Bohemian Rhapsody: The Surprising Story of the Perfect Summer Painting
Santiago Rusiñol left his family for the avant-garde. He found redemption in the ordinary.
By Tim Gihring
In June 1886, Santiago Rusiñol is on his honeymoon in Paris. He’s 25 years old, Spanish from Barcelona, and in love. In a letter to a friend, he writes that he has never felt so stimulated, so alive and full of pleasure. But he is not referring to his wife, or the trip, or marriage. He is referring to art. “The only thing that interests me,” he writes, “is the demon of art.”
Less than a year later, Rusiñol steps away from his duties in the family textile business — which has made him wealthy enough to do so — and hands the reins to his brother. He travels around Spain and France and Italy. And then he flies the coop entirely. In fact, he returns to Paris and the art scene he had fallen in love with, as though he were being drawn into an affair.
“The universe really tilts for him in 1889,” says Galina Olmsted, the Associate Curator of European Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “Paris is the center of the art world in Europe in the late 1880s and into the 1890s. And he falls into the bohemian set in the neighborhood of Montmartre.”
Rusiñol has left his wife and young daughter behind. “It’s not an uncommon story,” Olmsted notes, “that the pursuit of the life of an artist often leaves people on the wayside.” For Rusiñol, though, art is not a passing passion. It’s not even about sitting down at the canvas everyday. It’s a lifestyle, a way of thinking and being.
He immerses himself completely — painting, drawing, writing plays and poetry and criticism — and frequents artist hangouts like Le Chat Noir, the black cat café, which becomes home base for Rusiñol and his expat friends from Catalonia. They lead bachelor artist lives, whether they are bachelors or artists or not, and Rusiñol becomes their leader.
The culture of patios
He spends a few years in the city, painting scenes like the interior of a café with moody, shadowy figures — like you, the viewer, have just walked in, interrupting the everyday. But eventually he and his Catalan friends get out of the city, traveling around France and back to Spain. They’re becoming interested in plein air painting — making art in the great outdoors. And eventually they come across the town of Sitjes, just south of Barcelona, on the Spanish coast. A sleepy fishing village when the Catalan crew finds it in 1891.
“They really love the quality of the light and the atmosphere there,” says Olmsted. “Easy access to Barcelona when you need to get back into the city, and probably a very affordable place to go and spend a summer.”
Sitjes has the added attraction of something called patio culture. Not the kind of patio most people think of — outside in the yard or garden — but largely enclosed spaces off the main rooms of the house. Quiet. Cool. Private. It’s where you would wash laundry, where you would hang it to dry. Where you would sit with your family or your closest friends and sip coffee or something stronger. It’s not a space that you would open up to just anyone.
Rusiñol is intrigued. There is a feeling of solitude about these patios. You’re sort of inside, sort of outside, contained in this liminal space. And there is a certain quality of light, as it drops in from above and bounces off the warm walls. Once he’s settled in Sitjes and invited into patios, Rusiñol starts painting them.
The picture known as Patio in Sitges, recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, is among the first, made sometime between 1892 and 1894. The space has an intimate courtyard feel. The walls have a peachy, pink color. Planes of light and shadow fall across the canvas in the modernist mode that Rusiñol and his compatriots were developing.
“It almost feels like a dream,” says Olmsted. “You can imagine yourself being in that patio and then waking up — or booking a great Airbnb and having that space all to yourself. Maybe people have just left or will join you in a few moments. But for now, it’s your space.”
Better to be mad than tame
Rusiñol stays in Sitjes for years. He buys several old fishing buildings and ties them together into a kind of workshop/performance space/hangout. He calls it Cau Ferrat, the iron hideout, because Rusiñol has always collected pieces of finely made wrought iron that he would find on his walks in the Spanish countryside and he hangs these on the wall.
He is into the nineteenth-century idea of “total art,” what the Germans call Gesamtkunstwerk, combining music and theater and literature. He starts holding festivals in Sitjes called festes modernistes, where people read poetry and play music and show their art. Rusiñol makes an opening speech at one of them where he says, “We come here fleeing from the city, to get together and to sing together what comes from the depths of feeling. To rid ourselves of the chill that runs in everyone’s veins, taking refuge under the banner of art.”
The old religions are dead, he says. Art is the new faith. Vibrant and alive and beautiful. Better to be unbalanced and decadent and even mad, he says, than drooping and tame.
Around 1899, Rusiñol reunites with his family. Addiction to morphine, and perhaps to the decadent, unbalanced bohemian lifestyle, has nearly killed him, and the path of recovery seems to lead him away from all that. Back to what he once left, and deeper into places like the patios. Places of solitude that feel grounded in something more profound than cafe chatter, more timeless than trends.
Eternity and the garden
In the early 1900s, he begins focusing on gardens, an obsession that will last the rest of his life. He travels throughout Spain and the island of Mallorca, painting the same kind of scenes over and over. Usually devoid of people. Often part of a former aristocratic or royal estate. A ruined castle. Religious spaces. Formal but gone to seed, nature but not really natural — like his patios, a kind of in-between state. A dream.
Gardens, he writes, are “landscape turned into verse.”
“There’s a sort of eternal quality to a garden,” Olmsted says. “Gardens become a way to separate yourself from time, and I think we all experience that — a walk through a park or a garden or time spent in your own garden can feel like time dissociated from reality.”
When people drop out of his paintings, so too does their clothing and their hairstyle and other markers of time, such that the pictures become more timeless. They can appear to have been painted yesterday. And that, Olmsted says, helps invite the viewer in.
“I would love nothing more than to sit in that patio,” she says of the museum’s new acquisition. “That’s what is really captivating about the picture: it’s something made so long ago and yet it feels like I could step into it. It doesn’t feel so far away at all.”
