Nuria Quevedo died as she lived: forgotten by her country, Spain, and slowly eroded by that notion Distance Which she invented herself to describe the strange closeness of what is far away, which is what home becomes for those who are torn from it. The Spanish painter, who deserved a position of honor in the political art of the twentieth century, if only for the power of one of her paintings, died on Saturday, at the age of 87, in Berlin.
She had lived there since she was 14, when she went into exile in the German Democratic Republic like many other anti-Franco Spaniards in the 1950s. His family – his father was a pilot in the Republican Army; His mother crossed La Junquera on foot in 1939 after the end of the war – and joined the ranks of those republicans, communists and anarchists who, in order to survive the defeats inflicted on them by history, fell into the clutches of nostalgia for exile. This is what Nuria Quevedo painted: a tear on a lost land. The heavy emotional burden that cannot be put in any bag.
The painting that never gave him the recognition he deserved is titled Thirty years of exile (1971). From this dazzling oil painting, ten hypnotic faces emerge, contemplating the viewer and delving deeper into him with curiosity. These ten tired and weathered faces, belonging to the Spanish diaspora in the German Democratic Republic, are faces of baroque darkness and expressionism that are painful in their sincerity. The ten inhabitants of “Guernica in Exile” appear like ghosts. They are quiet, very still, very serious; As if that restrained disillusionment was caused by the defeat of the Civil War, the establishment of Franco’s long-standing dictatorship in Spain, and the impossibility of democratic communism in Germany after the Soviet tanks in Prague in ’68.
The ten figures in the huge painting – 120 x 150 centimeters – are a vivid image of uprooting. Of sadness for everything he lost. Of longing for what never happened. From the solidity felt by the host cities. Follower Distance Home, I felt the sting of the cold, cloudy afternoons in the German Democratic Republic. That is why Nuria Quevedo painted so many rainy landscapes, so many solitary, pensive, isolated human figures in the city with short days and long winters: because she never forgot the girl who arrived in Berlin in 1952 with braids and white stockings. Because he always kept in mind that youth faced the helplessness of exile in the long, lonely hours he spent in the library his family ran in East Berlin, listening to the slow, sad bells that a nearby church tolled at six o’clock in the afternoon.
This sadness, filtered through contemplation, introspection, helplessness, and disillusionment in the face of the lost dreams of this member of the PCE devoted to Don Quixote, has been the driving force of a work that has not stopped growing during more than sixty years of Quevedo’s active work in painting, engraving, and book illustration. An artist from Spanish exile with more than enough credentials to include her in the orbit of Maruja Mallo, Remedios Varo, Roser Bro, Marta Palau, Manuela Ballestre, Marie Martin, or Victorina Durán. But this never happened. Forgetting was its double punishment.
Although she was ignored by the cultural elites in Spain – and in her native Barcelona as well, with the exception of the writer Eric Hackl – in Germany she gained recognition. In the 1970s, she received a scholarship from the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. In the 1980s he received the Goethe Prize from the East Berlin City Council. Some of his works, recognizable by figures with large hands and round heads, are in the most important art collections of the former German Democratic Republic. Just three years ago, the Brandenburg State Museum of Modern Art devoted an extensive retrospective to him. And soon after, the Catalan artist, known by his nickname Die Berlineren of Barcelona (“Berliners”), won Chemnitz’s prestigious Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Art Prize because it reflected “in an impressive and overwhelming way” the uprooting caused by loss of home and loneliness in a new society.
For four years I communicated with her regularly. He sometimes spoke of the wild bloom of yellow broom and the splendor of the colorful lilacs in the garden of his home in Berlin, which he shared with his life partner, the director Karlheinz Mond. Other times he unleashed ideological jabs: “Hope is often treacherous: there are too many struggles, too many deaths, too much suffering.” He always celebrated with gifts: a book on the Republic, a protest song and a love song by Raymond, a sad tango by Gardel, a phrase by Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History. This was the picture of his life: his face turned towards the past and its accumulated ruins.
Can you be friends with someone 50 years older than you and whom you have never met before? And it should be so too Distance. Can you still feel close to a dead friend? And it will be so too Distance.