Year 3

Joan Brossa

CAP DE BOU

The party organised by Mas Blanch i Jové and Joan Brossa Foundation was in the purest Brossian style. Mas Blanch i Jové, in collaboration with the City Council of La Pobla de Cérvoles, created a permanent Brossa itinerary in the municipality. Later, we inaugurated The Artists’ Vineyard amphitheatre with “No-Res del Tot” [Nothingness from the Whole] by Joan Brossa, and the sculpture “Cap de Bou” [Ox Head], made from a reproduction of the visual poem by Joan Brossa. The party, directed by Hermann Bonnín, combined the magic of the Hausson that came through the barrels, the tender humour of the Catalan clown Tortell Poltrona before “L’Orgue de Camp” [The Organ of the Field], the opera of the Co. Dei Furbi staged on the viewing point with La Pobla de Cérvoles in the background and the Commedia dell’Arte of the Co. De la Rosa of the Guino Era.

Opening. Year 3 party at the Artists’ Vineyard.

Magnum collector’s edition
Joan Brossa

Joan Brossa
BARCELONA, 19 DE GENER DE 1919 – 30 DE DESEMBRE DE 1998

He is the most important Catalan avant-garde poet of the 20th century. He began writing occasionally when he was mobilised during the Civil War. Once he returned to Barcelona (1940), he met JV Foix, Joan Miró and Joan Prats. Thanks to their advice and under the influence of the neo-surrealists he began to write sonnets, odes and theatre (which he called “scenic poetry”). In 1941, and according to the futurists’ criteria, he made his first visual poems. In 1947, he founded the magazine Dau al Set with Antoni Tàpies, Joan Ponç, Modest Cuixart, Joan-Josep Tharrats and Arnau Puig.

From 1950, due to his contacts with the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo, the poetry of Brossa (with the book “Em va fer Joan Brossa” [Joan Brossa Made Me]) took a radical turn towards social commitment. In the sixties he experimented thoroughly with visual poetry and object poems, genres that he would never abandon. Simultaneously, he began working on collaborations with artists such as Tàpies and Miró, which he would gradually expand towards new ways of thinking about the plastic arts.

His theatrical work is collected in six volumes that contain hundreds of short pieces. His literary work has been translated to more than fifteen languages and in the last years of his life he received awards for all the genres that he had practiced.