauty contest and summer beach life. These components of the Jazz Age, which by 1930 had become commonplace, are given new life when rendered through the lenses of photographers such as Gaspar, Pioritz, and Casas. As one of the most important advances of the modern age, the conquest of the air through flight is a compelling theme. Not only did it expand the horizons of human endeavour, it also provided a sea change in terms of visual apprehension of the context of human life. Planes’s feature story about the Canudas aerodrome employs a parallel ‘graphic report’ on the machinery by Gaspar. Here, the editing and photomontage stand out, for the focus is not on the human aviator as hero, but rather again on the machine; with white outlines traced around them, the vehicles receive pride of place and stand out against both the natural background and that of the hangar. In the same issue, Pioritz takes on the Palace hotel in Madrid, the ‘punt dolç de la vida política i social d’Espanya’ (Olmedilla 16) (the sweet spot of Spain’s

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political and social life). As with the aerodrome, the photographer’s work offers a new perspective on a typical Jazz Age space, in this case through a series of shots of the hall and lobby, including a slanted one meant to approximate the drunkenness of an American tourist fleeing Prohibition. While the story may be from Madrid, the identification of a group of guests as Catalans reaffirms the fact that Imatges is a Catalan product for Catalan eyes. Like El Escándalo before it, Imatges also employed the type of ‘revelation’ story that would explain such things to the casual reader as how productions were put on, the mysteries of the radio, the manner in which hoardings were constructed, and even how films were shot. Issues 3–6 were replete with stories that touched on these topics. Capdevila’s ‘Com es posa una comedia’ (How a Comedy Is Staged) is a typical example, although it stands out especially for the glimpse into the world of theatrical objects and ephemera that the piece offers the reader through Casas’s photo of the prop room. The cacophony of this very busy image suggests the melding of multiple narratives of the many plays and shows that the theatre has put on through the sheer materialism of the props. At the same time, the picture reinforces Casas’s predilection for amassed things while introducing an exotic element in the form of a stuffed monkey that sits in the central foreground. In his contributions to Centeno’s story ‘Els misteris de la Radio’ from issue 5, Casas continues to push visual boundaries. The piece takes the reader on a tour of a radio transmitter, and while Casas’s first picture of the machinery is conventional enough, his treatment of the tower shows just how imaginative the photographer can be in his interpretation of the modern built environment. A low-angle shot of the tower alongside one taken from inside the bottom of it and then another, vertigo-inspiring point-of-view shot from the top, in which Casas’s feet are visible, highlight the structural materiality of the subject while at the same time bringing to the fore the precariousness of the photographer (and by extension, the reader) in this new world of artificially constructed heights and invisible radio waves (fig. 5.12). This same focus on metal and structure is evident in the similarly revelatory story about the Chocolate Juncosa neon sign, ‘Com es fa un anunci lluminós,’ from the same issue. The shots in this article are reminiscent of Casas but are not credited. One in particular – taken from behind the sign (fig. 5.13) – is especially intriguing in that this angle reverses the text on the front of the hoarding, thus rendering it secondary to the structure that holds it aloft. Subsequent articles such as Montanyà’s ‘Del trucatge a la realitat,’ which took the reader behind the scenes of an MGM movie shoot in

Figure 5.12 Radio tower from above and below. Imatges 5, p. 9. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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Figure 5.13 Interior of Juncosa sign. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

Hollywood, and the back-page announcement of the cancelling of the Imatges beauty pageant in the form of a montage of other newspapers’ coverage of the ‘scandal’ pointed to the creative process of visual media and print culture respectively.8 Singular Events While overt political commentary is not part of Imatges’s profile, its documentation of the city during certain key events that occur during

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its six-month run offers a glimpse at how the journal’s approach to the everyday adapts to cover the unusual. Three events in particular – the visit of the American warship the Chester, the November general strike, and the playing of the local football derby between FC Barcelona and Espanyol – provide politically charged material for the lenses of Imatges’s contingent of photographers. Casas’s shots and photomontage of the Chester in Vayreda i Aulet’s ‘El “Chester” al Port de Barcelona’ stand as some of his most dramatic work from this period. He makes the warship appear to be both beautiful and menacing while highlighting the mechanical aspects of it and thus creates a visual link to his treatments of other machines and buildings in Barcelona. As one can see in figure 5.14, Casas employs once more a high angle and keeps the converging wires and cords in focus, thus creating a second focal point, halfway up the mast, and establishing a greater sense of depth in his photo. The pictures of the Chester are of especial value in Vayreda’s eyes in that they represent the first ever images allowed to be taken of the ship. On account of this, he claims somewhat cheekily, they are documents of a strategic military importance of the first order (qtd in Doria 68). The photographic ‘scoop’ of this event is thus not only palpable at the local level but on an international one as well. A colour cover for the Catalan national day of 11 September may have graced the first page of the 10 September issue but this would mark the end of the relative lull in the the political situation in Catalonia. Labour tensions grew tenser and when the general strike was declared on 17 November Planes sent his photographers out to report on the event visually for Imatges’s readers. The cover of number 24 is particularly striking. Casas captures the action with his trademark excellent composition for a picture that was taken in the heat of the moment and in the middle of a firefight (fig. 5.14). The bars on a balcony on the Plaça del Teatre contain the police officer perfectly while the contrasting shadows heighten the menace of the cloaked figure. The other photos from this section are equally dramatic as Esmeu and Gaspar also shoot the conflict with an eye for the aesthetic qualities of a city under siege. The siege metaphor is clearly evident on the wrap-around cover of what would be the last issue of Imatges, which appeared only four days later on 25 November 1930. Casas is once again the author of the image, one that shows a row of Civil Guards watching the local football derby between FC Barcelona and Espanyol FC (fig. 5.15). The angle of the shot is such that the only full bodies that are visible are those of the paramilitaries. The crowd seated behind thus becomes reduced to a few faces

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Figure 5.14 The USS Chester. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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Figure 5.15 Cover of Imatges 24. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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and a sea of hats. At the same time, however, the power of the spectacle is evident; the game has captured the attention of the very men assigned to control the crowd. As Doria points out, though, their presence in the foreground constitutes a subliminal message alluding to the political tension in Barcelona at the time (123). Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that Planes’s editorial vision for Imatges reflected his own belief in the maturity of the Catalan reader/spectator vis-à-vis the international codes that the Jazz Age period had brought with it during the previous decade. By portraying the modern city of Barcelona in a way that exposes the reader to new techniques and ways of seeing, but by doing it in a manner that emphasises the local rather than a gawking admiration of foreign lifestyles, Planes practises a form of wish-fulfilment even as he indulges his didactic streak in the photo journal. For certain, these dynamics are visible in the story selection and the way in which the visual element is incorporated, but as regards the simple photographic act upon which Imatges is based, I would suggest that Planes’s posture as it relates to gawking also manifests specifically in an acknowledgment of the pose and posing. These notions, which are fundamental to the subject’s self-recognition as photographic object and the photographer’s manipulation of the human subject in the elaboration of an image, are broached explicitly on at least two occasions in the pages of Imatges. Furthermore, the recurring presence of the photographer in the journal’s text keeps the reader constantly aware of the mediating agent between the city and the newsprint image of it. The question of posing arises first in ‘Una fàbrica de ballarines’ (A Ballerina Factory), in which, although Casas states that he wants to catch the young women in action, the young dancers are hesitant to comply because they find it hard to believe that they will look good without the chance to pose (Pons i Guitart 14–15). While there is one staged shot in the story on page 14, Casas manages to snap one woman in the act of dancing from beneath the curled arm of the teacher, which acts as a frame with the body. The tension here is between the young women’s insistence on posing, an act that they equate with poise and beauty, and Casas’s indulgence in his own form of framing so as to create an image that is at once à propos to the story and aesthetically interesting (fig. 5.17). In this case, the secondary ‘lesson’ for the women is a modern one that may be extrapolated to the citizenry at large: one is just as compelling a subject in action as when simply at rest.

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Figure 5.16 Cover of Imatges 25, the last issue. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona and Núria Casas Formiguera.

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Figure 5.17 Flamenco dancer. Imatges 11, p. 15. Photo by Casas. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona and Núria Casas Formiguera.

The theme of the pose returns explicitly two months later, in ‘El ciutadà davant l’objectiu’ (The Citizen before the Lens). In this piece, Antoni Lefler discusses the experience of being photographed, vanity, and the aesthetics of the pose while situating the photographer among the citizenry. In my opinion the most important element of this story is Lefler’s point that the city dweller may potentially become a photographic subject

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Figure 5.18 Group of reporters. Imatges 19, p. 13. Photo uncredited.

at any moment (Lefler 13) (fig. 5.18). The accompanying photos by Casas, Garrigosa, and Gaspar show the cameramen in action as they take pictures on the street. In addition to the unambiguous treatment of the photographic moment, this story makes clear that the potential for imageability is part and parcel of the experience of the modern city. While Imatges was a relatively short-lived graphic journal, its appearance during the beginning of the end of Barcelona’s Jazz Age makes it an invaluable document for better understanding the later reception and adaptation of this cosmopolitan aesthetic. That it was the brainchild of Josep Maria Planes, one of the era’s most influential figures in the Catalan capital, only reinforces its importance. Likewise, that it helped fill the visual void created by the closing of the Exhibition and made excellent use of Gabriel Casas, arguably the city’s best photographer, places it squarely at the centre of the development of print culture in the Catalan context. The first and last images in Imatges were taken by Casas, which is fitting given his stature and importance as a visual recorder of the time; that these bookends were political subjects (the first, the Diputació President, the last, the Civil Guard) serves as a convenient reminder of the political context that inflected both the Jazz Age proper and its aftermath.

6 The Colour of a Cocktail: J.M. de Sagarra’s Aperitiu and Vida privada

J.M. de Sagarra Just as Josep Maria Planes was a versatile journalist who gravitated to the centre of the action during Barcelona’s Jazz Age heyday, so too was Josep Maria de Sagarra another key figure during this vibrant time. A multi-talented writer and journalist, he was instrumental in the articulation not only of the practice of the Age as it played out but also in its later criticism – both social and spatial – during what I call the ‘hangover’ period. Like Francesc Madrid, Sebastià Gasch, and Planes, Sagarra epitomized the cross-over potential between aesthetic pursuits and journalism and was to become one of the most elegant and respected voices of the Catalan experience of the Roaring Twenties. Sagarra was born into an upper-class Barcelona family on 5 March 1894. After abandoning a budding diplomatic career, the young man dedicated himself to literature, starting as a poet but then quickly becoming well-known as a playwright. He was an especially prolific writer and between the years 1922 and 1932, he wrote four books of poetry, penned regular articles for the republican La Publicitat and Mirador, and published some twenty-two plays.1 Sagarra’s first novelistic endeavour, Paulina Buxareu (1919), dealt with the turn-of-the-century industrial bourgeoisie. Apart from having been translated into Italian, this work, which the author described as a ‘sin of youth,’ did not enjoy any significant success (Ordoñez 13). Sagarra’s second novel, All i salobre (Garlic and Sea Salt), appeared in 1928, when he had already taken up an important position in Catalan letters. The risqué themes and subjects of the book shocked the bourgeois circles that Sagarra frequented. As Ordóñez points out, Sagarra’s

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habitual readers were expecting a colourful and picturesque social fresco but found themselves instead face to face with ‘un tenebroso aguafuerte de lujuria impotente, alcohol triste y fariseísmo cobarde, pintado con el blanco y negro de la desesperación y la náusea’ (13) (a dark watercolour of impotent luxury, sad alcohol, and cowardly Pharisaism, painted with the black and white of desperation and nausea). All i salobre’s criticism may have fired over the bows of the bourgeoisie but, nevertheless, they were still shots taken from a distance. The book’s focus was on a social periphery: Girona and the coastal leisure areas of the capital’s moneyed classes. It was not until 1932 and the publication of Vida privada (Private Life) that Barcelona, its zones of vice and spectacle, along with those members of high society who frequented them (and had, in the minds of many, collaborated with the dictatorship), came under Sagarra’s critical gaze. ‘L’aperitiu’ As a full-fledged participant in Barcelona’s Jazz Age tertulias and cocktail culture and as a respected journalist, Sagarra had a privileged position from which to opine on the social condition of the Catalan capital. His most famous journalistic haunt was in the right margin of page 2 of Mirador. From that space he provided regular servings of his own brand of literary journalism in the form of a far-ranging and interdisciplinary column called ‘L’aperitiu’ (The Aperitif). This section, which ran from 1929 to 1936, served as a continuation of the writings that Sagarra had contributed earlier in the 1920s to the equally liberal newspaper La Publicitat. This virtually continual presence in the Catalan press as an extremely well-read commentator with a wide breadth of vision and exquisite style makes him a valuable informant in terms of the journalistic response to social changes in Barcelona during the feliços vint.2 Sagarra is an especially effective source because his outlook is neither reactionary nor revolutionary; he appreciates tradition yet keeps a relatively open mind as to the demands of modern life and how mores adapt and evolve. As Casasús observes, in his ‘Aperitiu’ and La Publicitat material one finds examples of a vigorous and original study of manners or costumisme (99). Politically, Sagarra is firmly on the republican left and, as a supporter of both Catalanism and democracy in general, he chafed at the censorship that was in place during most of this period. What is more, as Garolera points out, even though Sagarra was well aware of

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the fugacity of the journalistic genre, he saw it as a way to increase the public’s desire for things literary and he perceived value in the ephemeral nature of the newspaper (Garolera xiv). Aware then of the cultural context in which he found himself and also cognizant of how the form of his expression influenced its immediate reception, Sagarra stands at once as a protagonist and a critic of the processes that his city experienced under the dictatorship and how they manifested in journalistic text. This critical distance coupled with his own multidisciplinary skill as a journalist, poet, playwright, and novelist is what would lead him to take matters into his own hands when the time was finally right in 1932 for the type of reflection and devastating appraisal of the Barcelona Jazz Age that, given his unique qualifications, only he could deliver. Before he would administer his coup de grâce with Vida privada, however, Sagarra offered columns on many different elements of the Roaring Twenties phenomenon: from bar culture and sports like boxing and football to the shows and films that helped cement the aesthetic and the practical codes that developed as the gentrification of what once had been marginal occurred slowly but surely. While Sagarra’s topics varied wildly, one constant in his deliberations on modern life is a strong appreciation and awareness of Barcelona as an urban centre in flux. Like Planes, he was interested in the cosmopolitanism that was part and parcel of the Catalan capital’s modern experience, and like the editor of Imatges and his fellow critic, Sebastià Gasch, he looked beyond the salons and art galleries and considered spaces like the street and the bar to be just as rich for such considerations. He sums up this urban awareness nicely in an article written about a trip to London in November of 1929 when he states that ‘Totes les ciutats tenen el seu punt dolç escenogràfic; és aquell lloc en el qual la pedra de la ciutat s’estova i es fa apta per a emmotllar-se a una forma de melodrama’ (Sagarra L’aperitiu 90) (All cities have their scenographic sweet spot; it’s that place where the stone of the city gives way and becomes apt for a form of melodrama). In Sagarra’s Barcelona, this sweet spot is a moveable feast that manifests in the wonders of an everyday that resists the static by changing constantly. And as is obvious from the title of his column space, the writer considers the aperitif hour, both metaphoric and literal, to be another sort of sweet spot, one that has lost its preeminence perhaps, having been once ‘l’hora màxima de l’home civiltzat’ and by the 1920s diluted through the exigencies of modern urban life. Nevertheless, compared to the coffee break, the aperitif time in its leisure embodies paradoxically this modernity because it represents an

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eventual liberation from work, and what is more, the critic affirms poetically, has an air of gasoline, silk stockings, and newsprint (5). Sagarra also sees much more inventiveness in the aperitif than in the coffee break, embodied above all in the cocktail shakers that the barmen wield like cinema directors (6). In his first instalment of ‘L’aperitiu,’ the writer establishes an important reflective aspect that will accumulate over time and mark his critical perspective from the paper’s literal margin. Referring to the newspaper as a critical, material object, he states: ‘jo veig en cada secció, en cada article, en cada títol, una referència a aquelles hores de què parlava’ (7) (I see a reference to those hours of which I was speaking in each section, in each article, in each title). Thus, there is some connectivity within the cacophony of the newspaper as form but it is a linkage that goes beyond the page and flows through practice before being related back to another section of the paper. Taken this way, the newspaper is more than a simple representative organ, it is a filter and a conduit that connects the reader to the city by making the urban manifest in his/her hands. Reflexivity and juxtaposition feed one another, thus approximating the experience of the urban through an individual’s reading of the paper and concurrent cognitive mapping of the city in space and time. In many of his early Aperitiu columns Sagarra engages directly with jazz music and the urban aesthetics with which it is associated. In an article about the poster for a concert by the jazz pianists Wiener and Doucet, for instance, he comments on how the stylized representation of what the musicians offer has a definite impact on the reception of the encompassing space where they will perform. For Sagarra, then, print culture at this point in time exerts a lot of power. He goes so far as to venture that such a poster on a wall in Barcelona changes the air momentarily, eliciting a physical response from the viewer and even augmenting the experience of the urban as ‘els automòbils multipliquin per deu la natural olor de la gasolina’ (10) (the automobiles multiply by ten the natural scent of gasoline). The inference here is that Barcelona is part of a greater Europe-wide circuit; that it exists as a destination on a scale beyond the local, with the jazz performance serving as the linking system. Along these lines, in a later piece, he mentions how jazz music is everywhere in the city and has almost become part of the body: ‘El jazz se sent a tot arreu amb una brutalitat de màquina. Aquesta brutalitat s’ens ha fet tant de la nostra pell, que la portem enganxada a l’orella com portem la corbata damunt la camisa’ (80) (Jazz is felt all around

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with machine-like brutality. That brutality has become such a part of our skin that we wear it hooked to the ear as we wear a tie overtop a shirt). The mention of ‘brutality’ echoes Gasch’s interpretation of the same phenomenon through his concept of violència. Of all the Jazz Age spaces in Barcelona, the bar is the one to which Sagarra returns most often in his writings. Sometimes his contributions are short and impressionistic, such as his take on a woman having a drink published on 7 February 1929: Entre el gris de la conversa i el soroll del fum es veu una dona sentada en un tamboret del bar. És una persona nova, encara no ha iniciat cap somriure per ningú. Va vestida de color de pèsol tendre, i duu sabates de pell de serp. Ha demanat un Martini sec i s’entreté a fer una mica de sang a la punta de la palla que xucla amb el vermell del llavi. (11) Amidst the grey of the conversation and the noise of the smoke one sees a woman seated on a stool at the bar. She’s new, she still hasn’t elicited a smile from anyone. She is dressed in a soft pea colour and wears snakeskin shoes. She has asked for a dry Martini and entertains herself by making a little bit of blood on the tip of the straw that she sucks with the red of her lip.

On different occasions, the bar serves as a referent for other ideas, like time, memory, and literature. For Sagarra, bars are spaces where words get hotter, the ice in drinks becomes colder, and clocks lose their impertinence (L’aperitiu 79). They are a place where the bartender, one of the important figures of the Age, performs his syncretic magic in the creation of cocktails, the metaphor par excellence for the form of cosmopolitan modernity that the city was experiencing. Sagarra’s heightened appreciation for both banal spaces and those of mass spectacle notwithstanding, the writer does not get caught up in the excitement of the Age and, as I mention above, is able to keep his faculties about him as he observes, stylizes, and comments on his city. Even as early as the opening months of 1929, Sagarra’s intuition is telling him that a climax has been reached. In a piece entitled ‘Grandesa i decadencia del cabaret’ (Grandeur and Decadence of the Cabaret) he relates how the owner of a famous cabaret told him that he had never before made so much money. Sagarra’s nose smells what he calls ‘decadence at the hour of the aperitif’ (11), a theme that he uses in another article in which he provides the historical counterpoint of boom town Barcelona during

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the First World War, when the drinks were stronger, the women were more beautiful, and there was more scandal and general atmosphere to that burgeoning Age (11–12). Another sign of the decadence that he sees creeping into the general feel of the city is the fact that the cabarets have lost what he describes as their ‘perversity’ (342). That is to say that for him, when bourgeois married couples start frequenting cabarets together one knows that the heydays are most definitely over. The End of the Age By early 1931, republicanism in Spain had been gaining strength despite the continuation of the monarchy at the hands of Primo de Rivera’s replacement, General Dámaso Berenguer. As Carr points out, while government by decree and some censorship continued, the General ‘lacked the moral force to make authoritarian rule effective’ (Carr 601). Conservative classes in the country had lost faith in the monarchy’s ability to stop the rise of socialism, and rather than push for a military solution, they decided to bet on Niceto Alcalá Zamora’s conservative republicanism (602).3 Socialists and Republicans swept the provincial capitals during the municipal elections of 12 April 1931. On the other hand, the monarchists were able to preserve their hold only on smaller towns where the system of caciquismo (local bosses) persisted. The King, seeing that his position was untenable, fled the country, and the Second Spanish Republic was declared on 14 April. In Catalonia, the municipal elections resulted in large gains for the Catalan left at the expense of the Lliga Regionalista, whose dedication to its bourgeois ideals had led it to support the existing regime. The major winner was the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), a party that formed through the fusion of Francesc Macià’s Estat Català and the Partit Catalanista Republicà (formerly Acció Catalana, the group supported by many members of Mirador’s writing and editorial staff) (McRoberts 33). Macià subsequently proclaimed Catalonia part of a nonexistent federation of Iberian republics. This risky assertion was rescinded some days later in exchange for the creation of a regional government – the Generalitat – that would prepare a statute of Catalan autonomy to be submitted to the Spanish parliament. The statute that eventually passed in September 1932 was a watered-down version of an initial one that had obtained an overwhelming 99 per cent support in a popular referendum held a year earlier (34). Had that first statute been enacted, it would have given Catalonia much more independence.

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Figure 6.1 Woman smoking at Bar América in Hotel Colón by Junyent. Mirador 106, p. 2. Courtesy of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Instead, rather than an autonomous state in a federal republic, Catalonia remained a part of an ‘integral’ Spain, the conception of which was firmly entrenched in the Spanish republican mindset.4 In the end, Catalonia gained marginal taxation powers, a co-official status for Catalan, and control of its unique civil law. Education, on the other hand, remained under the power of the Spanish state. Also, the December 1931 constitution specifically forbade official links among the Catalanspeaking Països catalans. When one considers the rapid changes that occurred in Spain at the turn of the decade, 1931 and 1932 stand out as the beginning of the political and social hangover in a country that had experienced the majority of its Jazz Age largely marked by Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. In the words of Paul Preston, ‘the coming of the Second Republic signified a threat to the most privileged members of society and raised inordinate hopes among the most humble’ (Preston 24). Although the peseta had begun to slide in 1928, the economy as a whole only started to feel the effects of the larger depression in the early 1930s. In addition to external

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economic forces, the nascent civilian government had to contend with a plethora of internal concerns. During those early years of the Republic, strikes were frequent and the promise of land redistribution coupled with falling agricultural prices forced landholders to stop maintaining their fields (33). Also, the fighting among political groups that eventually resulted in open conflicts in the streets began to intensify. During the early summer of 1932, Sagarra was already foreshadowing his belief that the Jazz Age was well and truly over. In one of his Mirador columns from June entitled ‘Bridge,’ he relates that in Paris, the cultural hub of the gentrified Age in Europe, people were no longer spending money on frivolities. Theatres, restaurants, and cabarets were suffering and, in many cases, closing. He ventures that the life of leisure and vice had diminished ‘one hundred percent’ (Sagarra ‘Bridge’ 2). In its place, the more sedate and scientific card game of bridge had emerged, driving another nail into the wild Jazz Age’s coffin: Als camps de golf i de tennis, als clubs nàutics, a les acadèmies de boxa, l’esport compta ben poc: l’important és jugar al bridge […] aviat no hi haurà girls, ni joqueis, ni res per culpa del bridge. I el vici s’ha escampat a tot arreu. Ara la febre d’aquell joc és la febre de París. No es va al teatre, no es va al cinema, no es va al cabaret, no es va enlloc. (2) At the golf courses and tennis courts, the nautical clubs and boxing schools, sport counts for very little: the important thing is to play bridge […] soon there will be no chorus line girls, or jockeys or anything on account of bridge. And the vice has extended everywhere. Now the fever of this game is the fever of Paris. One doesn’t go to the theatre, one doesn’t go to the cinema, one doesn’t go to the cabaret, one doesn’t go anywhere.

In May 1932, Sagarra revealed to his Mirador readers his intention to write an ‘authentic’ novel about the social and political history of Catalonia and Barcelona (Sagarra ‘Olor de novel·la’ 2). So against a backdrop of social and political uncertainty in Catalonia and abroad, Sagarra spent two months in Barcelona’s Ateneu library chronicling and recreating the heyday of an Age, the popular memory of which was fast receding.5 Vida privada Compared to the ferocity of modern international combat, the interwar years in Europe were a respite, a period during which a degree of

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capriciousness could be indulged. As leisure pursuits grew more and more popular in the collective, carefree release that followed the horrors of the First World War, frivolousness – evident in the jazz style, flappers, cocktail hours, gambling, and late-night revelling of the time – was ingrained in the aesthetic of the moment. In turn, this demand for diversion helped contribute to the Jazz Age’s broader development and gentrification, as more and more venues for spectacles and leisure activities appeared and the existing ones expanded. As I point out above, the Spanish government’s neutral stance during the First World War had a direct impact on the development of international social styles in Catalonia. With Barcelona assuming, however briefly, the role of pan-European city and perfomers flocking to the safety of its clubs and bars, the Jazz Age got a raucous headstart in the Catalan capital. When the war ended and the gentrifying nature of mass culture turned invevitably what was once avant-garde into something more mainstream, the upper classes in Catalonia embraced the general lighthearted fashion that emerged in the war’s wake. These members of the social elite enjoyed the favour of a dictator, Primo de Rivera, who cracked down relentlessly on the left-wing labour movements that threatened to upset the bourgeois and aristocratic apple carts. This repression was especially acute in Barcelona, where it extended to Catalan culture as a whole. The Catalan bourgeoisie’s acceptance of the dictatorship – tacit or not – makes Barcelona’s experience of the time unique and creates an interesting dynamic – one that Josep M. de Sagarra mines fruitfully in his two-part novel, Vida privada. The identification of something or someone as frivolous entails a value judgment. Vida privada is an excellent case in point in that it is a retrospective assessment of a time, the narrative tone of which is very clearly critical.6 Part 1, which is set during the heyday of the age during the 1920s, offers a particularly mordant verdict on the Age and on the Catalan bourgeoisie and aristocrats who most enjoyed its whimsical follies. To that end, Sagarra’s narrative focuses on elements of decay – moral, physical, and political – in a way that thus ties decadence to a portrayal of the frivolous as something wasteful. This attitude is articulated spatially in the novel as the zones frequented by the Age’s elite participants manifest in the text and come under the critical lens of Sagarra and his narrator. An examination of these spaces highlights their importance to the novel’s critical project and reinforces my overall argument that journalists and Catalanist intellectuals such as Sagarra enacted their own resistance to political repression and contributed to a resurgent Republican

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Catalanism through a direct engagement with the aesthetics of their local built environment. While in the case of Part 1 of Vida privada and its latent manifestation of the Jazz Age city, it may be less a statement of resistance – the dictatorship was over when the novel appeared – than a critical reflection on the players who enacted the Roaring Twenties style in Barcelona, that it stands as a final instalment in the mapping of the Catalan capital in the 1920s through an upper-class lens makes it a key part of the processes that I have been detailing in this book. The winner of the prestigious Premi Creixells, Vida privada is considered by many to be a masterpiece of Catalan narrative. Written during a metaphorical hangover, the book begins with a literal one. The great opening description of a protracted awakening is rich on many levels: ‘Els parpres, en obrir-se, varen fer un clac gairebé imperceptible, com si estiguessin enganxats a causa d’una pretèrita convivència amb les llàgrimes i el fum, o per aquella secreció produida en els ulls irritats després d’una lectura molt llarga sota una llum insuficient’ (Sagarra Vida privada 9) (The eyelids, upon opening themselves, made a scarcely perceptible click, as if they were stuck from a previous socializing between tears and smoke, or from that secretion produced in eyes irritated from a long session of reading in insufficient light). Just as the owner of the eyelids in question, the aristocratic protagonist Frederic Lloberola, manages to rouse himself in Rosa Trènor’s Eixample flat at the beginning of the book, so, too, must Vida privada itself be considered an important literary awakening. Not only is it one of the first Catalan novels specifically about Barcelona written in the twentieth century, its blatant indictment of the city’s elite amounts to a social rousing and denunciation following a decade of decline, dictatorship, and stasis for Catalan culture. Vida privada’s narrative recreation of the Age debunks the glamorous image of the time and even if this criticism is not as blatant as Díaz Fernández’s of the Castilian scene, it is equal in the ferocity of its tone. Likewise, just as Díaz Fernández’s La Venus mecánica employed Madrid in its narrative project, Vida privada is a novel intimately tied to its city, Barcelona. The juxtaposition of the city of spectacles with one in which the political realities were much less enjoyable makes the novel indispensable as both urban study and social commentary. What is more, I would suggest that it was only after the Age had ended, censorship had been relaxed, and some perspective gained that such a novelistic vision of the time could be articulated. Vida privada, which encompasses the story of three generations of the aristocratic Lloberola family, begins in 1927. The second part of the

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book is set in 1932, after the Republic had been declared. The novel does not eschew melodrama and it is Frederic’s unpaid gambling debt that sparks the action in the first section. His irresponsibility in turn leads to sexual blackmail at the highest levels of society, the consequences of which mixed with the general frivolousness of the time paint a grim picture of moral and social bankruptcy. Certain urban spaces play a significant role in the detailing of this degeneration and two questions arise. First, what specific sites of the Jazz Age city does Sagarra engage? Second, how do their aesthetic and empirical qualities inform his mapping of the social decay of which they are portrayed to be a part and thus contribute to an understanding of Jazz Age Barcelona across its temporal continuum? In response to this first question, in my examination of Sagarra’s novel I consider multiple spaces, including two bourgeois interiors (one, a literal hangover space; the other, a gambling house), a garden, a well-known nightclub, and a bordello. Their geographical locations in Barcelona are crucial and, with the exception of the garden, they fall into two areas that serve as polar opposites to one another: the ‘private,’ bourgeois Eixample and the ‘public,’ lower-class Raval. Sagarra’s narrative plays off the obstensible differences in these two urban environments while predictably drawing lines between them that show that they may not be so far apart as commonly thought. In so doing, his novel resonates with the previous narrative, journalistic, and essayistic work of Francesc Madrid, Sebastià Gasch, and Josep Maria Planes. Private Spaces: The Eixample The action of Vida privada takes place in a recognizable and demarcated Barcelona. This precision of place and of movement of the characters throughout the city is not gratuitous. As noted, the author uses the metropolis extensively and runs a gamut of urban locales. The first of these is that most closely connected to the rise of the bourgeoisie in Barcelona, the Eixample. Two private spaces of this neighbourhood are of particular interest: first, the ‘morning after’ flat in which the protagonist, Frederic Lloberola, awakens and is confronted with the grim materiality of his lover’s existence; second, a bourgeois interior turned gaming house in which the leisure activity of gambling focuses the narrative on the bourgeois body in order to strip away the façade of propriety. In this sense, Sagarra’s project may be interpreted as a form of narrative taxidermy – one in which a moribund Catalan society’s ‘stuffing’ and

