Under the title Eveli Torent. Between Els Quatre Gats and Freemasonry, the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) celebrates, from this Friday until February 16, 2025, what will surely be the first world retrospective on Eveli Torent (Badalona, 1876 – Barcelona, 1940), a character who appeared in all the artistic “saraos” of the early 20th century in Barcelona and Paris but who, due to a wandering and cosmopolitan life, as well as the civil war, was relegated to oblivion.
“Until relatively few years ago, he was best known for the portraits that his friends had made of him, notably Picasso,” comments Lluïsa Sala, curator of the exhibition and one of the world’s few experts in this enigmatic figure. Some of Picasso’s portraits can be seen at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, while others belong to private collections.
In the exhibition, in fact, you will be able to see some of the portraits that the genius of Malaga made in Torent, as well as others made by Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa and Ricardo Baroja. “Torent was a very active member of the Els 4Gats group, alongside Isidre Nonell, Picasso, Ramon Pichot, Manolo Hugué, Joaquín Mir and Carles Casagemas, of whom he was a distant relative and who dedicated some works to him,” explains Salas. .
The group, which met in the historic café in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter called Els Quatre Gats, represented the revival of modernism against the Rusiñol, Casas, Utrillo and company. “Torent was one of the first to exhibit at Els Quatre Gats,” notes the head of collections at the MNAC, Eduard Vallés. “We also know that only when he arrived in Paris, he exhibited in the Berthe Weill gallery, which tells us that he was a well-known artist at the time,” he adds.
The enigma of Torrent
But despite his appearance in numerous portraits and chronicles, neither the figure of Torent nor his work were widely known in artistic and museum circles. Pepe Serra Villalba, director of the MNAC, recognizes that “until three years ago, when we began to investigate his figure at the museum, I was unaware of his existence.” “It is for this reason,” says Serra, “that it was necessary to carry out this exhibition which would highlight one of the protagonists of Catalan art of the last century.”
Lluïsa Sala explains that a long research effort was necessary “to connect the dots and bring together some of his works, the vast majority belonging to private collections around the world”. In this way, the expert was able to reconstruct the vital periods of Torent, who was a very mobile person, since after settling in Paris in 1903 and remaining there until 1913, he then went to Argentina, d where he settled in New York in 1914 to remain in America until 1921, after the first great war.
He has spent all these years painting and illustrating professionally, accepting commissions for portraits of notable personalities and advertising posters. In the exhibition you can see those he made for a Barcelona tailor J. Peralta, for the anise brand Perla or for the French tonic Byrrh. “All of them have a modernist decor very close to that of other poster artists of the time,” reveals Sala.
From Paris to New York
But from the Parisian scene, the expert underlines Torent’s good relations with the French satirist writer Laurent Tailhade and his wife, the writer Marie-Louise Laurent-Tailhade. “One might believe that their friendship, which lasted, became very intimate,” says Sala. “The trio made numerous trips across France and following one of them in Brittany, Torent produced a series of paintings and illustrations of great stylistic novelty,” adds- he.
With Tailhade, he published a chronicle of the trip entitled The Butter Platein which one puts the tax and the other the illustrations. However, Torent continues to accept commissions for Spanish magazines such as L’esquella de la Torratxa and some of his works can be seen in the exhibition.
In 1913, he left France to seek new professional horizons. Previously, around 1910, he had traveled to Argentina, where he created a remarkable and powerful portrait of the famous sardana composer Enric Morera. Eventually he settled in New York, where he remained until 1921, when he moved again, this time to Barcelona.
Little is known about his years in America, although it is inferred from his epistolary relationships that he gave his art a professional approach and that he worked hard. In this regard, Sala emphasizes that “he was very intelligent and hardworking, a hustler who never had financial problems, also because his family was well off.”
Return to Barcelona and discovery of Ibiza
After returning to Barcelona, now aged 45, he devoted himself to teaching and settled in the city. But during the summer holidays, he discovered the island of Ibiza with which he fell in love. With his wife Consuelo Hernán, he bought a defensive tower on the island, the Torre d’en Rovira, and prepared it to spend the summers there.
“He makes it a sort of museum where he displays everything from agricultural tools to weapons and organizes receptions for other vacationers in the summer,” reveals Sala, who adds that he receives visitors dressed as a caliph with his wife, in what could be a germ of 60s performances.
They called themselves “the Great Caliph and the Caliph of the Caliphate of es Pallaret”, according to the journalist of the newspaper Ara Toni Ribas Tur, who investigated this stage of Torent’s life and wrote an interesting article in the catalog of the ‘exposure. The commentary, however, is not his but that of Josep Palau i Fabre, poet, biographer and also great friend of Picasso in recent years, who in 1936 attended one of these performative receptions and photographed it, leaving a priceless graphic testimony. of this scene from Torent.
Freemasonry, war, prison and death
“Torent says in a letter to his nephew in New York that it was in this city that he became a Freemason, but we think that he was already one since his stay in Paris,” underlines Lluïsa Sala. The fact is that Torent’s career within Freemasonry is solid and goes far, up to the 33rd degree, the maximum, which gives him influence both internationally and in the State. “During the republic, the majority of ministers were Freemasons and he knew them and corresponded with them. »
This influence which was so favorable to him before the civil war turned against him after the war. The fascist coup surprised him in Ibiza from where he moved to Barcelona. There he was arrested by the Republican side, accused of sympathizing with the uprising, although Torent refuted the accusations and was eventually released.
He spent the war years in Barcelona, but after the fall of the city in 1939 he was arrested and prosecuted as a freemason. He renounced Freemasonry in May 1940, but the harsh conditions of Modelo Prison took their toll on him and after being released he died in October at the age of 64.
