Painter, sculptor, engraver, graphic humorist and ex-librist, Ismael Smith (Barcelona 1896, New York 1972) is one of those fascinating figures of Catalan culture, a great promise of modernism who was pushed away by those who had previously elevated him until he died in hospital in a mental hospital in New York this November 1 fifty years ago. In 2017, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya dedicated an anthological exhibition to him, and it was there that Sebastià Portell (ses Salines, 1992) found the object of his latest novel, Les altures (Empúries): “It is a figure that when the more you know it, the more aware you are that you don’t know it, that it is ambiguous, unattainable, uncertain”.
In the novel, Portell traces the artist’s adventures from the Barcelona where he began successfully to the New York of his decadence, passing through Paris, where he received a scholarship from the Barcelona City Council and from where he had to return with the outbreak of the First War World. He does it through the characters that surrounded him, a New York neighbor, the nanny, his mother, his colleague Marià Andreu… “in each chapter based on the literary grounds of the moment: some with a more modernist aftertaste, close to to the prose of Joaquim Ruyra or Víctor Català, others move more towards the psychological novel of Virginia Woolf, Mercè Rodoreda or Antònia Vicens herself… Trying to get to know the figure and the literary environment in order to speak through the tools of moment”.
“I wanted a style –he continues– that was faithful, parallel or homologous to his artistic strategy. What did he do? He proposed works of absolutely disparate and sometimes contradictory styles that created an initial attraction and then plunged you into total darkness”. And always, says Portell, being clear that it is “a novel, not a biography or an essay, it is an entertainment and beauty device. What interested him was not to say everything, but to say what was needed and to say it very well”.
The novel drinks from a lot of documentation, and although he invents two characters –who existed anonymously, he gives them names and forms–, he wants to be faithful to the artist: “All the facts that are explained are real and almost all the words that I put in his mouth they sell private papers or letters from him”. It has been an investigation for almost three years based on catalogs (MNAC, Museu d’Art de Cerdanyola –where there is a permanent room with his work and a lot of documentation–, Fundació Palau and Fundación Mapfre in Madrid), articles and conversations with experts in his work: “I investigated like crazy and I don’t think I had ever stolen so much in my life, excusable thefts: I’ve stolen plots, storylines, motifs that he cultivated throughout his work”.
For the author, current president of the Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana, “there is something very captivating in his work and in how his work seemed to relate to his life. Ismael Smith’s work, like his personality, is seductive, very formal, aesthetic, which hides many obscurities and complexities”. An artist who is, he says, “the joker, the marginalized, the great promise of Catalan art at the beginning of the 20th century and a failure”. “He is one of the most complex personalities that I have come close to, and writing him has been a stormy and painful journey, but with perspective it has been worth it, it is the book that I am most satisfied with having written, by far” he explains. Portell tries to “question from complexity the binary dichotomy up-down, success-failure, light-dark. Ismael Smith is chiaroscuro, he is the artist who dared to transgress everything although for that very reason he failed, the artist who cultivated numerous artistic disciplines, from engraving to bookplate passing through sculpture, and who did not stand out profoundly in any of them, although there are notable works and very good”. After all, “a rare figure, and that led to a rather sad, languorous life path, but it is also what makes me interested in contemporary times”.
A painful journey, too, because it accompanies “an eminently sad trajectory, although it has dazzling and glorious moments, a life of suffering and misunderstanding.” With an added challenge: “The historical and artistic responsibility of doing justice”. The recognition, Portell concludes, “of a legacy, not only from Smith, but from all the writers who have come before us.”
Catalan version, here