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sutures are purposefully left visible in his narrative artifice as part of a focused indictment of the upper classes. By alternately highlighting material possessions and the flesh, the narrator initiates his or her critique ‘indoors’ and provides a revealing look at the decadent private life named in the title of the book. In order to better understand Sagarra’s geographically keyed text it is necessary to consider the history and spatial qualities of the Eixample, the area that casts a long shadow over the entire novel and delimits the ‘private lives’ of the Age’s upper-class participants. The story of the intrigue leading up to the choice of Idelfons Cerdà’s plan for the Eixample – the extension or enlargement of Barcelona in the form of a regular grid made up of octagonal blocks – after the demolition of the city walls is well known.7 Equally familiar is that the Eixample became the new locus of bourgeois activity as families pushed outwards from the densely populated old city to occupy the newly created space between where the walls had been and the already established areas of Sant Gervasi, Gràcia, and Sarrià.8 It must be kept in mind that shortly after its implementation, the Eixample deviated from the architect’s founding premise. Cerdà’s original vision was of an urban sphere ruralized through the incorporation of green spaces and height limits on every block. In the early stages, while not entirely loyal to this conception, the Eixample did maintain a low density as it centred on the Passeig de Gràcia. The neighbourhood was primarily residential in nature and had not yet seen the lower floors of the blocks converted into retail space (Garcia Espuche 205). Also, during this initial period, what García Espuche calls the ‘exodus of the bourgeoisie’ to the middle of the Eixample served to sharpen the growing dichotomy in public perception and esteem between the old and new parts of the city (208). As the 1890s progressed, the Eixample began to change quickly. The new demographic and mercantile power that the neighbourhood exerted at the end of the 1880s was patent in many areas. The Plaça de Catalunya, which occupied the space at the western end of the Rambla, came to represent the ‘centre’ of the two Barcelonas. The Eixample developed a manufacturing sector, and densification increased as the social prestige that still clung to certain areas of the old city was fully transferred to the new. In the early twentieth century, the Eixample was a focal point of modernisme. Architects like Gaudí, Rubió i Bellver, and Puig i Cadafalch all built there. By following the modernista’s contracts, one can trace the trajectory of the bourgeoisie as they expanded from

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the central Quadrat d’Or throughout the neighbourhood and migrated west to the foot of the Collserola massif, also known as Tibidabo. Gradually, the Eixample became more and more densely packed as narrow buildings filled in any remaining access to the centres of the blocks. With the increased emphasis on retail space, the ground floors were almost completely given over to shops, and Cerdà’s vision of heightrestricted buildings was completely forgotten. The Eixample was also an important area for transportation. Its wide avenues accommodated tramlines, growing motorcar traffic, and, eventually, the metro. During the International Exhibition of 1929, the area was a key entry point via the renovated Plaça d’Espanya. The ‘Hangover’ Flat How does Sagarra establish the pervasive critical tone in his recreation of Jazz Age Barcelona during 1927? The novel’s consideration of the time is initiated with a detailed description of the interior of what I have labelled the ‘hangover’ flat. This Eixample apartment belongs to Rosa Trènor, Frederic Lloberola’s ex-lover and the fallen daughter of a well-to-do family who finds herself struggling to keep a place in highclass society. A close examination of her material possessions within this space reveals the decay that has afflicted the frivolous upper classes with which she fraternizes. The portrayal of Rosa Trènor’s bedroom as a panorama of imprecise shadows and light sets the stage for the novel’s investigation of the shady private dealings of the Barcelona elite. Even a ray of sunlight that slips through the shutters to challenge the room’s murkiness is defeated by the chamber’s aesthetics. In addition to its sordid, aquarium-like feel, the room is depicted as a site of temporal confusion – a touch that alludes to the way in which night and day became irrelevant for Jazz Age party-goers. Upon awakening, Lloberola is both unsure of and uneasy about the time. What has happened, the reader gradually learns, is that the married protagonist has inverted the typical diurnal/nocturnal rhythm by sleeping away almost the entire day after a night of revelry and passion with his ex-girlfriend, Rosa. His reluctance to face reality and the clock is the first sign of his frivolousness. While Frederic’s return to consciousness after his night out is rapid, his eye is systematic and deliberate in taking in his surroundings. A sense of detritus and, if not outright decomposition, then certainly decay, permeates the room, which is cluttered with worn and used

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ephemera. This ‘day after’ space sets the tone for the descriptions of the built environment that will follow. As with a hangover, the activities of the night before linger on and although she has left the flat, Rosa’s presence persists, too, like something she has shed: ‘El fum covat era el que impregnava els llençols i la pell de Frederic, barrejant-se amb les reminiscències d’un perfum industrial i amb tot allò que produeix la transpiració de dos cossos abandonats’ (10) (It was the accumulated smoke that impregnated the sheets and Frederic’s skin, mixing itself with the traces of an industrial perfume and with all that is produced by the perspiration of two abandoned bodies). From the beginning of the novel, then, the reader is confronted with a scene in which the seemingly childish and irresponsible nature of the upperclass protagonist is framed by a murky sense of dilapidation. The passage constitutes a seldom seen uncovering of the underbelly of the ‘glamour’ of the nights of the Roaring Twenties. Frederic and the narrator’s survey of the flat progresses to the bathroom – with its stagnant water – and then to the kitchen where a stray cat has entered to lap up some curdled milk. Throughout, the decayed materiality of Rosa Trènor’s existence is reinforced, thus evoking a feeling of sadness in Frederic as he absorbs the common bourgeois incongruity between appearances and reality. One object in particular, her zombie-like stuffed dog, stands out among the rest of the dusty and dirty articles. This grotesque artifice has an especially strong resonance, not only in terms of actual decay, but also in a political sense. The driedout and moth-eaten dog, whose stuffing is coming loose, is an easy metaphor for the run-down woman and for the entire decrepit and frivolous upper class. This interpretation, however, explains only part of the aesthetic and materialist implications of the beast in its space. The poorly held-together animal denotes more than the product of the ravages of time and eventual decomposition. I suggest that it is also indicative of the morally destabilizing process of bourgeois life as it sought to perpetuate itself in the years leading up to and during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. More precisely, this view alludes to cohabitation with dictatorship and/or opportunism and profiteering, all of which contributed to an imperfect ‘suturing’ of the Catalanist imaginary with the repression and censorship of Catalan culture during the period. The dog is an important symbol within this hangover space not only because it contributes to the novel’s foundational aesthetic of decay linked to class but also because it establishes a political undercurrent for Sagarra’s critical recreation of the time.

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When one considers the notion of collaboration during the dictatorship, it is important to keep in mind that there was a substantial civilian component of Primo de Rivera’s military government from as early as 1923. And while the dictator would draw from many different groups, one in particular, the Catalan branch of the Unión Monárquica Nacional, was called on, as Casassas Ymbert puts it, to ‘attempt to de-Catalanize Catalonia’ (Casassas Ymbert 36). Granted, the participation of a conservative branch of a monarchist league does not damn an entire social group. However, what is perhaps more disturbing for Catalan cultural specificity and potential sovereignty is to consider the pre- and postcoup links between Primo de Rivera and the more mainstream Catalan groups of the time, especially the emblematic Lliga Regionalista. Primo de Rivera partly justified his military coup on the grounds that the national questions of Euskadi, Catalonia, and Galicia were getting out of hand.9 Nevertheless, he still counted on the support of powerful sectors of Barcelona’s mercantile, industrial, and financial communities who had previously been involved, to varying degrees, in promoting ‘Catalan issues.’ As the perceived threat of anarchist violence grew, however, many of these groups welcomed closer links to a ‘strong, counterrevolutionary Spanish state’ (Ben-Ami 39). Writing in 1930, Artur Perucho generously proposes that certain regionalists, especially Mancomunitat president Josep Puig i Cadafalch, had been tricked by the dictator (Perucho 77). Other texts from the period paint a different picture. Take, for example, a loose sheet written by the founder of Estat Català and future president of the Generalitat, Francesc Macià. This manifesto declared pointedly that ‘La Lliga Regionalista hoy está ya dividida; […] los elementos conservadores y acaudalados abandonan el ideal creyendo poder aumentar el encaje metálico’ (Macià 171) (the Lliga Regionalista today is divided […] the conservative and affluent elements are abandoning the ideal believing that they can increase the cash stores). The stuffed dog in Vida privada is important also on account of the taxidermist that its appearance evokes. He is described as having been ‘unskilled’ and one whose shoddy and macabre luxury ‘reanimation’ of a pet represents a decayed process of production (10). This flawed production, symbolically rooted in death and decomposition, may be compared to the erosion and betrayal of Catalanist ideals by the supposedly nationalist bourgeoisie under Primo de Rivera during the Jazz Age. The false, or one might say, ‘stuffed,’ Catalanism of those who collaborated with the dictator – whether they were tricked or not – becomes as shoddy and tattered as the dog in Trènor’s flat.

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The actual history of Rosa’s acquisition of the (still living) dog that appears later in the story does not contradict this reading. That the beast belonged originally to a Castilian general (with whom Rosa had an affair) underlines the idea of a ‘selling out’ or a capitulation to the Spanish military/state. Consequently, the dog is symbolic of more than the space of the degenerate, frivolous present in which Frederic and Rosa find themselves and which, to a large extent, they embody. Through its citing of a grotesque suturing, it evokes a past in which the process of cultural and/or national regeneration and representation was compromised. In the narrative’s recreated 1927, the dog is an eerie mannequin included in a coterie of fashion items that are no longer able to keep up with the tensions and forces of the Age’s mode. That Rosa adorned the dog with an out-of-style garter is also relevant.10 This final touch highlights – and memorializes – the destructive nature of the desire between the general and her and, hence, between the Spanish military establishment and the daughter of a well-off Catalan family. For, as the reader learns, the garter ‘fou la primera cosa que tocaren les ungles tètriques del general quan ella va lliurar-se a l’idil·li’ (148) (was the first thing that the general’s squared nails touched when she devoted herself to the love affair). Desire and decay, two markers of the Age for Sagarra, intermingle within the aesthetic effect of the animal in the private interior of Rosa Trènor’s Eixample apartment. The hangover flat establishes various themes that are expanded later in the novel: the irresponsible character of Frederic, the sense of decay surrounding him and Rosa, and, as I propose here, a political stance incarnated in the materiality of the stuffed dog. Sagarra the narrative taxidermist is not finished with his upper-class subjects, however, and within the flashback that complements this compelling first scene, he goes to work again, employing his moralizing narrator and a session of gambling so as to lay bare the stitching in the bourgeois façade and reveal the characters’ own metaphorical stuffing. The analyses that follow explore Sagarra’s continued recreation of Jazz Age frivolity, specifically in regard to questions of urban space and its effect on the body. The Gambling Flat In order to provide a more explicit referent for the first scene, which begins in medias res, a flashback to the previous night’s festivities breaks the initial narrative stream. The scene in question centres on another Eixample space and details Lloberola’s reunion with Rosa as well as a

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gambling session that they and their friends enjoy. Sagarra and his righteous narrator deftly intertwine the moral emptiness of the ‘day after’ flat with the frivolousness and turpitude of the bourgeois interior-turned-gaming-house. The leisure pursuit of gambling was by no means exclusive to the Jazz Age. Gambling has a long and storied history and is an activity that has surfaced in a range of literary works. During the 1920s, though, it was an important and popular leisure activity enjoyed by many, especially the well-to-do. César GonzálezRuano recalls that sites of jazz spectacle and gambling often went together. He comments on the layout of one popular locale in Madrid, Maxim’s: ‘[a]l fondo, el the-danzant [sic] con una orquesta moderna, y arriba, en el primer piso, al que se subía desde el bar, la sala de juego con ruleta, la primera que vi en mi vida’ (González-Ruano 69) (at the back, the thé-dansant with a modern orchestra, and upstairs on the first floor, which you got to via the bar, the game room with a roulette wheel, the first that I saw in my life). González-Ruano also recounts that, by the middle of the decade, gambling was to be found everywhere in the Spanish capital: ‘Jugarse, se jugaba en todo Madrid: en los casinos, en los fondos de los cafés, en las más sórdidas e inverosímiles chirlatas, que tenían todas sus viejos chulos y matones profesionales; pero Maxim’s y el Ideal Room, […] yo creo que eran los sitios más elegantes’ (72) (Gambling, gambling all over Madrid: in the casinos, at the backs of the cafés, in the most sordid and unbelievable gambling dens, which had all their old pimps and professional thugs; but Maxim’s and the Ideal Room […] I believe that they were the most elegant places). As I mention in chapter 1, in Barcelona during the 1920s, the military governors made repeated attempts to control the nightlife of the city and to crack down on gambling and pornography by restricting the operating hours of various nocturnal establishments. Although the restrictive atmosphere of the government gradually relaxed, in Vida privada gambling is still portrayed as a diversion enjoyed by the upper classes in private. It is an ostensibly friendly and lighthearted pursuit, but the dynamics of gaming exert strong effects on the participants, which are exploited by the narrator to further the novel’s critique. The gambling scene takes place in the apartment of Mado, the girlfriend of Bobby Xuclà. Xuclà, a major character in the book, is introduced as one of Frederic’s most loyal friends, a fellow aristocrat and a friendly go-between for the protagonist and Rosa. He and Frederic arrive at the flat a half-hour before midnight and are greeted at the door  by the hostess, who wears what the narrator describes as satin

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pajamas.11 The threshold of the entrance gives way to the menjador, where the game of baccarat is well underway. This area of the flat, which is normally associated with the communal activity of eating or the more socially relevant practice of entertaining, is now the scene of speculation and wagering.12 It has a visceral, carnal energy, here expressed in terms of the reactions of the female participants: ‘el joc dilatava els ulls, fent oblidar la presència del rimmel i precipitant les coïssors i les llàgrimes naturals’ (17) (the game dilated the eyes, making one forget the presence of mascara and precipitating stinging pains and natural tears). The narrator singles out one woman in particular, Reina, for her style of play. The ensuing description of her at the gambling table borders on – if not fully enters – the grotesque and merits citation for the important moral and spatial extrapolations that can be made: ‘En el moment de jugar, l’interès de Reina ultrapassava els límits de la correcció més primària; no admetia bromes; el seu somriure forçadíssim ensenyava les dents amb un excés de secreció de saliva, produït per l’estat de nervis, d’una manera molt semblant a la que gasten les hienes quan entre elles s’ha convingut una visita al cementiri’ (18) (With the game begun, Reina’s interest exceeded the limits of the most basic correctness; she didn’t allow jokes; her severely forced smile showed her teeth with an excess of secreted saliva, a product of her state of nerves, in a way very similar to that of hyenas when, among themselves, a visit to the cemetery has been arranged). The references to hyenas and a cemetery amidst this concurrència of Barcelona high society are interesting. Specifically, they further an interpretation of the interior/gaming house in two ways. First, the description of the severely forced smile rends the personal bourgeois façade; the artificial ‘surface’ of the bourgeois body is betrayed by the more natural nervousness brought about by the card game.13 The saliva that bubbles up, like that of the excited, hungry hyenas, invokes the space of the menjador but it does so grotesquely, equating the room’s present occupants with scavengers while surreptitiously re-establishing the functionality of the space and inferring an apparent corruption of its use. The second point that must be made regarding this citation is fundamental to a consideration of these Eixample flats as frivolous spaces of the moment, closely related to the notion of decay. The narrator’s reference to a cemetery invokes the idea of death and invites the reader to consider Reina and the gamers as potential scavengers of long-dead and buried ‘meat,’ representative, perhaps, of the thrill of unearned economic gain. This allusion to death is not gratuitous; within the

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context of the game it prompts consideration of the physiological and psychological effects of uncertainty on the gambler regarding time and the experience of space itself. When one considers the temporal dynamics of the gambling experience, it is tempting to view wagering as a succession of moments of risk – of life and death hinging on chance – with the instances occurring in series yet, technically, remaining independent of one another. Writing in 1927, Emile-Auguste Chartier saw it much the same way: ‘Gambling strenuously denies all acquired conditions […]. Gambling rejects … this weighty past which is the mainstay of work’ (Benjamin Arcades Project 512). What links these moments, if not the actual outcome of each wager, are the gambler’s short-term memory and the material aspect of the bet. The stakes of each game or series of hands mirror the processes of accumulation. Thus, there is a semblance of progression and connection to the past within an atmosphere of immediacy, total risk, and personal isolation. This Erlebnis, or shock-generated experience (as opposed to the tradition-bound Erfahrung), is ideally realized, according to Benjamin, in the notion of ‘catastrophe.’ Unlike Chartier, though, the German philosopher sees memory at work, at least insofar as it is specifically related to the process of accumulation. Even if he is not explicit, the meaning is clear when he says that ‘by constantly raising the stakes, in hopes of getting back what is lost, the gambler steers toward absolute ruin’ (Benjamin Arcades Project 515). In the game, the notion of catastrophe invites the possibility of immediate emotional or economic detritus while alluding to the catastrophe in Catalanist terms of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and its support by important segments of Catalan society. Rosa’s bedroom and Mado’s dining room are both Eixample interiors decorated with the same classes in mind. In Rosa’s bedroom, the furnishings invoke a corrupt production process that sheds and creates degenerate material over time in accordance with the inevitable effects of what Leopardi called ‘Madam Death’: fashion (qtd in Benjamin, The Arcades Project 62).14 In the gambling flat, however, the object is no longer the centre of attention and representative of decay. The physicality of the game and the immediacy of its experience invert the focus of the space. The conversion of the menjador into a gaming house triggers a reconfiguration of it into one of the moment, a place of risk and immediacy.15 The economic speculation that the upper classes carried out on the outside of the Eixample is internalized, and their bourgeois bodies are physically put under strain and charged with the potential for

