The Majorcan painter who dazzled Rubén Darío
150 years have passed since the birth of Pilar Montaner, a woman ahead of her time and with an exceptional artistic production
Palma“The olive trees that your Pilar paints are real, / They are pagan, Christian, and modern olive trees / that guard the secret desires of the dead / with gestures, wills, and poses of the living”. This is what the poet Rubén Darío wrote addressing Joan Sureda, the husband of the painter Pilar Montaner. We remember the life and work of this exceptional artist, ahead of her time, as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of her birth, on April 13, 1876.
She was born in Palma, the daughter of the military man and aristocrat Jaume Montaner and Elvira Maturana, a Uruguayan, to whom the customs of the Majorcans seemed a bit extravagant: “They eat little grass cakes,” she said; that is, cocarrois. Her mother died when she was barely a child, and she was educated in a religious boarding school in Madrid. But she felt homesick for the sea and asked her father to return to Mallorca.
Her husband, Joan Sureda, whom she called “Noñín”, would be decisive in her career. He was the heir of the family that owned the palace known as the King Sancho Palace, part of the Valldemossa Charterhouse complex, which was their home until economic ruin arrived and they lost it. She became pregnant fourteen times and had eleven children, only five of whom would survive her. In a similar way to the poet Joan Alcover with his writings, family tragedy marked Pilar Montaner's life, to the point of delving into increasingly dark painting.
Montaner constantly portrayed her children. Especially Jacobo, her favorite, a poet and signatory with Jorge Luis Borges and Fortunio Bonanova of the Manifest de l’Ultra, from 1921, and Elvira, with whom Borges seems to have fallen in love during his stay in Mallorca. Both would die very young. One of her best-known works depicts the young children with their nannies. Painting it was a Herculean task: there was no way the children would stay still, not all at the same time.
The 'Sureda madmen', as they were known for their unconventional behavior, shared long – and expensive – trips throughout Europe, during which she met the great masters of painting. If she became pregnant during these trips, she would give birth wherever she was, and those expeditions would continue. In 1906, she also took a trip to Madrid with another painter and friend, Antoni Gelabert. It was truly unusual at that time for a woman to travel the world with a man who was not her husband.
Saving the 'Parado' of Valldemossa
Pilar Montaner used to go out to paint in the natural landscapes of Valldemossa, mounted on a donkey with her supplies. She also captured views of Palma, some in the company of Gelabert. Her first painting, in 1899, was the portrait of Madò Calafata: a certainly peculiar woman, who wanted to take Archduke Lluís Salvador to court because the prince called her "Juana Ana", and she called herself Joanaina. On one of her excursions, she came across some soldiers bathing with their horses and painted them. They didn't want to get out of the water for anything in the world, as they weren't wearing their uniforms... nor anything else.
The popular Parado of Valldemossa most probably was saved from disappearance thanks to Pilar Muntaner. She saw that what we now call generational handover did not exist: those who knew it were dying and young people preferred more 'modern' things, which, she recounts, would mean "forgetting it and never singing it again. Never!", she told herself, and asked the vicar –and organist– to set it down in writing. Santiago Rusiñol, one of the illustrious visitors to the Sureda house, dressed in traditional Mallorcan attire and danced one of those traditional dances with the painter.
The father, Jaume Muntaner, asked Joaquim Sorolla, then already a famous painter, to give his daughter lessons. He, not very convinced, set complicated conditions, which were accepted. Of course, she had to receive instruction separately from the male students. Her talent convinced Sorolla, who said to Joan Sureda: "You take care of the children, because there is a painter here." "Pilar: if you don't paint, you'll condemn yourself!", her colleague Pedro Blanes Viale had warned her.
Joan Sureda accepted Sorolla's pronouncement. Of course, he didn't take care of the children himself; for that, there were women in his service. But he wrote to his wife: "You paint. Don't waste minutes on other things. You will do great things that will be the pride and life of our children. Don't you see, my Pilar, that my whole life is dedicated to your glory?"
Those would become reproaches, when things didn't go so well. In her diary, she kept a record of everything she had spent on painting classes, trips, guests, and all of that added up to the astronomical sum of 150,000 duros: "Without me, Pilar would have been just like any other woman." Instead, she would continue to defend her husband to her children: "Don't complain, my dear children, those of you few who are left, about your father's conduct as a bad administrator (...). Money doesn't bring happiness, but quite the opposite, it brings many sorrows."
