Went to see the Gipsy

I’m as use­less at pre­dict­ing elec­tion re­sults as I am at rid­ing a bi­cy­cle, so this ar­ti­cle, with its mid-Jan­u­ary dead­line, will avoid spec­u­la­tion about the Cata­lan elec­tions to be held on Feb­ru­ary 14, de­ci­sive though they will be.

Which doesn’t mean we have to aban­don pol­i­tics al­to­gether, given that until the end of the first week in Feb­ru­ary, Barcelona’s Palau de la Vir­reina is host­ing an ex­hi­bi­tion about one of the most po­lit­i­cally en­gaged – and tal­ented – artists of 20th-cen­tury Eu­rope: He­lios Gómez, who, al­though he died at 51, man­aged to cre­ate more, travel more, learn more lan­guages, de­fend more causes and meet more peo­ple than most of us could man­age if we lived to be a hun­dred. Born into Seville’s Ro­mani com­mu­nity in 1905, he was 18 when he began to fre­quent the city’s Kur­saal In­ter­na­cional, a pi­o­neer­ing an­ar­chist so­cial club, con­cert hall and mod­ern art gallery. There he had his first ex­hi­bi­tion of paint­ings and en­grav­ings, and joined the an­ar­cho-syn­di­cal­ist trade union, the CNT, be­fore mov­ing to Barcelona. At 22, the far-right dic­ta­tor­ship of Miguel Primo de Rivera obliged him to go into exile, first to Paris, until he was ex­pelled from France for hav­ing demon­strated in sup­port of the Italo-Amer­i­can an­ar­chists Sacco and Vanzetti; he moved to Brus­sels, where he worked as a book il­lus­tra­tor, and then on to Am­s­ter­dam, Vi­enna and the USSR, pick­ing up tips from the avant-garde move­ments from each place – while pub­lish­ing his work in Dutch, Aus­trian and Russ­ian news­pa­pers, books and mag­a­zines along the way. He even­tu­ally ended up in Berlin, where he stud­ied ty­pog­ra­phy while com­plet­ing his first major work, a graphic novel avant la let­tre called ’Days of Fury’. Once Primo de Rivera had re­signed for health rea­sons (1930), Gómez re­turned to Barcelona, where his il­lus­tra­tions ap­peared in a wide range of an­ar­chist and com­mu­nist pub­li­ca­tions in both Cata­lan and Span­ish. Un­der­go­ing a change of rev­o­lu­tion­ary heart, he now joined the Work­ers and Peas­ants Block (BOC) a com­mu­nist-af­fil­i­ated or­gan­i­sa­tion. Hav­ing helped lib­er­ate the Barcelona Women’s Prison, he moved to Madrid, joined the Span­ish Com­mu­nist Party (PCE), and worked for their house organ. Fol­low­ing a right-wing shift in Span­ish pol­i­tics in 1931, he was jailed in Madrid and then Jaén. Re­leased on bail, he fled to Brus­sels and from there again to the USSR, where he pub­lished his sec­ond graphic novel (’Span­ish Rev­o­lu­tion’) and had an ex­hi­bi­tion in Moscow. Back in Barcelona in time for the 1936 rev­o­lu­tion, he joined the Cata­lan com­mu­nists (PSUC), founded a union of Cata­lan poster artists, led a squad of Gipsy cav­al­ry­men to free Mal­lorca and Ibiza (they weren’t able to), then fought on three dif­fer­ent re­pub­li­can fronts be­fore being ex­pelled from the PSUC, ac­cused of Trot­sky­ism. He went back to the an­ar­chist move­ment and joined the Dur­ruti Col­umn, work­ing on lay­out and il­lus­tra­tion for its paper. After the Fas­cist vic­tory, he went into exile and was in­car­cer­ated in sev­eral French con­cen­tra­tion camps. Back in Barcelona in 1944, he founded a clan­des­tine pro-re­pub­li­can group, for which he was im­pris­oned for five months. On his re­lease, he had a sur­re­al­ist ex­hi­bi­tion in a major gallery and painted some im­por­tant mural works in two Barcelo­nan build­ings be­fore being ar­rested yet again (on un­clear charges) and jailed in the city’s Model prison for eight years, where he painted his last great work: the Gipsy Chapel, a homage to free­dom and the Ro­mani peo­ple, whose his­tory and tra­di­tions had in­spired his ini­tial an­ar­chism. Re­leased in 1954, he died two years later, the Model hav­ing dam­aged his health ir­repara­bly. Through­out his trav­els, exile and im­pris­on­ment he had be­friended Sal­vador Dalí, the Cata­lan pres­i­dents Macià and Com­pa­nys, the Ger­man artist George Grosz, the Span­ish writer Max Aub, the French poet Louis Aragon, and many oth­ers.

It’s a pity, that with a life so packed with events, there is no space left to ex­plain how ground-break­ingly good his work is.