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detritus and ruin. The accompanying mental aspect of this internalized speculation practised by these ‘care-free’ gamblers reinforces Vida privada’s retrospective moral condemnation of them. In the privileged moment of the game, the traditional experience of continuity and growth is forgotten, as the only remaining ‘memory’ is dictated by the presence or absence of money on a certain part of the table. Immediate gain, like that provided the bourgeoisie by Primo de Rivera, supersedes longterm responsibilities. Throughout the gambling scene, the narrator’s constant gibes penetrate the bourgeois masquerade and dramatically undercut the players’ attempts to maintain airs of civility. A comparison between Barcelona’s upper crust and specimens of a more rudimentary nature is exemplary of the critique and is typical of the narrator’s disdain: ‘En el joc, aquelles amigues que afectaven els sentiments més desinteressats les unes per les altres, eren d’una gasiveria i d’una ferocitat només registrades en el món dels insectes’ (20) (In the game, those friends who put on disaffected airs among themselves possessed an avarice and ferocity only registered in the world of insects). Rosa, who is all business once the game begins, is also brought to task by the narrator’s acerbic appraisal: ‘Rosa deixava el pontificat, i s’abocava a la feina de provar sort, d’aquella manera fofa i voraç emprada per les sangoneres quan es tracta de xuclar sang d’una pell estomacada’ (20) (Rosa stopped pontificating and dedicated herself fully to the job of tempting fate, in the spongy and voracious manner of the leeches when they try to suck blood from mistreated skin). Her reactions to the gambling experience are important not simply because they, too, reflect the physical effects of the gambling space but also in terms of the plot, since they indicate her general attitude towards Frederic. Rosa sees in her ex-lover an opportunity for economic gain in exchange for her own aging sexual favours.16 The initial Eixample scenes in Vida privada confront the reader with a decadent and frivolous upper class in their own private space. This introduction to the high life of Barcelona in the 1920s is decidedly negative. There is no glorification of the exotic activities of a cosmopolitan jet set; rather, the opening of the novel betrays a palpable decay beneath the supposed carefree frivolity of the time. In this way, Sagarra sets himself apart from his contemporaries. For if other observers such as Planes, Gasch, and Madrid responded to the aesthetics of the built environment in their critical considerations of the city in a way that eventually contributed to a reawakening of Catalanist praxis through journalism, Sagarra is more concerned with the aesthetization of these

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spaces of the Catalan capital. That this stylization occurs in narrative and comes only after his own important contributions as a journalist and columnist points to narrative’s utility as a tool for retrospective evaluation once the hustle of the Jazz Age has subsided and the chips have fallen where they may. Transition Space: The Garden A party in a garden in a neighbourhood west of Barcelona proper facilitates Part 1’s transition out of the Eixample and into the Raval, where many of the spaces of public spectacle normally associated with the Jazz Age are to be found. Hortènsia Porcell, a wealthy widow who is constantly attempting to solidify her social standing, holds the soirée. The scene of the party at her home in Sarrià is revelatory in that it continues the underlying political commentary in the novel against a backdrop of leisure and frivolity that is accompanied by jazz music. That Porcell’s social is centred on the garden has aesthetic implications related to the specific built environment of the Catalan capital. In this context, the depiction of a dwelling with ample green space accentuates the urbanized fate of the city and especially that of the Eixample.17 In addition, it underlines the destiny of Frederic’s parents, the aristocratic Lloberolas, who have been ‘deruralized’ and then relieved of their prized possession, a glorious tapestry that Porcell herself purchased and subsequently displayed in her home.18 Hortènsia’s success at playing the political games that the realities of the new social economy demand is evident in the diversity represented by her guest list, which includes, among others, high-ranking military personnel, former supporters of the Lliga Regionalista, ‘authentic’ aristocrats, and the Spanish dictator himself, Miguel Primo de Rivera. As the guests arrive, Porcell’s garden becomes representative of the upper social strata of the Age in Catalonia and its regime: a decadent group of sycophants, within which, according to an anonymous voice in the crowd, even the Catalanist separatists have become ‘all a tad cowardly’ (161). The criticism by the separatist and republican voice is cut short by the imminent arrival of Primo de Rivera. Coincidentally or not, the outspoken critic takes refuge among the trees, referring to the dictator, as he does so, as ‘that beast’ (161). In this instant, the garden space becomes a site of an inversion of the modern order: the ‘beast’ is out in the open and the ‘man’ is hidden among the foliage. Given the critic’s Catalanist views, this shying away from confrontation and

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rebellion also converts the garden into a symbolic site of impossibility, where the articulation of Catalonia’s national aspirations is quieted by their own agent out of an understandable fear of reprisals. The garden is an important site of performance in two ways. First, it harbours the frivolous social spectacle of bourgeois and aristocratic hobnobbing. Second, a live jazz band sets the tempo of the evening and must compete with the various conversations of the party-goers. The narrator’s mention that the Charleston had, by that point, become ‘fodder for the periphery’ alludes to a decentring of the spectacle that is commensurate with the physical distance between the Sarrià house and the entertainment centres of the city, the Raval and the neighbouring Paral.lel (152). When combined with the falsity still apparent in Hortènsia’s home (despite her attempts to modernize), this banalization transforms the space into one marked by inauthenticity. The garden or terrace party was a staple of the Jazz Age social scene in America and abroad. However, as Fitzgerald narrated in The Great Gatsby, partygoers’ loyalty to their hosts was not written in stone. Hence, ‘inauthentic’ may apply equally to the gentrified musical entertainment and to the social performance of friendship and allegiance on the part of the assembled guests. Sagarra uses the upper classes’ desire for authenticity against them when his narrator details a search for ‘genuine’ Jazz Age spectacles in the pages that immediately follow the garden party. An outing by a group of revellers to the infamous Raval expands Sagarra’s textual mapping of the city during the period and affords him an opportunity to deepen his critique of the frivolity of the elite as he narrates their hypocritical responses to the neighbourhood’s ‘public’ immorality as opposed to the private morass to be found in the bourgeois Eixample. Public Spaces: The Raval The Raval neighbourhood was born out of industry. Over time, however, its primary occupation became illicit recreation. As I have outlined above, the various types of entertainment available in what was also known as Barcelona’s Fifth District entailed a high degree of sensuality. Contact between performers and the audience was closer than that at more ‘refined’ locales, such as the Liceu opera house or the Palau de la Música Catalana. This intimacy existed not simply because prostitution was part of the ‘amusement’ but also on account of the nature of the area’s dancings, café concerts, and cafés de camareras.19 Cabaret space

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in particular often involved the patrons as participants in the spectacle and during the 1920s, it was an especially cosmopolitan space, a performative site for international artists who brought the latest in jazz music and (bawdy) dance to what was, at first, a predominantly male audience in cities across Europe. As Peter Jelavich points out, there has been confusion regarding what was and was not actual cabaret during the time because of the popular images established by Marlene Dietrich and the fiction of Christopher Isherwood (Jelavich 1). At its most basic level, the physical set-up of a cabaret interior had an important effect on how it acted as a threshold or bridge for the global and the local. As Kern describes, the traditional division between performer and audience could be substantially blurred: The stage was as close to the audience as possible, generally surrounded by tables. It was on the same level as the audience, and there were no curtains or footlights to accent the difference between the actor and audience. Cabaret performers themselves sometimes dined at the surrounding tables, then rose from among the customers to do their routine […]. The seating also encouraged fluidity. Dining, drinking, and talking went on while performances were in progress. […] Many revue numbers encouraged interaction between performers and audience. Chorus girls would tousle men’s hair, bump their chairs, or pull them on stage for a dance. (Kern 200–1)

Jelavich concurs, adding that the entertainment numbers drew from many genres and commonly exploited topical themes, mainly sex, fashion, and fads, to the detriment of political content (2). Until it became quite commercialized near the end of the 1920s, the cabaret nightclub had a reputation as a marginal, nocturnal space of vice. Now, what made the cabaret and other performative spaces of the Raval different from those in the adjacent Paral·lel or on Madrid’s Alcalá was that the crowded nature and design of its streets and alleys blurred the lines between the private and the public. In his book Nights in the Big City, Joachim Schlör identifies hotels, restaurants, and variety shows as ‘spaces of withdrawal’ from the urban night (Schlör 39). Although he makes the point that the illumination of the night – store windows, advertisements, etc. – started to bridge the gap between inside and outside, if one considers the Raval according to his theory, it is clear that, during the 1920s, the neighbourhood’s architecture defeated this type of compartmentalization. Navigation – nocturnal or otherwise – was

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always problematic in the area, and visiting patrons had no choice but to access many locales on foot, given the impossibility of arriving directly at the door of a club or theatre in a taxi. What is more, unlike the Eixample, the Raval’s layout owed much to the area’s confinement by the city’s walls. When those walls began to come down in the 1850s, the Raval had already expanded and occupied all of the remaining space available to it. The combination of urbanization and industrialization made it one of Europe’s most densely populated city areas. Later, after the walls were gone and Barcelona had imposed a moratorium on industrial construction, only small businesses and an urban working class remained to inhabit a district whose living conditions could be described as horrendous. The industrial spaces vacated by relocating industry slowly began to fill up with more marginal trades. The strong presence of the port and the naval base in the Raval’s waterfront area, Drassanes, ensured an enthusiastic clientele for the multitude of bars, cabarets, music halls, hotels, and bordellos that moved into the area. Predictably, it earned a reputation as a moral and urban liminal zone, situated as it was partly between the respectful Rambla and the more ‘rational’ and ordered Eixample. Ironically, the Raval became a tourist destination as its reputation spread and it began to appear in texts by a variety of authors.20 Sagarra’s Raval in Vida privada is an accurate depiction of the area’s conditions at the time. Although his dramatization reveals vice and criminality, he does not attempt to glamorize the neighbourhood or aggrandize the performers and patrons found within the various cabarets, café concerts, and taverns.21 The Raval’s authenticity as a site of spectacle is tied to its physical makeup and so, too, is Sagarra’s use of the zone in his critique of the upper class. The revellers who undertake a frivolous ‘tour of the slums’ in search of excitement find the area’s performances unnerving. One of the reasons for their discomfort is the lack of delimitation of the ‘shows,’ which, like the private lives of the Raval’s residents, spill into the street and ignore any notion of set boundaries (which were abundant in the orderly Eixample). What is more, the spectacles that the tourists encounter – especially the various performances of the lowerclass body – are so strong that they penetrate the defences that class difference affords the sightseers. Submerged in the moral and physical decay of the Fifth District, the revellers find their lightheartedness weighed down by misery, and they are doubly indicted: once for their roles in the perpetuation of the ‘immoral’ spectacles and again for their own hypocrisy, which they only acknowledge fleetingly.

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Two spaces in particular serve as focal points for the ‘tour’: the famous La Criolla nightclub and an anonymous bordello known for its live sex shows. Getting to these locales is not an easy matter, and the possibility of disorientation looms large. Nevertheless, the women in the group are especially curious and excited to enter a zone that is normally off-limits to them. Their introduction to the Raval, however, is visceral and foreboding. The decay implicit in the narrator’s depiction of the Eixample is made explicit in the Raval: ‘Era la una de la matinada, i aquell carrer bullia una mica d’ombres amb la direcció distreta, estava ple de gasos amoniacals, i a terra, de tant en tant, hi havia un gat mort que dormia el seu fàstic etern damunt d’un llit de peles de taronja’ (165) (It was one in the morning and that street boiled a bit with shadows and with an absent-minded direction, it was full of ammonia gases, and on the ground, now and again, there was a dead cat who was sleeping his eternal disgust on a bed of orange peels). The initial expectations of exoticism held by some members of the group are not met. As the narrator points out, the corners and alleyways they encounter among garbage and ‘infected liquids’ do not excite; they depress. The scene is not of exhilarating vice but of great poverty, filthiness, and desolation. This experience of disappointment is rare in literary portrayals of the Jazz Age scene. By contrasting the well-to-do revellers with images such as these, Sagarra’s text casts a new light on the frivolity normally associated with one of Barcelona’s entertainment hotspots. In so doing he also reinforces Planes’s insistence that the area was in large part a fictional fabrication – at least during the second half of the 1920s. The La Criolla Nightclub The first two spaces that I considered in this chapter were private ones; the first enclosed by the Eixample’s architecture, the second, by the Sarrià district’s social reputation. Decay, palpable in the material existence of the bourgeoisie, appeared as an endemic force with political and moral roots stretching beneath the bourgeois façade of carefree frivolity. Sagarra’s narrative exposé of these spaces and their elite performers or participants inaugurated his recasting of the lighthearted reputation of the Jazz Age. In the author’s treatment of the Raval, however, the reader sees the more conventional performers of the Age’s spectacles: dancers, musicians, and prostitutes. One of Barcelona’s most celebrated nightclubs, La Criolla, exemplifies both the ‘spillage’ of spectacle into the public zones and also

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Sagarra’s debunking of the Jazz Age mystique. As a locus of activity within the Raval, the club’s stage extends beyond its interior. Legions of prostitutes and beggars congregate outside of La Criolla and bathe in the red light of its enormous neon sign. In 1929, shortly after the events depicted in the first part of Vida privada, Josep Maria Planes wrote an article about La Criolla in which he made special mention of the sign and its theatrical effects. Three floors tall, its letters greatly illuminated what was otherwise a dark street. Planes also saw the same potential for spectacle on the street that Sagarra did: Tot el carrer queda tenyit d’una capa de vermellor que li dóna un to fantàsticament irreal. Diríeu que es tracta d’un gran truc d’escenografia. El personal que circula per la calçada i els invertits i les prostitutes que s’exhibeixen per les voreres participen d’aquest bany de vermell brut i queden decoratius, estilitzats. (Planes ‘La Criolla’ 2) The whole street is tinted by a cape of redness that gives it a fantastically unreal tone. You would say that it was a great scenographic trick. The personnel who circulate barefoot and the ‘inverted’ ones and the prostitutes who exhibit themselves on the sidewalks all participate in this raw red bath and become decorative, stylized.

