Background

Joan Brossa was born on January 19, 1919, in Barcelona, Catalonia. He was the son of an engraver and a retired operetta singer.

Education

Joan Brossa always detested school and college. He said once: "The important things they learn, but they don't teach." In any case, in July of 1936, when he was 17, Joan had to leave the school in an obligatory manner, because he was mobilized by the Republican Army to create a front against the "nationalists."

Career

Considered among the avant-garde throughout his long artistic life, Joan Brossa distinguished himself not only in poetry but in theater and visual arts as well. Joan's written explorations were conducted in his native language of Catalan and include the stage plays Nocturn encounters, as well as numerous poems and prose monologues.

At the age of seventeen, he enlisted in the Republican Army and fought in the Spanish Civil War. His works from this period addressed to his companion-in-arms against fascism.

While the civil war left its mark on the young Joan Brossa, his work was even more profoundly influenced by two avant-garde Catalan artists whom he met following General Francisco Franco's conquest of Spain. Poet Josep Vicenç Foix and painter Joan Miró inspired his interest in both poetry and the surrealist movement than in full bloom. Under the guidance of Foix and Joan Prats, another great Catalan artist of the period, Joan combined surrealistic imagery with the sonnet form in his first books, La bola i l'escarbat and Fogall de sonets.

With his widening circle of avant-gardist Catalan friends, Joan Brossa helped found the influential literary review Dau al Set in 1947. About that time, he also began working with new forms, such as prose and theater. One of his first plays, Sword-but, has a sardonic obscureness. It consists entirely of a curtain raised and lowered stage.

In yet another experiment during the Dau al Set period, Joan Brossa began applying surrealist techniques to folk poetic forms like the ode and romance.

By 1950 he began moving in a more political and realistic direction. In the collection Des d'un got d'aigua fins al petrol, he fashions a patriotic work calling for a Catalonia free of political and religious oppression. The decisive influence in this direction was Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. Cabral introduced Joan and his circle to the ideas of Karl Marx. It was shortly after this introduction that Joan published his landmark Em va fer Joan Brossa, in which he abandons the phantasmagoric and absurd to focus entirely upon the ordinary, through a humorous and political lens. The poems were not well received by a Catalan literary establishment, which had focused on a more erudite post-symbolism in the 1950s.

His Catalunya i selva, a collection of sonnets, addresses the plight of Spanish society under the Franco dictatorship. In Romancets del Dragolí, he employed mythical subjects appropriated to the medieval poetic form to introduced his political ideas.

During the 1960s, Joan Brossa became fascinated with the idea of transcending the technical borders of his art. In two books of poetry from the early 1950s, Trangol and Malviatge, he had experimented with mono-syllabic poetry. Joan played with the shape of words and even the spaces on the page on which they have written. 1963's El Saltamartí marks the beginning of Joan Brossa's "visual poetry:" poems that use visual images to convey a poetic meaning. An example from this period is a piece titled Conscientious Objector, which consists of a rifle barrel topped with a candle snuffer used during the Roman Catholic Mass.

Joan frequently collaborated with visual artists that included Miró and the internationally renowned Catalan graphic artist Antoni Tàpies.

Meanwhile, Joan Brossa never lost his taste for traditional written poetry. Els entra-i-surts del poets and Roda de llibres show Joan continuing in the style of the Cabral period and creating short, surprising poems full of political and social insight.

Joan Brossa found a model for his quasi-theatrical explorations in the "transformist" art of Italian actor Leopoldo Fregoli, who created a kind of early performance art. Leopoldo used multiple disguises and other techniques to dramatize his ideas about the continuous change, or transformation, inherent in living beings.

Joan Brossa's play Striptease uses Fregoli's is a peep show. It consists of six girls on a darkened stage. A spotlight roves from one to the next, revealing that each successive girl wears an article less of clothing, but when the stage lights burst forth as the end of the piece, the audience realizes that the last girl is not only naked, she is a mannequin.

The death of Franco in 1975 ended the decades-long suppression of Catalan language and culture within Spain. For Joan, this meant opportunities to publish new and old works and reach beyond his small circle of postwar intellectual friends. He charged forward with his avant-garde experiments and won international acclaim. His later work followed two tracks: one poetic and the other "plastic."

In poetry, Joan Brossa tried new metrical forms, most notably the complicated Medieval sestina. But his work in non-literary visual arts was what most captured public attention. In the 1980s and 1990s, the artist's growing fame resulted in insufficient funding forever grander projects. As the size of his works and the media used to create them evolved, his themes remained consistent. He retained the critical, almost bitter anti-establishment position he developed in response to the civil war and Franco's long regime. This anti-establishment posture has seen in one of Joan's exhibitions at the Virreina Palace in Barcelona. One work, Parasite, consists of a stuffed parrot perched atop a tailor's dummy facing a microphone.

Joan Brossa worked briefly as an engraver and bookseller.

In the last years of his life, he received an endless cascade of acknowledgments. His contribution to poetry, the theatre, film, and plastic arts began to make him well-known and understood for the Spanish artistic world, and also for the general public. He was one of the most prolific and early avant-gardes of his country.

Joan Brossa died as the result of an accident at his Barcelona studio in the Barri d'Horta-Guinardó on December 30, 1998, while preparing for a major exhibition to commemorate his eightieth birthday.

Achievements

• Joan Brossa was widely known as a Catalan poet, playwright, dramatist, and visual artist. He created a series of plastic compositions, or visual poems, in which the text linked to the pictorial frame, which contains it. He classified it as "visual poetry."
  
