Flowers, little birds, neo-rococo furniture. And kittens, many kittens in compacts, paintings and porcelain figurines. A soft, exaggerated sentimentality. Many clichés and a lot of light blue color, more than pink, which would only prevail later. It’s the cheesy. The cheesy. A word that was born in the 19th century linked to the social and economic situation of Spain at the time, of backwardness, and about which, although surprising now, many of the thinkers and artists of the moment wrote, from Benavente to Ortega y Gómez de la Serna. A word in which taste, social class, economy and power are mixed – who decides what is cheesy? – with a difficult translation. Neither its origin is clear.
Sergio Rubira, curator of the exhibition Elogio de lo cheesy that the CentroCentro space in Madrid has just opened, offers two theories: one, based on Professor Tierno Galván, is that it comes from italics, “an English letter, crooked, with many floreos, which arrived in Spain at the end of the 18th century and prevailed above all in the commercial field, associated with the bourgeois. In the 19th century, not everyone knew how to read and write, and when they did learn, if they tried to imitate handwriting from difficult cursive, they would make mistakes or overdo it. And it is possible that cheesy comes from that English cursive when it was badly done. In addition, in the XIX there is a rivalry between the cursive letter and the Spanish bastard, more legible. A national claim against the letter that comes from outside.
The other possible origin of cursi is almost fictional and, says Rubira, it came to inspire characters in Lorca’s work Doña Rosita the spinster and the language of flowers. “It would have originated from two sisters from Cádiz but of French origin, the Sicurs. It seems that they were dressed in the French fashion and belonged to a family with means, but they are orphaned, they do not have so much money to renew their clothes, the clothes begin to tear and they cover the patches with ribbons or sew a little flower to a stain and their appearance ends up being ridiculous. Young people from Cádiz begin to yell at them on the street: ‘Sicur, Sicur, Sicur!’”.
Yale professor Noël Valis, author of La cultura de la cursilería: bad taste, class and kitsch in modern Spain (Antonio Machado Libros) is attracted to the idea of ??the Sicur, “who appeared to be of a higher class and embodied that idea of ??I want and I can’t: the most important thing is to consider the value of the anecdote”. And in any case, remember that the first appearance of the word cheesy was in a Cádiz newspaper in 1842. And he stresses that it is very important to locate its origin in the provinces “until at the end of the 19th century we can see its nationalization in the novels of Galdós , already in Madrid”.
And remember the union of the term to the middle class. “It is a moment in which in Spain there is a certain economic backwardness and cultural insufficiency. The cheesy begins in the lower-middle class and then in all the middle classes, and at the end of the century it reaches the aristocracy. It is very democratic, ”he smiles. And he says that “the Spanish middle classes are insecure, they do not show the same strength as in France or England, and the RAE dictionary precisely defines corniness as wanting to appear, belonging to a higher social class.” And he points out that for Ortega y Gasset “the whole question of corniness encompasses the entire Spanish history of the second half of the 19th century.”
“This is the moment – Rubira underlines – in which Europe is democratizing, industrializing, compared to a Spain that tries to pretend that it is also at that pace but goes much further back, and all this culture of the cheesy is born trying to imitate what is coming from outside. It is the culture of appearances and cheesy is a fundamental term, without it there are things that cannot be explained from the 19th century”. And he recalls that “it is associated with consumption, fashionistas read books on civility, and to appear they spend beyond their means. And somehow the cheesy is attacked by that aspiration for change. The cheesy characters of 19th century literature end fatally and it has to do with shaking the norm. This is not your place. Galdós portrays the protagonist of La de Bringas as horrible, she ends up in prostitution, but if you analyze it from another perspective, she is a woman who breaks. They are judged for trying to declassify themselves.”
Both Rubira and Valis are reminiscent of Ramón Gómez de la Serna –in the show there are cheesy objects from his office– and his Essay on the cheesy to show the ambivalence of the term in our lives. “He talked about the corny bad and the good”, says the teacher, “and there is something about that: it is a social and cultural phenomenon, but it is also associated with the domestic, the homemade, the feminine, the most intimate”. The artist Carlos Pazos, who has just curated an exhibition on the concept of taste, Bad painting? , sums it up: “There is a type of corniness, of banality, that keeps a lot of company. A sweet bolero sometimes interests you more than a Joy Division song. In kitsch there is a certain delivery, a certain excess. Kitschness is absolutely necessary.”