The narrator of Vida privada emphasizes the blurred line between inside and outside within the Raval by identifying the prostitutes as ‘specimens from the hospital’s dissection halls’ (165). Unlike in the Eixample, misery and immorality are in plain sight here, and these distorted lowerclass bodies are physically congruent with the area they occupy. By describing their limbs as having been purposely twisted and disjointed, the narrator fuses the area’s convoluted urban geography to the human body. There is an explicit connection between the prostitutes and their environment, said to be paramount to their survival: ‘n’hi havia d’altres […] unes dones vestides de fum, de fregalls i de pells de gat, que donaven la sensació que si les treien d’alla es moririen com els peixos fora de l’aigua, i que per poder respirar, les seves venes necessitaven una injecció constant d’àcid úric i de col podrida’ (166) (there were others […] a few women dressed in smoke, scrubbers and cat skins, who gave the impression that if they were taken out of there they would die like fish out of water, and that to be able to breathe, their veins needed an injection of uric acid and rotten cabbage). This description strikes an ironic chord within the text given that the reader has already seen Frederic

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Lloberola’s brother, Guillem, who, disguised as a member of the lower class, prostituted himself to one of Barcelona’s most well-known aristocratic couples not in the Raval but in the Eixample.22 The rendering of the prostitutes’ bodies as distorted and convoluted coincides with what Grosz has observed, namely, that ‘the city is made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its turn is transformed, “citified,” urbanized as a distinctively metropolitan body’ (Grosz 242). The performative aspect of the prostitutes’ display further ties them to this particular space, where many of the ‘shows’ inside the dancings were sexually charged in nature. That said, however, the effects of the space outside La Criolla are not limited to the bodies of these female prostitutes. The narrator continues the catalogue of figures and mentions the males – sailors, workers, and pederasts – who mill about the carrer Cid. When the beggars and pickpockets are said ‘only to be found’ in those areas, the Raval is once more equated with a stage and the denizens, actors to be made up: ‘és possible que aquells barris els donen un maquillatge especial, i els mateixos homes posats a la Rambla ja són tota una altra cosa’ (166) (it is possible that those neighbourhoods give them special make-up, and that the same men placed on the Rambla would be a whole other thing). La Criolla’s interior heightens the tourists’ disappointment and sharpens the narrator’s criticism of them. The club’s reputation and enormous marquee hold the promise of something special, yet the first impression is of a crowded café with only pretensions of a dancing. As a discordant jazz band plays, the various revellers take in a crowd made up of sailors, thieves, and transvestite prostitutes. Individual reactions are varied. When one effeminate man returns Teodora’s excited, voyeuristic gaze with a vague, desolate, and alienating stare of his own, she is cowed. With her presence acknowledged, she drops her permanent smile and is forced to look away. For his part, the Count finds the blatant misery and lack of comfort in the space disquieting. Rafaela, on the other hand, sees no possible connection between her world and that of the Raval. Her only worry in the club is that some of the dancers may come too close and dirty her skirt, an opinion that echoes the worries of contamination that Francesc Madrid describes in the opening parts of Sangre en Atarazanas. The opinion of one of the other upper-class tourists in this scene in the novel, the mathematician Emilio Borrás, stands out. He finds the desperate, sexual sadness and vice embodied by the prostitutes and

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sailors as well as the thieves’ blatant lack of scruples to be authentic and sincere. Here, then, is some manner of authenticity, albeit not the type that the group had set out to find. Borrás, who possesses more critical perspective than the other members of the group, uses the falsity of the upper classes as his point of comparison. Nevertheless, even though his view of the denizens of the Raval is sympathetic, he is the one most affected by the proximity of Lolita, a transvestite who accosts and follows the group on the street as they continue their tour of the neighbourhood after their visit to La Criolla. Lolita’s appearance reinforces the gender confusion they perceive in the Raval while reminding both them and the reader of the decayed quality of the spectacles evident in its spaces. The performance of femininity put on by Lolita, a forty-something man with smeared rouge and coconut-oiled hair, has a different effect on the upper-class women than on their male companions. While the former cannot quite explain the strange impression they receive, the men, on the other hand, panic. Lolita’s abysmal attempt at passing as a woman fails. His female façade is ruptured; it is not complete and/or convincing, and the implication is that he represents a threat to the bodily integrity of the upper-class male through penetration. Thus, Sagarra’s critique of the range of opinion in the group is total in that even for Borrás – when the authenticity of the Raval keys to both the sexual and the emotional – it is best kept at a voyeuristic distance. The Bordello The depiction in Vida privada of a bordello specializing in acrobatic tableaux (live sex shows by a group of men and women) takes the sexual aspect of the Raval to another level. This time, the authenticity of the lower-class body in flagrante delicto shakes the bourgeoisie’s sensibilities utterly. There is no emotional intimacy in the twenty-minute performance, only a mechanical repetition of the sex act with the sounds of the troupe occasionally punctuating the accompanying silence: Aquell personal dedicat a la més embrutida mecànica del sexe treballava sense cap entusiasme; totes les aberracions els havien obligat a fer-les mil vegades, davant d’un públic idiota, pel qual sentien una gran indiferència. Eren unes artistes que actuaven en fred, amb les venes aigualides per una rutina pàl.lida i sense cap sentit de rebel·lió; una cosa tan glacial, tan inexpresiva com la copulació del insectes. (173)

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The personnel dedicated to the dirtiest mechanics of the sex act worked away without any enthusiasm; all of the aberrations had obliged them to do them a thousand times in front of an idiotic audience, for whom they felt a great indifference. They were artists who worked in the cold, with their veins watered down by the pallid routine and without any sense of rebellion; [it was] something so glacial, so inexpressive like the copulation of insects.

The insect reference is especially compelling in this quotation as it draws a direct line between the lower-class bodies on display here and the upper-class ones described in the same terms during the gambling scene earlier in the novel. In both instances, the element of calculation in each activity – wagering on the one hand, mechanical sex on the other – is implicated in the social economy of upper-class entertainment in such a way that these acts are rendered as direct criticisms of the bourgeois characters that either participate in or enable such pastimes. As regards the initial upper-class response to the spectacle in the bordello, it is primarily physical and, again as in the gambling scene, the narrator makes mention of liquids to enhance its visceral qualities: ‘de seguit s’atura la secreció de l’alegria, les boques es clouen, les galtes es contreuen i els ulls s’embruten d’un líquid gris que és la febre, la tristeza o la vergonya’ (173) (right away the secretion of happiness stopped, their mouths closed, their cheeks contracted and the their eyes filled with a gray liquid that is fever, sadness, and shame). Teodora’s desire for more ‘sensations’ has been amply fulfilled but not in the manner she was expecting. While at first she and the other women are able to hold themselves in check, later they are intimidated, scared, and sick to their stomachs. For the men, the live sex acts project a sense of ‘infinite sadness’ which evokes personal darkness (174). Sagarra uses the reactions of the revellers to emphasize his criticism of them. Their curious search for authenticity has brought them face to face with debasement, yet they do not assume any responsibility for its continuation. After they pay for the show, Borrás philosophizes in an attempt to distance himself from what he has witnessed. A recovered Teodora, who sees things in more practical terms, rebukes him: ‘em sembla que hi veus massa filosofies; jo només ho he trobat repugnant. I elles … s’hi guanyan la vida’ (174) (it seems to me that you see too many philosophies there; I only found it to be repugnant. And they [the women] … they earn their living there). The key moment of this entire passage occurs as Borrás asserts that, while the spectacle is ‘the infinite

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poverty of the flesh,’ it is not vice, which is to be found ‘elsewhere’ (174). Teodora’s momentary musing on the equivalence of vice and the upper classes that they, themselves, represent is a moment of clarity. The self-reflection is fleeting, however, and rather than enter into a dialogue on the matter, or simply leave the Raval, chased out by their own shame, the group decide to continue their tour and quench their thirst in a well-known gypsy bar. The frivolity of the evening is shaken but not shattered. Sagarra’s obvious conclusion in response to his character’s direct inquiry is that they do represent vice, and, in addition to supporting the demoralizing spectacles of the Raval, what goes on in the Eixample is much, much worse. Conclusion Part 1 of Vida privada provides the reader with a detailed and ambitious mapping of Barcelona during the heyday of the Jazz Age. Through the inclusion of a variety of spaces involved in the creation and reproduction of the aesthetic of the time, Sagarra makes clear connections between the built environment of the city and his critical project of denouncing the decayed and frivolous upper class that enjoyed it. By considering their actions, he shows that even though the bourgeois Eixample and lower-class Raval displayed different forms of vice and immorality, they were not so different. Vida privada’s moralizing narrative successfully reveals the excesses of the Jazz Age, but it does not glory in them. Fiercely critical of a corrupt upper class that, in the author’s opinion, had sold out Catalonia’s interests, Sagarra’s novel provides an important appraisal of the 1920s in Spain’s ‘second city.’ Vida privada’s treatment of the metropolis and its denizens stands as further proof of the international Jazz Age style’s penetration into Catalan culture. The novelist’s retrospective manifestation of many key spaces related to this style and his aesthetic response to them highlights the importance of the physical urban experience to the articulation of the time just as it underscores the power of narrative as a tool of comprehensive and enduring derision and critique.

Conclusion: Picking Up the Tab

The Jazz Age in Barcelona has been a somewhat forgotten time. The founding of modern Catalan nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century and the dramatic struggles of the Republic in the 1930s have always seemed to draw attention away from a period in a city that saw both lawless violence bordering on open war and an extremely controlled society under a dictatorship. All of this as Barcelona was experiencing the giddy pressures of mass culture for the first time. That the vibrancy of these years manifested not only in the streets, cinemas, clubs, and exhibition grounds but was also being mediated and conditioned in the black and white pages of the press points to the important link between journalism and urban experience. As my case studies here have shown, this connection was especially acute during the Jazz Age; writers took an active interest in the new styles arriving daily and took up the challenge of grappling with the accelerating and changing rhythm of urban life. In their texts the increasing homogenization of mass taste – a form of syncopation or cultural backbeat – is patent yet never allowed to completely subsume the local. This effect is bolstered by the very form of the newspaper itself, a manifestation of the urban in which juxtaposition, fragmentation – yet also normativity in regularity – reflect, confront, and condition the new. An offshoot of the Catalan press’s interest in the activities of the Jazz Age and the subsequent commitment to the built environment that this entailed was that Barcelona’s literary press corps, along with the city’s left-leaning writers and critics, helped reinvigorate the movement of Catalanism during the politically repressive phase of the time. They did so in various ways and in this book I have closely analysed the work of those figures that I count among the most important and

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compelling as they relate to the reception of international Jazz Age codes and styles, their playing out in the Catalan capital, and how these writers may have contributed to the political imaginary as well. For his part, Francesc Madrid, co-editor of the intriguing El Escándalo and author of the seminal Sangre de Atarazanas, used new journalistic techniques, the inclusion of seldom-heard voices, and depictions of ignored spaces as outlets for the pressures that the dictator could contain but not eradicate. The plurivocality and expanded vision of the city that he enables complements El Escándalo’s dual movement of mystery-making and revelation in regard to the built environment of Barcelona just as it feeds an ethical posture towards information dissemination under dictatorship that sits in tension with the titillation that the paper clearly adores. Sebastià Gasch, the Catalan art and culture critic who most directly engages with the music that gave the Age its name, made almost exclusive use of the press to propagate his theories of rhythm, the urban energy of the time, and, importantly, his ideas concerning the physical spaces of performance associated with the Jazz Age’s spectacles of mass culture. As a Barcelona-based cosmopolitan, Gasch was ideally positioned to comment on the changing face of the Catalan capital, and his articles and treatises show how the city served as an ideal template for readings of the synthesis of global and local forces – be they from the worlds of entertainment, sports, or art. He may not have had the lasting impact of other theorists in Europe but his attention to the local in the form of the Barcelona scene enshrines him as a prime mover and observer in the Catalan experience of the Roaring Twenties. The literary journal Mirador, in which Gasch, Josep Maria Planes, and countless others published their work, did more than just cater to the frivolities of the privileged, artistic elite. Its political engagement with Catalanism helped consolidate the Catalanist imaginary as it related to the urban sphere of Barcelona and in so doing infused the manifestation of the Jazz Age at its height with an aesthetic awareness of the local in such a way that resistance became a corollary of textual presence. Likewise, the short-lived but equally important graphic journal Imatges presented Jazz Age Barcelona to its readers in a way that sought to consolidate the modern spatial practices that had emerged from dictatorship and that could be identified – at last – as specific to Catalan space and experience. Finally, Josep Maria de Sagarra, who had participated actively as a journalistic commentator on the Age as it was happening, was the one

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who would push beyond the ephemeral pages of the press and recreate the city in narrative form – in the process giving his and future generations the great Barcelona novel. Writing from the perspective of a metaphoric hangover allows Sagarra a critical licence that is devastating on a politico-social level. Nevertheless, as with the other writers and critics that I have considered here, his reading of the time runs through the specific physical spaces of Barcelona. It is an aesthetic and architectonic appraisal of the capital during a tumultuous period in social terms that lays bare what he considers to be the moral corruption of the upper classes not only on account of sexual deviance and other vices but, ultimately, on cultural grounds for their having collaborated and colluded with a centrist dictatorship. In the end, so-called sensationalistic and literary journalism served as an important facet of Jazz Age Barcelona’s staging of both international codes imported from abroad and the city’s own local experience of violence, excess, and vice. They mediated a Barcelona that was a filter for transculturation and, at the same time, a Rosetta stone for the way in which varied journalistic gazes not only perceived but, importantly, imagined the city as well. They helped resist cultural oppression and breathed new life into a dormant political movement that would be a key player in the pre–Civil War period. Jazz Age Barcelona, a city that was constantly under pressure from different sides, remains vital and new in the archive; the presentness of journalism and its role in manifesting the Age through critique, reporting, and interpretation perpetuates spaces that in many cases have long since disappeared, rendering them accessible nonetheless to the inquisitive tourist who seeks to contemplate a compelling example of a fascinating city that lived its Jazz Age both intensely and uniquely.

Notes

Introduction 1 As Heider explains, anarcho-syndicalism came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century when revolutionary anarchists returned to the labour movement. She further observes that anarcho-syndicalism drew on the writings of Kropotkin and Bakunin, but did not eschew revolutionary syndicalism’s ideals (Heider 18). 2 For an excellent study of mass culture in nineteenth-century Paris that elucidates the notion of city as spectacle in a way that draws on Benedict Anderson and Walter Benjamin, see Vanessa R. Schwartz’s Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. For an outstanding critique of the German experience of the Roaring Twenties vis-à-vis the city, see Janet Ward’s Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. 3 See, especially, Cabot’s Indignacions i provocacions and Polo’s La fascinació del periodisme. Cròniques (1930–1936). 4 For more on the hotel as a social and cultural space in the Catalan and Castilian contexts, see my articles ‘A Periphery with a View: Hotel Space and Catalan Modernity’ and ‘The Politicization of Jazz Age Space in José Díaz Fernández’s La Venus mecánica,’ respectively. For a treatment of the hotel and cosmopolitanism and its implication in immigration interdiction, see my ‘Spaces of Immigration “Prevention”: Interdiction and the Nonplace.’ 5 Peter Fritzsche’s Reading Berlin 1900 is an excellent study of how journalism helped make cities ‘legible’ in the early part of the twentieth century. 1. Barcelona Boom Town 1 In his book Jazz City, Leroy Ostransky tries to dispel some of the myths that have grown up around Storyville and its place in the expansion of

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jazz. While he recognizes that the neighbourhood’s closure did affect some of the musicians in New Orleans, he is careful to point out that the majority did not work there (Ostransky 63). Ostransky cites the labour shortage in war industries in northern and western manufacturing cities as being an equally important factor in the migration of African Americans and, as a result, in the spread of jazz (59). 2 While the contradictory accounts about the intriguing origins of the word ‘jazz’ are part of the Age’s lore, the many different versions often underline the importance of the music’s live presentation and, as a result, the space of performance. Shaw quotes Arnold Loyacano, bassist for Tom Brown’s Band – the first white New Orleans combo to go to Chicago in 1915 – who asserts categorically that it was after their arrival in the city that the term gained purchase (16). Loyacano’s comments imply a connection between the reception of his band’s specific style of playing and the articulation of the event. Jazz historian Marshall W. Stearns weighs into the debate by pointing out the vulgar meaning – it was a euphemism for the sex act – associated with the term ‘jass,’ later to become ‘jazz’ in the middle 1910s (qtd in Shaw 17). The allusion to the energy of sex grounds the music in its performative and spatial contexts given that, early on, musicians often played it in brothels, taverns, and seedy bars associated with the sex trade. These associations lingered with the music long after it entered the mainstream, and, even after it had gained a high degree of popularity, jazz was still criticized by conservative commentators on account of the nature of the music as well as for its black origins. In 1921, the head of the Chicago Musicians’ Union wrote in Variety that jazz was ‘“socially demeaning” and “musically immoral”’ (qtd in Shaw 17). 3 Hobsbawm observes that even by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘“show business” and the popular music industry were already sufficiently developed to have generated national and even transatlantic networks – agencies, theater circuits, even chains and so on – not to mention the publication and distribution of a constantly changing supply of popular musical numbers’ (Hobsbawm 265). 4 For details on the inevitable backlash in postwar France, see chapter 4 – ‘The Call to Order’ – of Jody Blake’s excellent book Le Tumulte Noir. She cites travelling Briton Clive Bell, among others, as indicative of ‘a growing number of people in the French capital for whom the novelty of the African-American idiom had, at the very least, begun to wear thin as they sought to return to peacetime normalcy’ (Blake 83). Bell had famously pleaded ‘No more jazz!’

