During the great gala of the La Vanguardia awards, in the Oval Room of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia, set in a night-blue light, two women looked at each other with their eyes wide open. Sitting next to each other, you didn’t need to listen to their conversation to understand that they understood each other, as their faces conveyed attention and happiness, qualities that help define charm. Because Queen Letícia and Lita Cabellut, despite their differences, are twinned by the turn of fate that transformed their lives and shaped their identity.
For Cabellut, recognized today as one of the most valued contemporary artists, her life changed at the age of twelve. Born into a gypsy family in Sariñena, she grew up in Raval and the cruelty of poverty spurred her on and deprived her of going to school. There must have been something revealing in her eyes for Paquita Llohis Serra, a cultured woman from Masnou, to notice her.
“I am the result of someone else’s empathy,” says the artist. Paquita had the courage to adopt a twelve-year-old girl and give her the chance to develop. And today I think that intelligence is equivalent to discovering and acting through empathy”. One day, the adoptive mother took the girl to the Prado Museum, where Lita began to tremble, captivated. There, still without having learned to read and write, his mother asked him if he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. And she replied that she wanted to “be a painter”.
When the private drawing teachers could not teach her anything else, they sent her to the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. There he would study the classic masters, and work on his style, halfway between figuration and abstraction, questioning his roots. He understood that the material is only the skin of art, in the manner of Goya, and began to look for its muscles, arteries, heart. His name has appeared for years, according to the Artprice meter, among those of the most valued living artists, a fact that has undoubtedly encouraged a troupe of opponents to try to beat his mastery. The talent of an upstart has always been discussed by the establishment. It also happened to Letícia.
His story does not have the Dickensian aspects of Cabellut’s life, but it could have fit well in the stories of Jane Austen or Henry James. Love acted as a vital shocker and her marriage was double: she married Felipe VI and Spain, even though a sector of society rejected her. The poisoning already emerged in the official announcement – that “let me speak” that feminism has resigned today – and the constant rumors of aesthetic touch-ups, the distance from the King Emeritus and the rest of his political family or the ‘ height of the heels she wears marked the stage as a princess. While the silver threads of his white hair, secularism or the gift to communicate have accompanied him during the nine years of his reign.
Lita said that, despite living in Holland (since the age of 19), she has not lost her Spanishness. Not even that gypsy thing. She understands art as a collective event, and in her process other hands intervene while a canvas is shaped like a sculpture.
I have no doubt that Letícia retains intact the journalist who loved her profession. The prodigious memory he has allows him to retain names and data, to ask about what is usually forgotten and to take care of the human detail. When dinner was over, Lita came to our table to look for her daughter Marta. “The Queen wants to meet you”, he told her. Marta was also adopted, although she and her mother, who never forgot the heartbeat of love between broken glass, are like two drops of water.
