Gypsy, anarchist, and communist. This is how the painter Helios Gómez defined himself, a 20th-century avant-garde artist and creator of the famous Capilla Gitana (Gypsy Chapel) in La Modelo. A painter often forgotten who is now recovered by the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) thanks to the donation of the painter's personal collection by his son, Gabriel Gómez. It is a collection consisting of six oil paintings, 27 drawings, and an illustrated book, with works that cover practically the entire trajectory and styles of this creator, from the early 1920s to the 1950s, including the Civil War, in which Gómez participated as a soldier and artist for the Republican side.
In parallel, the MNAC has also purchased the three works by Gómez that were already exhibited in the modern art rooms of this museum: Evacuación (Evacuation), Agro andaluz (Andalusian Agro), and Dolor aerotransportado (paracaídas con ojo) (Airborne Pain (Parachute with Eye)). Evacuación, painted in the midst of the Civil War, depicts people fleeing an attack on their city in an apocalyptic scenario, while the other two paintings are post-war works, with a style closer to the surrealism of the time, but where the pain of the armed conflict is still perceived. "Helios Gómez represents like no one else the figure of the authentic revolutionary artist, with a very expressive and powerful work while being directly involved in the conflict," said the director of the MNAC, Pepe Serra.
With this donation, the MNAC becomes the reference center for the work of Helios Gómez, with a large representation of the artist's different pictorial styles and stages. Gómez, born in Seville in 1905, was able to attend night classes in Fine Arts, although his training was mostly self-taught, and he began his career as a painter of ceramics and religious paintings. After traveling through several European cities, due to his involvement in various revolutions and also to escape political repression, he settled in Barcelona until his death in 1956.
During the Civil War, the artist fought not only in the trenches, but also using the most powerful weapon at his disposal: art. A propagandist for the Republican side, he actively denounced the ravages of the Civil War on the population with his series Horrors of War. Among his personal collection, now donated to the MNAC, four ink drawings belonging to this series stand out, where he portrays violent episodes such as the bombing of a school or citizens taking refuge in the subway during the bombings of Barcelona.
Thus, Helios's work enriches the MNAC's collection on the Civil War, which already has a hundred works by some forty artists exhibited in the museum's permanent halls. At the end of the war, the painter was imprisoned by Francoism in La Modelo, between 1945 and 1954, where he would paint one of his most recognized works, the Gypsy Chapel, frescoes that the Centre de Restauració de Béns Mobles de Catalunya has now begun to restore.
In addition to his ink illustrations, the donation also includes six oil paintings, which represent Gómez's different styles and which, at the same time, are a reflection of the different avant-garde trends in early 20th-century Europe. At the MNAC, surrealist and dreamlike paintings, such as Transfixión, can be observed, but also the influence of Matisse and his female figures in works such as La mujer de la ventana or Cabeza de mujer, and even the artist's approach to abstraction, represented in Tauromaquia abstracta.