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5 Jackson is correct when he observes that Baker’s relationship to jazz music was not as close as her connection to Parisian music hall and cabaret traditions (78). Nevertheless, her performances became emblematic of the latter part of the period and showed that different forms of expression could mix successfully as part of the Jazz Age spectacle. 6 Modernisme was the Catalan version of fin-de-siècle aesthetic movements such as art nouveau, arts and crafts and Jugendstil. An interdisciplinary movement, it not only manifested in the literary and plastic arts but also – spectacularly – in architecture through the works of such luminaries as Gaudí, Domènech i Muntaner, and Jujol, the works of whom had a strong impact on the look of Barcelona’s built environment. For its part, Noucentisme, which overlapped time-wise with Modernisme and extended into the early 1920s, may be considered a ‘return to order’ or correction of modernista excess through a revalorization of classical design and forms. Noucentisme is notable especially for being the official aesthetic approach of the Catalan political elite that was in power in Catalonia until Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état. 7 For a comprehensive study of the violence and repression, see Pradas Baena. 8 In this sense, the violence may be considered ‘avant-garde.’ Along these lines, in an article on the Catalan vanguard, specifically, Joan Ramon Resina considers direct action of this type as an active component within the historical horizon of the avant-garde as event (Resina ‘Form as Event’ 371). Following Eco’s allusions to intentionality and the historical impact of form, Resina posits the ‘shock effect’ as a common denominator among the various incarnations of the avant-garde. He contends that whether ‘we consider the Futurists, Dadaists, or Surrealists, the objective is always to jolt the public by attacking its moral, perceptual, logical, and patriotic certainties’ (371). This practical understanding of the avant-garde as a temporally specific phenomenon with the potential to bridge form and experience is refreshing and opens the door to broader interpretations such as mine regarding the different phases of the Jazz Age in a Barcelona-specific context. 9 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 10 In an editorial from 1921 entitled ‘Fin de un orgia’ (End of an Orgy), the La Publicidad newspaper remarks on how easy it was for retailers to adjust their prices when money rained down upon them during the war and criticizes them for wanting to prolong the ‘price orgy’ into the postwar period (‘El fin de una orgia’ 1). 11 Mariano José de Larra was an early nineteenth-century Spanish satirist whose journalistic writings centred on figures and customs of the day.

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2. Where Others Fear to Tread: El Escándalo and Sangre en Atarazanas 1 Dorsey Boatwright and Enric Ucelay da Cal’s excellent article on women in the Barrio Chino and the role of El Escándalo in their representation, which I engage below, is the major exception. 2 Eugeni d’Ors (1884–1951) was one of the leading intellectuals associated with Catalonia’s Noucentista movement, the classical correction to Modernisme’s artistic excesses. Under the pseudonym ‘Xènius’ he contributed thousands of short narrative essays or glosses to the daily conservative paper La Veu de Catalunya. In 1917 Ors became Director of Public Education for the Mancomunitat, which was the association of regions that predated the Generalitat. When he lost that job in 1920, Ors left Catalonia for Madrid, stopped writing in Catalan in favour of Spanish, and changed his politics completely; during the war he supported Franco’s rebellion and then became a leading intellectual during the dictatorship. 3 See Roig Rosich 433–64 for more on censorship and the Catalan press during the dictatorship. 4 For primary source texts by Miguel de Primo de Rivera, see Primo de Rivera and Casassas i Ymbert. 5 For more on their reading of the representation of women in El Escándalo and the fields of sociology and sexology, see 30–1. 6 Jean-Louis Guereña’s La prostitución en la España contemporánea is a comprehensive study of the phenomenon in the country at large. For more on prostitution and naturalism, see Guereña 323–38. 7 For two excellent studies of the image of the ‘new woman’ in Spain during this time, see Larson, and Highfill. 8 A 1921 article from La Publicidad implies that the use of narcotics was perceived as endemic. According to Dr Alsina Melis, ‘va extendiéndose de manera alarmante en Barcelona el uso de la cocaina y de la morfina, de un modo especial la cocaina’ (‘El uso’ 1) (the use of cocaine and morphine in Barcelona is growing at an alarming rate, and cocaine in a special way). Melis blames the spread of drugs on the arrival of foreign nationals following the Great War but expresses especial alarm that some of those falling victim to addiction include children of ‘good families’ whose problems went unreported for fear of scandal. Along with the deranging properties of the drug itself, the doctor also announces that in Barcelona there exist locales that could be found if the police were to put their minds to it, where cocaine and morphine addicts ‘se reúnen para hacer sus orgías’ (1) (get together to have their orgies).

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9 See the last chapter of this book for a detailed study of Sagarra’s masterpiece, Vida privada, as well as his journalistic pieces, which appeared throughout the second half of the 1920s. 10 Joan Salvat-Papasseit (1884–1924) was an avant-garde poet of workingclass origins. He also had an important impact on Catalan avant-garde letters through his work as an editor by founding Un Enemic del Poble (1917–19), Arc-Voltaïc (1918), and Proa (1921). 11 See chapter 3. 12 See chapter 4 of this book for a detailed analysis of Mirador, its treatment of Barcelona during the Jazz Age, and its role in Catalanism as a political movement. 13 By late 1927, the Charleston would have already seen its heyday and begun its descent into history. See, for example, Joaquim Aroca’s ‘La crisi del Xarleston,’ which appeared in L’Esquella de la Torratxa in December of that year. 14 The inspiration for the term seems to be the Chinatown in San Francisco, which was popularized in de Mille’s 1915 film The Cheat (Boatwright and Ucelay da Cal 30). 15 As Mendelson points out, Las Hurdes has long been a part of Spanish meditations regarding the nation; among those who have treated it figure Unamuno, Marañon, and most famously, Buñuel. See Mendelson, 65–91. 16 See Le Bon. For more on the general context of delinquency and degeneration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman, as well as Bernaldo de Quirós’s La mala vida en Madrid: estudio psicosociológico con dibujos y fotografías del natural and Modern Theories of Criminality. 17 In their entry on the Eixample, Hernández-Cros, Mora, and Pouplana cite the statistic of the architect of the Eixample, Idelfons Cerdà, that, in 1859, the average number of people per room in the old city was 3.7 (HernándezCros et al. 141). 18 For more on the fear of disease and women, see Blanco, Jagoe, and Enríquez de Salamanca’s La mujer en los discursos de genero: textos y contextos en el siglo XIX. 19 For a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative examination of prostitution in Spain during this period see Guereña, especially chapter 4, ‘El tiempo de la higiene especial (1869–1935).’ Among other things, Guereña points out the existence of the prostitute in both fiction and non-fiction works such as the novelas cortas sold in kiosks before and during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the Guía Nocturna de Barcelona La Luna, a

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22 23

Notes to pages 56–82 guidebook that provided information about various city brothels and included advertisements for condoms and venereal clinics (301). This point is amply treated by Sagarra in his novelized account of upperclass slumming in the Barrio Chino. See chapter 6 of this book for a detailed examination of his representation of this effect. In his study on prostitution Guereña points out that male homosexuality was generally absent from the erotic kiosk novellas available at the time (301). This fact makes Madrid’s treatment of it in Sangre seem even more risqué, even if it is couched in a conservative moral tone. Villar describes the same sort of behaviour in his book. Known as the Noi del Sucre (Sugar Lad), Segui was a pragmatic anarchist activist who played a key role in organizing and leading the movement in Catalonia during the late 1910s and early 1920s. He was assassinated in the street in March 1923.

3. The Spatial Aesthetics of Jazz Rhythm 1 According to Minguet i Batllori, Gasch pushed Miró’s painting as a paradigm of artistic modernity (Minguet i Batllori ‘Joan Miró i Sebastià Gasch’ 86). In another of his many works on Gasch, Minguet i Batllori implies that the critic’s unquestioned reputation in the ‘systems’ of Catalan high culture was what made his targets tolerate his diatribes against those very systems (Minguet i Batllori ‘Al marge’ 17). 2 ‘Rhythm,’ at its most basic and musical level, involves various notions such as tempo, the length and placement of notes, as well as the less definable concepts of ‘groove’ and ‘swing’ (King 13–14). 3 The Cercle was founded in 1893 as an artistic space in which its members could contribute to the Beaux Arts through an engagement with the Christian faith. 4 Beginning 1 January 1929, all issues regarding Catalan arts and letters in La Gaceta Literaria were grouped under a separate banner: ‘Gaceta Catalana.’ Rather than appearing in the main body of the paper under the editorship of Giménez Caballero, Tomàs Garcés in Barcelona and Juan Chabás in Valencia administered them. As I observe, Sebastià Gasch’s articles were often exceptions to this rule. 5 See Gasch’s 1927 articles, ‘El pintor Joan Miró’ and ‘Salvador Dalí,’ respectively. 6 Regarding the scientific movies, one can clearly trace a line between this guide and the famous opening of Buñuel’s surrealist tour de force,

Notes to pages 84–95

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8

9

10

11

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L’age d’Or from 1931, in which the viewer is initially confronted by a science film about scorpions. No matter how attractive such sobriety may be, however, such is the detrimental power of the ‘artistic’ traditions that have so poisoned contemporary society that even hawking products to a mass audience is constantly in danger of losing its anti-artistic valence. The Spanish football league played its first season in 1928–9. Prior to that, the King’s Cup was the premier trophy (Vila-San-Juan 126). In boxing, Paulino Uzcudun, a Basque aizkolaris (lumberjack), took his strength to the ring and won the undisputed European championship in Barcelona in 1926 (129–30). In addition to healthy crowds at the venues, both boxing and football were covered on the radio and enjoyed large audiences. The tour de chant or soloist singing was at the core of the European music hall spectacle, especially in the café-concerts. These solos were an important part of the evening’s entertainment and were normally undertaken by an already established artist, although occasionally an amateur was accorded a couple of numbers at the beginning of the night (Feschotte 31). In keeping with the notion of ‘variety,’ other frequent elements of the music hall show included clowns, illusionists, acrobats, cyclists, animal handlers, ventriloquists, and the important later addition of the jazz band (56–7). Gasch makes another direct reference to ‘eurítmia’ in his preface to Díaz-Plaja’s 1930 book on cinema. Based on this and other references, there do appear to be strong parallels between Gasch’s theories on music hall and Adolphe Appia’s revolutionary redesigning of the turn-of-thecentury stage. For more on Appia and his incorporation of Delcroze’s eurythmics, see Beachem. For a study of Appia and the avant-garde aesthetics of sport, see García Santo-Tomás and Davidson. According to Kloos and Reuter, revue directors in large (Central European) cities – the only places that could sustain the really extravagant shows – could ‘easily spend a quarter of a million dollars on costumes and sets for a single production’ (qtd in Gumbrecht 191). For an excellent history of theatrical lighting, see Schivelbusch’s chapter ‘The Stage.’ Gumbrecht advances Jelavich’s theory that ‘Kicklines are often interpreted by spectators and critics as the epitome of the deindividualizing and desubjectivizing mid-level jobs that have recently become open to women; and like those jobs, they have a desexualizing effect’ (Gumbrecht 194). While there is an obvious desubjectification of the chorus girls in Gasch’s descriptions, he does not mention extraneous economic circumstances.

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14 Gasch does not discriminate here on the difference between the original work and its image, though. This leaves the door open for the question of whether a reproduction of a painting would still possess the same sort of ‘stopping’ power. 15 For an interesting study of this concept of ‘distraction,’ in the context of media and modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, see Armstrong. He examines Kracauer’s writings on distraction and cinema in light of Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ 16 Their descriptions elicit comparisons to Walter Ruttman’s 1927 ‘montage documentary’ about the rhythms of daily life, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, and the German’s later visual experiments with light and music. Gasch’s critical mixing of rhythm, cinema, and music invokes, as well, Ferdinand Léger’s purist film Ballet mécanique, from 1924. 17 Gasch recognizes the potentially deleterious effects of such a process in his choice of language: ‘[el ritmo musical] viola nuestro organismo, lo soborna, lo reduce literalmente a la impotencia’ ([musical rhythm] violates our whole organism, it bribes it, it reduces it literally to impotence), but he does not elaborate on these consequences (‘Jazz’ 9). Apparently, Gasch accepts these effects as necessary consequences for an unimpeded transmission of meaning and does not stop to consider, as Adorno will do in his writings on jazz, the ideological impacts of such a powerful musical tool employed by the culture industry. For an excellent study of Adorno and the culture industry, see Witkin’s Adorno on Popular Culture. 4. Vantage Point: Barcelona’s Mirador (1929–31) 1 For a comprehensive examination of Primo de Rivera’s campaign against the Catalan language and culture, see Roig Rosich. 2 Jaume Bofill, Rovira i Virgili, and Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, all high-ranking members of Acció Catalana who were also involved in La Publicitat, were forced into exile during much of Primo’s reign (Huertas and Geli 16). 3 An anonymous front-page article from June 1932 exhorted the paper to support artists, yet not force them to resort to a jingoistic, ‘affected patriotism’ in order to be able to make a living (‘Necessitats’ 1). The author also makes explicit just how closely tied the metropolis and the arts were perceived to be. After listing various elements and needs common to all great cities (i.e., running water, order), a loftier inventory is provided, one that adds quality bookshops, antiquarians, conferences, concerts, and art collectors to the list of requirements of a ‘civilized city’ (1).

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4 Huertas and Geli point out that between 1915 and 1930 the number of people employed in the electrical, chemical, cement, and automotive industries increased 500 per cent. What is more, in 1930, half of the working population of Catalonia was employed in industry (12). 5 For more on cocaine in Barcelona, see chapter 2. 6 For more on the hotel and its role in the elaboration of Catalan modernity, see Davidson, ‘A Periphery with a View.’ 7 For more on the concept of ‘violència’ and the Jazz Age in Barcelona see chapter 3. 8 While Spain’s lack of membership in the gold standard provided substantial insulation from the Depression, the collapse of international trade still delivered a strong blow to the economy (Clavin 123–4). For Mirador’s reaction to the Crash, see the editorial ‘Els drames.’ 9 While sport has its own internal information management system – statistics regarding individual and team performances – the external system, that of attendance figures, gate receipts, etc. will eventually become part of the overall ‘packaging’ of sport entertainment as well. 10 The fight, which took place on 30 November, featured the Italian champion Primo Carnera against the Basque heavyweight Paulino Uzcudun. Carnera won the ten-round bout on points. 11 There were three ways to get to the Expo site: by funicular from the Paral. lel district, by cable car from the port (construction on the car only began in July 1929), and via the Plaça d’Espanya. The latter two especially offered new visual experiences of the city. When finally operational in 1931, the telefèric provided an entirely new panorama of Barcelona. Rather than taking in the metropolis from Tibidabo or from the park on Montjuïc itself, the view from the cable car literally begins on the sea and runs over the port area to Miramar. According to Mirador’s Manuel Serret, ‘la visió que proporciona un viatge en el ferrocil aeri és una cosa completament inèdita i meravellós, que no cansa mai’ (Serret 8) (the vista provided by a trip in the cable car is something completely new and marvellous, of which one never tires). Plaça d’Espanya, on the other hand, was completely redone for the Exposition and, with its new hotels and distinctive towers, became a unique filter for the view of the city from the steps of the Palau Nacional. The funicular is not nearly as dramatic; it runs almost the whole way underground. 12 This is not to say that there were not criticisms, but, as was mentioned earlier, the fact that censorship of the press was in full effect during the first year of the Exposition often makes it difficult to judge the ambiguous tone of some of the articles.

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Notes to pages 120–30

13 Josephine Baker performed at Barcelona’s Principal Palace in early 1930. Planes’s review of her show is lukewarm, however, and alludes to a diminishing of her fame and aura even as it affirms her quality as a performer. By first suggesting that she has been coasting on her successes of 1925/6 and then attributing her Barcelona triumph to simple curiosity, the critic makes clear that her appeal in the Catalan capital is different from that which she enjoys in Paris (Planes ‘Josefina Baker’ 5). For his part, Jackson also stresses the fact that ‘there were limits to Baker’s relationship to jazz,’ suggesting that she was more a part of the Parisian music hall and cabaret tradition than of the accompanying jazz music that peaked in the mid to late 1920s (78). 14 This ‘pop culture’ angle of the reception of jazz differs somewhat from the theories elaborated by Sebastià Gasch, who views rhythm as being the key to the physical effects of jazz (see chapter 3). 15 The government approved the construction of the Poble at the end of 1926. The work team included architects Francesc Folguera i Ramon Reventós, Xavier Nogués, and Miquel Utrillo. The director was Lluís Plandiura. In an interview with Mirador, Nogués reveals that he and the others had logged some 18,000 kilometres criss-crossing Spain looking for the buildings that they eventually copied (‘La paternitat’ 3). An article published in June 1929 in Madrid’s El Sol sarcastically takes Utrillo to task: ‘dicen del “pueblo español” que, por ser típico, hasta no tiene escuela’ (Bello 1) (they say that because the ‘Spanish town’ is so typical, it doesn’t even have a school). For a detailed analysis of the role of photography in the preparations for the construction of the Poble, see Mendelson 1–37. 16 While Epps considers the Poble a site of the uncanny, based on the effect of familiarity and displacement inherent in the experience of the town by those from other parts of Spain, he considers its political charge to be somewhat more ambivalent than I do (171). 17 The Països Catalans dominate one street, the stereotypically named carrer Mercaders or ‘Merchants’ Street.’ The majority of the buildings on that street are based on houses from the picturesque mountain town of Rupit and the provinces of Girona and Tarragona, respectively. 18 One may also observe that the ‘plaza mayor’ is more specifically representative of Spanish (read: Castilian) urban planning, since Mediterranean Catalan cities make more use of the tree-lined promenade or rambla. 19 The buildings in the Poble Espanyol are not exact copies but rather models inspired by actual buildings. 20 Among these figure railway problems, the prolongation of the Gran Via to Badalona, the issue of Turó-Park, and affordable housing for workers.

Notes to pages 131–43

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21 See Brunet, ‘Els noms’ and Sacs, ‘Emblemes,’ and ‘Els colors de la bandera’ in particular. 22 GATCPAC stands for the Catalan Artists and Technicians Group for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture. As members of this group, Sert and Torres Clavé would work together on such famous Barcelona buildings as the Casa Bloc apartment complex (1932–6) and the emblematic Anti-Tuberculosis Clinic (1934–8). 23 Examples of these types of articles are numerous. See, for example, Gifreda’s ‘La Reforma de la Plaça del Rei,’ in which a visit to Barcelona by Le Corbusier is remembered, as is the shame at his seeing the ‘bridge’ on Carrer del Bisbe. In no. 73, Brunet himself documents the history of the lengthening of Carrer de Balmes (Brunet ‘La prolongació’). Then, Gifreda paraphrases an earlier title with ‘La futura Plaça de Catalunya’ in no. 96. 24 ‘Chaotic’ and ‘anarchic’ are adjectives that are often repeated regarding the city as writers insist upon the need for order and control. See, among others, ‘L’urbanisme anàrquic’ by Sacs, ‘La Urbanització de la Barcelona futura’ by GATCPAC, and ‘Per una política de l’arquitectura,’ which contains a report issued by the Associació d’Arquitectes de Catalunya. 25 Sebastià Gasch, the subject of the previous chapter, detailed certain aspects of the hangover of the Roaring Twenties in his 1932 article ‘Crisi d’espectacles?’ The critic observed, for instance, that both cinema and theatre had begun to suffer, as their respective shows played to empty houses. Gasch further contends that the seedier cafés concerts of the Paral.lel were no longer anywhere to be found but does observe that, due to its velocity and agility (two traits it owed in no small part to jazz), music hall continued to thrive. 5. An Age in Pictures: Imatges (1930) 1 See below for a biography of Casas and detailed analyses of his work for Imatges. 2 See chapter 2 of this book for a detailed study of Madrid’s works from the mid-1920s. 3 Aviation, football, and boxing were especially popular sports during the 1920s; so much so that in April of 1925, two of Barcelona’s biggest papers, La Veu de Catalunya and La Publicitat, helped support the creation of L’Esport Català, a weekly that came to serve as a laboratory for modern journalistic practices in Catalonia (Finestres 26). This was an important occurrence not only because it was the first time that modern sports were to be chronicled in such a way, but also because the journal’s language

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4 5

6

7 8

Notes to pages 144–87 was Catalan (26). L’Esport lasted until 1927 only to be briefly revived in 1929 as La Nau dels Esports (27). When La Nau went under in February of 1930, its spot was filled quickly by La Rambla, a weekly that appeared under a byline that showed the extent to which sports had become part of the popular conception of modern life: ‘Esport i ciutadania’ (Sport and citizenship) (43). Planes moved to La Rambla as a reporter and contributed a couple of stories before creating the ‘Set dies, set nits’ (Seven days, seven nights) section in June of 1930 (43). The series were called ‘Els gangsters de Barcelona’ and ‘L’organització de l’anarquisme a Catalunya i a Espanya’ respectively. Finestres ascribes a lot of intention to Planes in terms of the goals of his journal, stating that the urban cosmopolitanism and internationalism of the stories are evidence of the editor’s intention to make the reader complicit in the cultural and social time of a space that was not limited to Catalonia (47). While this may have been an important part of the effect, as I detail below, the posture of the reader or viewer towards this cultural and social time is paramount to Planes’s project, as both his stated intentions spell out and the eventual articulation of the weekly indicates. The case of the La Ciutat from 1931 is exemplary in terms of the latter case. Faced with stiff competition during the mornings and evenings, the newly created left-leaning paper, which featured many of the ‘usual suspects’ of the Catalan intelligentsia that I have been highlighting in this book, took an innovative, if ultimately unsuccessful approach. La Ciutat broke with convention and appeared as a midday edition. Despite (or perhaps, because of) its unique publication schedule, the paper lasted less than a month. This period of conservative rule between 1934 and 1936 was plagued by street-fighting, arson, and assassinations. For more on the pageant and the controversy that it caused, see Doria 35–7 and 52–4.

6. The Colour of a Cocktail: J.M. de Sagarra’s Aperitiu and Vida privada 1 According to Jaume Fuster, his primary theatrical audience was ‘format per menestrals, buròcrates, petits botiguers, etcètera’ (90) (made up of day labourers, bureaucrats, small business owners, etc.). 2 For a detailed examination of Sagarra’s style, tone, and particular brand of Catalan, see Garolera’s introduction to L’ànima de les coses xxx–xxxiii. 3 Zamora was the head of a Revolutionary Committee that had formed in August 1930. The group’s planned coup was thwarted, and the leaders – including Zamora – were imprisoned (Carr 595).

Notes to pages 188–99

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4 José Ortega y Gasset was a particularly outspoken proponent of a nonfederal constitution and opponent of the Estatut. 5 Marina Gustà relates that Sagarra had planned on writing a larger study of Barcelona and that he considered Vida privada an early, limited trial (Gustà 35). 6 Díaz Fernández’s La Venus mecánica is another text that is highly disapproving of the Age, but unlike Sagarra’s it was contemporary with the period’s zenith (1929). 7 Although Madrid gave the order to demolish the walls (except for the Ciutadella) in 1854, they were not completely torn down until 1865 (Hughes 276–8). 8 In their entry on the Eixample, Hernández-Cros, Mora, and Pouplana cite Cerdà’s own statistic that, in 1859, the average number of people per room in the (old) city was 3.7 (Hernández-Cros et al. 141). 9 In an article originally published in the Diario de Barcelona, he remarks that one nationalist event in particular, a commemoration by patriots of the assault on Barcelona by the Spanish and French crowns in 1714, caused him to push up the coup by twenty-four hours. He writes that on that day ‘el separatismo se desbordó arrastrando por el suelo la bandera de España’ (Primo de Rivera 48) (separatism overflowed, pulling the Spanish flag down to the floor). 10 The narrator’s description of the garter makes the dog’s symbolic connection with Rosa Trènor even more explicit: ‘la lligacama […] en la qual feien la viu-viu tres roses minúscules de setí, com tres gotes de sang’ (10) (the garter […] on which three minuscule satin roses get along as best as they can, like three drops of blood). 11 Women’s evening wear in the 1920s made great use of satin and silk; ‘smoking suits,’ loose-fitting garments meant for lounging, were also fashionable. Mado’s use of one here blurs the line between private (boudoir) space and the semi-public space of the salon. For more on female fashion during the era, see Jenkins, chapter 5. 12 Kirsten Belgum regards representation as the ‘primary function of the “public” part of the interior, the salon, the receiving room, the gute Stube, the Herren- or Damen-zimmer’ (Belgum 21). If one accepts this interpretation, the temporary conversion of the space through the activity of gambling dissociates it even further from its function. Gambling and the experience of time while participating in it change the focus of the space and hence reduce the furnishings’ impact on the interior. 13 Notions of ‘surface’ invite direct comparison to the Eixample itself, which, through its development, defeated Cerdà’s attempts at maintaining a

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14

15

16

17 18

19

20

Notes to pages 200–5 visible ‘interior’ of the blocks. From the public zone of the street, the Eixample, with its modernista façades and successful shops, portrays a wealthy integrated surface, akin to the fashionable outward appearances of the bourgeois and aristocratic characters of the novel. Significantly, large sectors of the bourgeoisie had important roles not only in luxury consumption but also in the manufacturing and production of commodities and ‘fashion.’ The temporary nature of the transformation of the space is important. As Jane Rendell observes in her examination of nineteenth-century gaming houses, dedicated gambling rooms usually required, if not a hidden space, then at least one where ‘temporally as well as spatially, separation from everyday life was essential to sever connections with diurnal cycles that could potentially shorten long gambling sessions’ (Rendell 100). During this scene, the narrator fleshes out Rosa’s character. The reader learns that she comes from a decent, Old Barcelona family and that her present sorry state of affairs is largely of her own doing. Although she possesses a natural grace, her airs at being an ‘old-style grande dame’ belie a more modest character, exemplified by her rather humorous refusal of caviar in favour of the more ‘rural’ bread and tomato after the gaming session ends (21). For more on the aesthetics of the garden and its link to Catalan identity, see Buxó i Rey. The tapestry is a socioeconomic trophy of Porcell’s ‘evisceration’ of the Lloberolas. Her purchase of it should be read less as an attempt to help out the financially struggling aristocrats than as a bid to use it to bestow authenticity on her own home’s interior, one dominated by old knickknacks and faux Grecos, Goyas, and Riberas. According to Max Bembo, cafés de camareras were rather risqué dancings where, along with erotic dancing, the taxi dancers would masturbate their male partners to orgasm (qtd in Villar 57). Over time, these establishments gradually died out and were replaced by the less explicit cabarets and their tanguistas (57). Among those who wrote on the area were the Civil Governor of Barcelona in 1886, Manuel Gil Maestre, Juli Vallmitjana, the aforementioned Bembo, Vásquez Yepes, and, of course, the subject of Part 2 of the second chapter of this book, Francesc Madrid, whom Villar credits with popularizing the name ‘Barrio Chino’ in 1925 (121). Foreign authors who depicted the Raval before 1932 include Morand, Montherlant, and Carco. For a comprehensive history of this urban space, see Aisa and Vidal.

Notes to pages 205–8

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21 In May 1929, Mirador published an article by J. Aiguader i Miró entitled ‘La perversitat del districte cinquè’ in which the critic lambastes the creation of a false image of the Raval as the depository of Barcelona’s masculinity. He criticizes the bored people who frequent the area at night looking for excitement and asserts that any vice to be found is a result of the neighbourhood’s miserable living conditions. Aiguader i Miró’s piece seems to be oriented towards consciousness raising among the periodical’s readers; he describes the squalor of the zone in great detail and includes an ending meant to shock in which he sustains that the Raval supported the sale of rotten eggs to those unfortunates who could not afford to purchase fresh ones. 22 Guillem’s erotic liaison is with the Baron and Baroness of Falset. When Guillem later learns that Frederic’s gambling debt is owed to the Baron, he blackmails him to nullify it. Driven to the brink of desperation by Guillem, the Baron commits suicide at the end of Part 1.

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Index

Acció Catalana, 106, 136–7, 153, 222n2 D’Ací i d’Allà, 26, 71, 145 Adorno, Teodor, 102, 222n17 advertising, 84 Aguilar, Màrius, 127, 143, 145 Aiguader i Miró, 229n21 Alcalá Zamora, Niceto, 187 All i salobre, 182–3 Almirall, Valentí, 24 American Southern Syncopated Orchestra, 78 L’Amic de les Arts (journal), 71, 80, 83 anarchism, 66 anarcho-syndicalism, 3, 215n1 Anderson, Andrew A., 72 Annual, Battle of, 23 Apa (Feliu Elias i Bracons), 106 Appia, Adolphe, 78–9, 90, 220n10 architecture: Catalan, 124 Armstrong, Louis, 13 Arnau, Carme, 4 Art Deco, 104, 110 Artís, Andreu, 137, 139 Aubert, Paul, 16 baccarat, 63 Baker, Josephine, 14, 49, 73, 74, 217n5; Barcelona show (1930), 224n13

Barcelona Gráfica (newspaper), 142, 151–2 Barcelona: boom during First World War, 11, 57, 63, 108, 111, fig. 1.2; death squads in, 21; entertainment in, 62, 71; modernization of, 24, 74; neutral status of, 4; as prototype Jazz Age city, 15–16, 190; semiotics of, 131; state of war in, 16; street violence in, 16, 20, 54, 66, 144, 212, figs.1.4, 1.5; strike of 1917, 16; Tragic Week in, 25 Barceloneta, 110 Barrio Chino: as entertainment zone, 104; in Imatges, 154–62; and Jazz Age, 8, 11; and jazz performance, 121; as object of journalistic gaze, 26; as one half of Old Barcelona, 139; as port zone, 43; as ‘public’ space, 192; in Sangre en Atarazanas, 50–68; and squalor, 229n21; thieves’ academy in, 46–7; in Vida privada, 203–11, 220n20; and writers, 228n20 El Be Negre (newspaper), 144 Becquer, Angel M., 46–7 Belgum, Kirsten, 227n12 Bell, Clive, 75, 216n4

242

Index

Bembo, Max, 228n19 Benedict, Burton, 123 Benet, Rafael, 70, 73, 127 Benjamin, Walter, 102, 200, 215n2, 222n15 Berenguer, General Dámaso, 141, 187 Berlin, 74 Bernades, Vicens, 113 Bienio negro, 147 Blake, Jody, 14, 216n4 Blanco, Alda, 219n18 blasé outlook, 147, 154 Boatwright, Dorsey, 218n1 Bohigas, Carles, 128 Bon (Romà Bonet i Sintes), 107 bourgeois interior, 199 boxing: business of, 114; criticism in Mirador of, 113; and crowds, 115; first club in Barcelona, 17; and media, 116; ring for, 86–7; as urban event, 116; world title fight (1916), 17, 85, 221n8, 223n10 Boyer, M. Christine, 118 Brunet, Manuel, 106, 115–16, 133, 225n23 Bux, John, 95 cabaret: boom of, 89; characteristics in Barcelona of, 62; first appearance of tango, 111; gentrification of, 187; performances in, 65; as reception point of Jazz Age performance, 7; set-up of, 204; and speed, 46; women in, 63, 66, fig. 2.6 Cabot, Just, 4, 106, 215n3 caciquismo, 187 café concerts, 203, 220n9 cafés de camareras, 62, 66, 203, 228n19

cakewalk (dance), 14 Calvet, Agustí, 24 Campillo, Maria, 4 Canudas Aerodrome, 171 Capdevila, Carles, 172 Carr, Raymond, 15, 22, 187 Casas, Gabriel, 5, 10, 142, 149, 151–81 Casassas Ymbert, Jordi, 196 Casasús, Josep Maria, 24, 25, 26, 183 Castanys, 107 Castellanos, Jordi, 4 Castillo, Reyes, 49 Catalan Anti-Art Manifesto, 70, 80–1 Catalan Republic, 105, 126, 131, 140 Catalanism, 7, 183 censorship, 66, 106, 129–30 Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, 71, 220n3 Cerdà, Idelfons, 193–4, 227–8n13 Chagall, Marc, 73 champagne, 41, 113, fig. 2.3 Chaplin, Charlie, 81, 96 Charleston, 121, 139; arrival in Catalonia, 69; arrival in Spain of, 9, 49–50, 74; decline of, 219n13; as démodé, 203; in Gràcia, 49; and rhythm, 49–50, 64; superseding of foxtrot by, 73 Chester, USS, 175, fig. 5.14 Chicago, 13 cinema, 3, 81, 85, 104, 121, 127 circus, 85 La Ciutat, 226n6 Civil Guard, 175, 181, fig. 5.16 cocaine, 160; and Barcelona drug scene, 43; in Bar del Centro cabaret, 111; female addicts of, 44–5, fig. 2.8; spread from France of, 59, 61; as urban ‘plague,’ 58, 218n8

