Fototertúlia Origin, authors and context of the political, caricature and pornographic album of Los Borbones en pelota based on a series of cartes de visite, by Albert Domènech
March 2, 2020, Artistic Circle of Sant Lluc
Photos: Jordi Algué
Audio: Montserrat Baldomà
Currently, no one disputes the importance of photography as a source of information from the most diverse perspectives – cultural, heritage, historical – but we can rarely present it as definitive evidence that requires rethinking the authorship of a work of the importance of the album Los Borbones en pelota, attributed to the brothers Valeriano and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, preserved in the BNE.
From a series of CDVs dating back to the beginning of the Democratic Six-Year Plan (1868-1870) that appeared on the market and found in archives that reproduce caricatures directly linked to the album, we must rethink its authorship. This also entails proposing geographical changes and understanding the modus operandi of its origin, which helps us to resolve the great doubts that this surprising work posed to historians and Bécquerians.
Thanks to the comparison of the CDV with the illustrations of Los Borbones en Pelota we can conclude that the watercolors preserved in the BNE are a later copy of an original album not physically preserved but of which only the photographs have partially reached us. mentioned that are key to resolving a series of doubts that throughout many studies were raised.
Through the photographic reproductions of the original set we can recognize the hand of various Barcelona artists such as Eusebi Planas and Tomàs Padró and others less skilled who used photomontage to make their caricatures of political content. This diversity of authors leads us to relate the elaboration of the album to the tradition of a series of Barcelona social gatherings of the s. XIX who made one such as the Pírica Society (1842-1858), El Trapecio (1860) or the Rebotiga d’en Pitarra (1866-1872). These gatherings were directly linked to the world of intellectuals of artists, writers, scientists and petty bourgeois revolutionaries.
The revolutionary Barcelona of the Sexennium would be the ideal context in which this album was produced – behind closed doors for its pornographic content in some illustrations – in artists’ workshops or in one of the many and renowned social gatherings such as those of Pitarra, Inocenci López , Café Suizo… These clearly republican environments and opposed to the moderate monarchy would allow us to understand the anti-monarchical belligerence that so characterizes this album.
The preserved CDVs also force us to consider the possibility that the original album could have more illustrations than those reproduced in watercolor by the BNE and that it was a more complex album than one might think from the beginning.
Extract from the Photo Talk (Catalan)