Among so many illustrious guests who passed through her house in Valldemossa, a peculiar case was that of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, in 1913. It seems that Darío fell platonically in love with the artist. Or not so platonically, because he reportedly grabbed her by the waist at one point. She would have stopped him, with just a look and two words: "Rubén, Rubén."
Although the friars had not been in the charterhouse for a century – the State had confiscated and sold it – Darío seems to have been awakened by that environment to his mystical vein, the one that now seems to be back in fashion. "Why haven't I been a Carthusian?" he asked himself aloud, insistently. Well, it happened that Joan Sureda had custom-made a Carthusian habit to be buried in, and Pilar Montaner took it out of a chest of drawers and invited the poet to put it on. The complication was, afterwards, to get him to take it off. She photographed him dressed in that habit.
The pornographic olive trees
Darío's trust in the painter was such that he asked her to read any letters that arrived first: “If it’s bad news, don’t tell me.” He was once at the entrance of the cloister, sitting with the painter, whose hand he took, while they heard the sweet song of a peasant. That magical moment was broken by Sureda's appearance, making a racket. “Here comes the inquisitor,” lamented the poet.
Darío went to see Montaner paint his famous olive trees, which were probably not much to his liking. Upon returning home, he assured his man, shouting: “Pilar is crazy! I want almond trees in bloom!”. Although he must have changed his mind, as his famous poem testifies. Darío held the painter in such high regard that he stated she should always be addressed as “you” (usted), as she was an archduchess. In his novel The Gold of Mallorca, she appears as “the Castilian Maria”.
Another very distinguished visitor to her home, of whom there were quite a few, and among the most illustrious, was the philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno, of whom she also made a portrait, and who seems to have been fascinated by her, whom he describes as an "excellent and emotional painter" and to whom he dedicated the book Caminades i visions espanyoles, in which he reflects his walks around the island.
Pilar Muntaner's olive trees were not just the motif so many times repeated by painters in Mallorca. She went much further. In those twisted forms, she found dreams, delirium, and eroticism. She discovered pornographic images in them. Sometimes, to check that she wasn't going crazy, she would consult a trusted friend or her husband: "What do you see in that olive tree?"
But Pilar Montaner was not just her landscapes, nor her portraits. Despite her criticisms of the art of the time, which she accused of
Her final years Pilar Montaner spent them, she wrote, “surrounded by so many memories and trifles that evoke the life of so many disappeared lives”, feeding a small white and blind mouse. She had stopped painting: she only made, from time to time, some charcoal drawings. She died on September 23, 1961. Perhaps now, 150 years after her birth, it would be good for Majorcans to be able to know the work, partly unknown and mostly found in private collections, of this artist ahead of her time.
It could never be that a woman painted so well. In 1917 she had an exhibition at the mythical Sala Parés, in Barcelona. On the opening day, a few visitors entered the gallery and were amazed by her paintings: “This is a great painter! How was this man not known?”. It never occurred to them that it was a great... painter. Other observations were not so flattering: some perceived that the portrait of Antoni Maura did not resemble him at all. Logical: because it was not Maura but Unamuno. They didn't even look at the catalog.“It is hard to believe,” wrote the journalist Francisco Madrid, “that Pilar Montaner's paintings are by a female hand.” His paintings, stated his colleague Antonio Ballesteros de Martos, were “of a virility, of a power, of an intensity that in no way seem to be the product of a feminine temperament.” When the Association of Painter Artists was founded in Palma, she was the only woman among the ten founders.
Information prepared from texts by Maria del Carme Bosch, Patricia Veiret, Isabel Peñarrubia Marquès, Antoni Janer Torrens, Luis Ripoll and R. Perelló Paradelo, Carlos ‘Coco’ Meneses, Pedro de Montaner, Josep Capó Juan, Miquel Àngel Ballester, Ángeles Caso and Màrius Verdaguer, the memoirs of Pilar Montaner, the correspondence of Pilar Montaner and Joan Sureda, the documentary La pintora sense rostre by Jaume Carrió and Luis Ortas with a screenplay by Verónica Sáez and the collaboration of Francesca Gelabert Desnoyer.