Index cocktails, 7, 87, 184, 186, 190 Cocteau, Jean, 75–6, 78 cosmopolitanism: and boxing, 115–16; and drug use, 59; and entertainment, 64; evolution of, 6; and International Exposition, 122; and Jazz Age, 65, 143, 184; and wartime Barcelona, 18 La Criolla (bar), 156–7, 159–60, 206–9, fig. 5.4 Crónica (journal), 145, 148 crowds, 54, 86, 115–17, 178 cubism, 100 D’Ors, Eugeni, 24, 216n2 Da Cal, Ucelay, 218n1 Dalcroze, Émile Jacques, 77, 79, 90 Dalí, Salvador, 9, 70, 72, 76–84, 99 dancings, 64, 65, 203, 208, 228n19 Davidson, Robert A., 215n4, 221n10 El Día Gráfico (newspaper), 143 Diari de Catalunya (newspaper), 25 Diario de Barcelona (newspaper), 227n9 Diario de la Exposición Internacional (newspaper), 142 Díaz Fernández, José, 191, 227n6 Domènech i Muntaner, Lluís, 163–4 Doria, Sergi, 152, 178 Edén Concert, 92 Eixample, 26, 104, 150, 202, 227– 8n13; history of, 192–4 Ellington, Duke, 13 Enríquez de Salamanca, Cristina, 219n18 Epps, Bradley S., 123, 125, 224n16 Ernst, Max, 73 El Escándalo, 5, 8, 25, 27–51, 147, 156, 171, 213, fig. 2.1

243

Espanyol FC, 175 L’Esport Català (newspaper), 225–6n3 Esprit nouveau, 77 L’Esquella de la Torratxa (newspaper), 17, 18, 219n13 Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, 187 Estampa (journal), 145, 148 Estat Català, 187 eurhythmics, 78 Evans, Nicholas M., 11–12 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Paris, 1925), 73 Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1867), 122 Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1878), 122 Fabre, Jaume, 16, 17 ‘fallen’ women, 44, 58, 63 fashion, 200 FC Barcelona, 175 Ferrer i Guardia, Francesc, 151 Finestres, Jordi, 145 First World War, 3, 62 flappers, 5, 66 Foix, J.V., 127 football, 221n8 foxtrot (dance), 89, 121 Fréjaville, Gustave, 92 Fritzsche, Peter, 215n5 Fuster, Jaume, 226n1 Los Gabrieles (bar), 157, fig. 5.5 La Gaceta Deportiva (newspaper), 144 La Gaceta Literaria (newspaper), 72, 75, 76, 220n4 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 125 gambling, 42, 197–202, 228n15

244

Index

Gance, Abel, 82 Garcés, Tomàs, 220n4 García Espuche, Albert, 193 García Martínez, José María, 49, 89 García Santo-Tomás, Enrique, 221n10 gardens, 202 Garolera, Narcís, 183 Garvey, Marcus, 13 Gasch, Sebastià, 5, 107, 139, 182, 192, 201, 213; and Barcelona bars, 109–10; and end of Jazz Age, 225n25; and live jazz, 120; theory of rhythm of, 9, 69–103, 224n14; theory of violence, 16, 69–103, 186 Gaseta de les Arts, 71, 76 Gaspar, Josep, 5, 142, 151–4, 171, 175 GATCPAC, 132, 225n22 Gaudí, Antoni, 165, 193 Geli, Carles, 108 Gifreda i Morros, Màrius, 131–4, 145, 165, 168, 225n23 Gilroy, Paul, 12 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto, 72, 220n4 Girona, Ignasi, 124 gold standard, 223n8 Graf Zeppelin, 151 Grau, Joan, 120–2 The Great Gatsby, 203 Gris, Juan, 98 Guardia Civil. See Civil Guard Guereña, Jean-Louis, 218n6, 219n19, 220n21 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 113, 221n13 Gustà, Marina, 227n5 Harlem Hellfighters, 13 Highfill, Juli, 218n7 Hobsbawm, Eric, 13, 14, 216n3

Hotel Colón, 87, 111, 143, fig. 4.2 hotel: as cosmopolitan space, 7. See also Hotel Colón, Ritz Hotel, and Palace Hotel Huertas, Josep M., 16, 17, 108 Hurtado, Amadeu, 105–6 Hylton, Jack, 95, 101–2, 120–1 Iberoamerican Exposition (Seville, 1929), 120, 130 Imatges, 5, 10, 141–81, 213, figs. 5.1,2 impressionism, 72 International Exposition (Barcelona, 1929), 11, 108, 139; access to, 223n11; artificiality of, 112; construction for, 24; and Eixample, 194; in Imatges, 151; loss of international dimension of, 141, fig. 4.4; and press, 117–18; political dimension of, 119–20 Internationale Koloniale en Uitvoerhandelstentoonstelling (Amsterdam, 1883), 120–1 Isherwood, Christopher, 204 Jackson, Jeffrey H., 14, 217n5 Jagoe, Catherine, 219n18 jazz: and eroticism, 49; as montage, 12; omnipresence of, 185; origin of term, 216n2; rhythm of, 6, 69–103; as rhythmic art, 14; spread of, 3 Jazz Age: first phase of, 62, 70; gentrification of, 109, 122, 184; ‘hangover’ of, 10, 182; illegal activities of, 42; meaning of term, 3; nocturnal spaces of, 5, 51; spatial practice of, 5, 42; urban spaces of, 139; and violence, 7, 9, 16, 21, 111

Index Jelavich, Peter, 204, 221n13 Joia (journal), 26 journalism: and ephemeral nature of, 184; and ethics, 43; history in Catalonia of, 24; interviewing, 66–7; as mapping, 7, 109; as manifestation, 6, 50, 109; as medium of Jazz Age, 12; modernization of, 25; political potential of, 23, 106, 201; as presence, 6; undercover reporting, 60–1; and urban myth, 16, 68 Kaplan, Temma, 15 Keaton, Buster, 81, 95, 96–7 Kern, Stephen, 204 kickline, 94–7, 221n13 Kracauer, Siegfried, 96–7, 102 Lang, Fritz, 82 Langdon, Harry, 81 Larra, Mariano José de, 25, 217n11 Larson, Susan, 218n7 Le Bon, Gustave, 54, 219n16 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), 73, 74, 77, 79, 137, 225n23 Lefebvre, Henri, 5, 6, 125 Lefler, Antoni, 180 Léger, Ferdinand, 222n16 leisure activities, 6, 17, 89, 108 Levi Wine and his Black Orchestra, 108 Levin, Thomas Y., 96 Levinson, André, 49 Liceu, 20 Life Magazine, 145 Lliga Regionalista, 15, 25, 187, 196, 202

245

Lombroso, Cesare, 219n16 Losada, Carlos, 42 Macià, Francesc, 140 Madrid, Francesc, 113, 182, 192, 201; and Barcelona drug scene, 43; and Josep Maria Planes, 143; and Sangre en Atarazanas, 51–60, 208, 228n20; and taxis, 48 Madrigal, Carlos, 58 Maluquer i Viladot, Joan, 154, fig. 5.3 Manifest Groc. See Catalan Anti-Art Manifesto Maragall, Joan, 25 Marrugat, Jordi, 4 mazurka (dance), 62 Mendelson, Jordana, 146, 219n15 Meridià (newspaper), 140 Milans del Bosch, Joaquín, 23, 42 Minguet i Batllori, Joan M., 70, 93, 103, 220n1 Mirador, 5, 9, 72, 85, 94, 103, 104–40, 144, 183, 189, 224n15, fig. 4.1; and Catalanism, 213, 219n12; and journalistic innovation, 25, 151; and urbanism, 47 Miró, Joan, 70, 73, 80, 95, 110 Modern School, 151 Modernisme, 15, 24, 217n6 Molas, Joaquim, 4 Montanyà, Lluis, 9, 70, 80, 82, 84 Montjuïc, 151; cession of castle, 136; Exposition site, 112; gardens of, 129; revitalization of, 130–1; stadium, 131; as symbol of oppression, 126 monumentality, 123 morphine, 43–5, 218n8, fig. 2.9 Murnau, F.W., 82

246

Index

music hall: history of, 88–9; revues, 90; sketches, 92; variations of, 89 La Nau, 225–6n3 Nebot, Francesc de P., 124 Negri, Blanca, 95 negritude, 5 New Objectivism, 82, 149, 151 New Orleans, 12 New York, 5 newspapers: as cultural mediators, 6; as syncretic montage, 12; and World’s Fairs, 118 La Noche (newspaper), 143 El Noticiero Universal (newspaper), 142 Noucentisme, 15, 24, 72, 217n6, 218n2 La Nova Revista (newspaper), 71 October Revolution, 21 L’Opinió (newspaper), 144 opium, 43 Ordoñez, Marcos, 182–3 Orginal Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), 13 Ortega y Gasset, José, 227n4 Ostransky, Leroy, 215n1 Ozenfant, Amédée, 74, 77, 79, 99 Palace Hotel (Madrid), 171 Palau de la Música, 163–4, 203 Palau de Projeccions, 92, 120–2, 126 Palau Nacional, 129, 142 Panyella, Ramon, 4 Papitu (newspaper), 144 Parador system, 125 Paral.lel, 11, 23, 26, 75, 104, 121, 203–4, 223n11 Paris, 5, 14, 73

Partit Catalanista Republicà, 187 pas-doble (dance), 139 Passarell, Jaume, 110 Patronato Nacional de Turismo, 125–6 Paulina Buxareu, 182 photography, 150–81 Picasso, Pablo, 77, 98 pick-pocketing, 47 Pla, Josep, 25 Plandiura, Lluís, 127, 224n15 Planes, Josep M., 4, 10, 87, 108, 111–13, 192, 201, 213, 224n13; assassination of, 144; and Imatges, 141–82 Poble Espanyol, 9, 122–8, 142, 151, 224n16, 224n19 Polo, Irene, 4, 142, 171, 215n3 Pompeya Music Hall, 21 Prat de la Riba, Enric, 24 Premi Creixells, 191 Preston, Paul, 188 primitivism, 14, 87 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 7, 65; attacks on Catalan culture by, 120, 123–5, 190, 222n1; and bourgeoisie, 201; coup by, 15, 21, 217n6; crackdown on gambling by, 42; death of, 140; decline of dictatorship under, 98, 104–6; escape to France by, 10, 129, 141; period after death of, 148, 187–8; speeches by, 218n4; in Vida privada, 202; and violence, 67 Prohibition, 41–2 prostitution, 62, 63; and Barrio Chino, 53, 55–7, 208; guide to, 219–20n19 Prous i Vila, Josep M., 168 public works, 47–8

Index La Publicidad/Publicitat (newspaper), 21, 27, 72, 106, 144, 183, 217n10, 218n8, 225n3 Puig i Cadalfalch, Josep, 120, 193, 196 purism, 74, 222n16 La Rambla, 225–6n3 Ramblas, Barcelona, 26, 47, 54, 137, 139, 151 Renaixença, 129 Rendell, Jane, 228n15 Renger-Patzch, Albert, 149 Resina, Joan Ramon, 4, 105, 217n8 Retana, Álvaro, 89 La Revue Nègre, 49 rhythm. See jazz Riegl, Aloïs, 123–4 Ritz Hotel (Barcelona), 163 Robert, Robert, 25 Roig Rosich, Josep M., 218n3 Rovira i Virgili, Antoni, 106 Rubiò i Bellver, Joan, 193 Rubió i Tudurí, Nicolau M., 129, 136–7 Ruttmann, Walter, 82, 222n16 Sacs, Joan, 127 Sagarra, J.M. de, 4; and bars, 186; and print culture, 185; and Vida privada, 10, 24, 58, 122, 145, 156, 182–211, 213 Sagrada Familia Expiatory Temple, 163, 165 Salaün, Serge, 89 Salvador, Santiago, 20 Salvat-Papasseit, Joan, 43, 219n10 Sander, August, 149 Sangre en Atarazanas, 8, 50–68, 156, 208, 213, fig. 2.10 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 221n12

247

Schlör, Joachim, 204 Schwartz, Vanessa R., 215n2 Segui, Salvador, 66, 220n23 Sert, Josep Lluís, 132, 225n22 Setmana Tràgica, 151 Severini, Gino, 73 sexual tableaux, 56–7, 209–11 Shaw, Arnold, 12 shimmy (dance), 64 Simmel, Georg, 100 El Sol (Madrid), 224n15 Soldevila, Carles, 24 Soldevila, Ignasi, 145 Solsona, Braulio, 47–8 space: interurban, 5; textual, 6. See also spatial practice Spain: boom during First World War, 15; crisis of 1917, 15; and Depression, 223n8; neutrality of, 16, 21, 89, 190; Second Republic of, 10, 88, 107, 136, 141, 187–9, 192, 212 spatial practice, 5–6, 10, 42, 43, 48, 65, 68 speakeasies, 42 stadium, 86 Stearns, Marshall W., 216n2 Storyville (New Orleans), 13 syphilis, 56 tango, 13, 63, 64, 139, figs. 2.4,5 taxi drivers, 47 taxidermy, 195–6 Tom Brown’s Band, 216n2 Torres Clavé, Josep, 132, 225n22 urbanism, 47, 134 vals-jota (dance), 62, 139 La Vanguardia (newspaper), 142

248

Index

Vayreda i Aulet, Joaquim, 167, 171, 175 La Venus mecánica, 191 Verne, Maurice, 101 Vertov, Dziga, 82 La Veu de Catalunya (newspaper), 25, 70, 71–2, 142, 218n2, 225n3 Vida privada (novel). See J.M. de Sagarra Vilà i Bisa, Antoni, 114 Vila-San-Juan, José Luis, 24, 108 Vilaseca, Josep, 133

Villa Rosa (bar), 53, 157 Villar, Paco, 42, 220n22 violència, 70, 80, 85, 86–8, 102. See also Sebastià Gasch Virilio, Paul, 99 Vu (journal), 145, 147–8 Wall Street Crash, 137, 141 Ward, Janet, 215n2 Wüst Berdaguer, Federico, 49, 64 xotis (dance), 139

STUDIES IN BOOK AND PRINT CULTURE General Editor: Leslie Howsam

Hazel Bell, Indexes and Indexing in Fact and Fiction Heather Murray, Come, bright Improvement! The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario Joseph A. Dane, The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method Christopher J. Knight, Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, and the Tradition of the Common Reader Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization William A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge, eds, The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, eds, The Future of the Page Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia, eds, Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Paper-contestations’ and Textual Communities in England, 1640–1675 Nick Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York Jonathan Carlyon, Andrés González de Barcia and the Creation of the Colonial Spanish American Library Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture Deborah McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience David Finkelstein, ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition

Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s Elizabeth Driver, Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825–1949 Benjamin C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Ms. Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England Mary Ann Gillies, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 Willa Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book-Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 Lisa Surwillo, The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain Dean Irvine, Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 Janet Friskney, New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952–1978 Janice Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860 Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator Martyn Lyons, Reading Culture and Writing Practices in NineteenthCentury France Robert A. Davidson, Jazz Age Barcelona