  His work is present in collections as outstanding as those of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern in Valencia, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Patio Herreriano Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español in Valladolid and Artium de Álava, Vitoria.
  
  In 1948, Joan Brossa spearheaded the Catalan avant-garde group and artistic movement, "Dau al Set."
  
  He won the Crítica Serra d'Or prizes in 1971, 1974, 1978, and 1996.
  
  In 1992, Joan Brossa got a "National Prize" for the Visual Arts, and a "National Theatre Prize" in 1998.

Works

More photos

• architecture

  • L'Hospitalet

    (This artwork was erected after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2003

  • Poema visual transitable en tres tiempos: Nacimiento, camino - con pausas y entonaciones - y destrucción

    1984

  • Homenaje al libro

    1994

  • Barcino

    1994

  • Ocaso y/o Incomunicación

    1994

  • A de Barca

    1996

• artwork

  • Ajuntament de Mollet del Vallés

    (This artwork was erected after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    1999

  • Camino de la A a la Z

    (This artwork was erected after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2007

  • Antifaz, La Rambla

    1991

  • El saltamontes, sede del Colegio de Aparejadores y Arquitectos Técnicos de Barcelona

  • Letras gimnastas

    1997

  • Espai Escènic Joan Brossa

    1998

  • Cop de poma

    1963

  • Nocturn matinal

    1970

  • Tres Joans

    1978

  • U no és ningú

    1979

  • Tal i tant

    1983

  • El rei de la màgia

    1986

• book

  • A partir del silenci

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2001
  • La piedra abierta

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2003
  • El dia a dia

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2007
  • Fora de l'umbracle

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2013
  • El dia del profeta

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2008
  • Poesia escènica XIV

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2017
  • Poesia escènica XV

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2017
  • Poesia escènica VIII

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2015
  • Poesia escènica IX

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2015
  • Poesia escènica X

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2016
  • Poesia escènica XII

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2016
  • Poesia escènica XIII

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2017
  • Poesia escènica XI

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2016
  • Poesia escènica VII

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2015
  • Poesia tipogràfica

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2003
  • Prosa completa i textos esparsos

    (The book was published after Joan Brossa's death in 1998.)

    2013
  • El Saltamartí 1963
  • La clau a la boca 1997
  • Sextines 76 1977
  • Antologia de poemes de revolta 1979
  • Poesia i prosa 1994
  • Poemes escollits 1995
  • Sonets de Caruixa 1949
  • Em Va Fer 1951
  • Cantir de cantics 1972
  • Poemes de seny i cabell 1977
  • Vint-i-set sextines i un sonet 1981
  • Ball de sang 1982
  • Els ulls de l'òliba 1982
  • Askatasuna 1983
  • Ot 1984
  • Calcomanies 1985
  • Els entra-i-surts del poeta 1986
  • Poemes públics 1987
  • Viatge per la sextina 1987
  • Tarannà 1988
  • Ventall de poemes urbans 1988
  • Ollaó! 1989
  • Furgó de cua 1993
  • Suite tràmpol, o, El compte enrera 1994
  • Passat festes 1995
  • Poemes visuals 1975
  • Alfabet desbaratat 1998

Religion

Joan Brossa became an atheist who believed that "if a good God existed, he would try at Nuremberg."

Politics

Joan Brossa became a Marxist. In his works was an apparent uprising against the authorities. In Joan Brossa's words, if he wouldn't be a poet, he would be a guerrilla.

Views

Joan Brossa sought to push out the frontiers of poetry, to make it provocative and modern. He explored new methods with words, then on the stage, later with images and finally objects. His poetry moved from the literary to the concrete, from verbal to visual images, in which the idea always took precedence over the aesthetic.

Joan reckoned that "today's poet must broaden his horizons, move away from books, and project himself through the various means that society itself provides. The poet must use them like unexpected vehicles, infusing them with an ethical content that society does not confer upon them."

Quotations: "I regard research as a journey into the unknown, a plunge into the mirror of the imagination. I cannot be sure where my present experiences are taking me or what I will think in a few years. For the time being, I will carry on pushing the usual means of perception to discover new spaces of sensitivity."

Membership

• 

  Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana , Spain

• Joan Brossa was a founder of "Dau al Set" in 1948

  Dau al Set , Spain

  1948 - 1998

Personality

Joan Brossa was a restless youngster from a modest background whose family thought he would become an office clerk. He was tenacious, his sense of purpose often taken for arrogance.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Karl Marx

• Writers

  Josep Vicenç Foix, João Cabral de Melo Neto

• Artists

  Joan Miró

Connections

Joan Brossa was married to Pepa Llopis.

Wife:

Pepa Llopis

Friend:

Josep Vicenç Foix

Josep Vicenç Foix was a Spanish poet, writer, and essayist in Catalan. He usually signed his work by using the abbreviation J.V. Foix.

Friend:

Joan Miró

Joan Miró was a Catalan painter who combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy. His mature style evolved from the tension between his fanciful, poetic impulse, and his vision of the harshness of modern life. He worked extensively in lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries, and sculptures for public spaces.

Friend:

João Cabral de Melo Neto

João Cabral de Melo Neto was a Brazilian poet and diplomat. He was one of last the great figures of the golden age of Brazilian poetry.

colleague:

Antoni Tàpies

Antoni Tàpies was a Catalan artist, credited with introducing contemporary abstract painting into Spain. He began as a Surrealist but developed into an abstract artist under the influence of French painting and achieved an international reputation.

colleague:

Joan Prats

Joan Prats a Spain art promoter. He organized exhibitions for leading Iberian artists including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder.