Josep Dalmau

Josep Dalmau was an art dealer, antiquarian, and artist. Of the dealers who established their galleries in Barcelona during the first decades of the twentieth century, he was exceptional for exhibiting and actively promoting a range of foreign avant-garde artists, in addition to established and emerging Catalan artists at his Galeries Dalmau. Dalmau visited Paris frequently before World War I and depended on his ties in the French capital when he organized the first group exhibition of Cubism in Spain in 1912. While the cost of mounting exhibitions was offset by the profits from his antique business, Dalmau remained a staunch champion of modern art until his death in 1937. In a city that previously had no exhibition venues or opportunities for progressive artists with limited financial means to advance their careers, Dalmau provided a space, international connections, publishing opportunites, and exposure for avant-garde artists.

Trained in his father’s profession of bookbinding, Dalmau moved to Barcelona with his brother, Rafael, in 1884, where he worked in a binding workshop. After displaying his work in an exhibition of industrial art held in Barcelona in 1892, the artist received training from the Symbolist painter Joan Brull. In July 1899, Dalmau exhibited a group of drawings and oil paintings at Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), where he was exposed to the cultural milieu of the tavern-cum-exhibition hall founded by Brull’s friends, artists Ramón Casas, Pere Romeu, Santiago Rusiñol, and Miguel Utrillo. During its brief but lively run from 1897 to 1903, Els Quatre Gats was the social and cultural epicenter for the practitioners of the Catalan Modernisme movement, which included its founders. Around the turn of the century, Dalmau met Picasso at Els Quatre Gats, where the young Spanish artist was a regular and fellow exhibitor.

In 1906 Dalmau acquired L. Quer, an established antique shop in Barcelona at carrer del Pi, num. 10. As early as 1908, Dalmau’s shop hosted exhibitions of modern art, which were initially modest and focused on Catalan artists, such as Joan Colom, Josep Mompou, and Isidre Nonell. Dalmau’s efforts progressed after 1911 when he opened the Galeries Dalmau at 18 Portaferrissa, where his varied and active exhibition schedule included numerous shows devoted to Catalan artists as well as exhibitions of art by Uruguayan transplant Joaquín Torres-García and Joan Miró’s first solo exhibition.

In April 1912, two months after Dalmau organized a display of pre-Cubist drawings by Picasso at the Galeries Dalmau, the dealer staged the Exposició d’Art Cubista (Exhibition of Cubist Art), in which sculptures and drawings by Catalan artist August Agero were on view with works by Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912; Philadelphia Museum of Art), Gris’s Study for “Man in a Café” (1911–12; Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Laurencin’s Head of a Woman (1912; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.) were among the works included in the show. Soon after the exhibition closed, Duchamp’s nude was famously exhibited in New York at the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, known popularly as the Armory Show.

Extant documentation reveals that Dalmau’s exhibition was not a commercial success: for example, in the inventory of Gris’s works from the show, only one drawing is noted as sold (although the artist gifted Dalmau one of his drawings “as a souvenir”). Yet the exhibition did much to launch Cubism into the imaginations of the Catalan public, as witnessed by the many illustrated reviews of the show in regional newspapers including La Veu de Catalunya, La Publicidad, and El Poble Catalá. Recent scholarship acknowledges Dalmau’s prescience in organizing one of the earliest Cubist exhibitions outside of France, and the show is now recognized as the gallery’s most significant effort in the promotion of avant-garde art.

During World War I, Dalmau expanded his gallery’s exhibition program to accommodate a growing community of émigré artists who sought residence in neutral Spain. Serge Charchoune and his wife Hélène Grunhoff, Kees van Dongen, Gleizes, Laurencin, and Francis Picabia were among the foreign artists offered solo exhibitions at the Galeries Dalmau at this time. In addition, Dalmau provided financial backing for the first four issues of Picabia’s journal 391, produced while the artist was living in Barcelona.

Dalmau organized another show of modern art with the Exposició d’Art Francès d’Avantguarda (Exhibition of Avant-Garde French Art), which opened at the Galeries Dalmau on October 26, 1920. The range of artists in the forty-six person show included Emilie-Othon Friesz, Henri Matisse, Miró, Paul Signac, Joaquim Sunyer, and Félix Valloton. In mounting this exhibition, Dalmau once again relied on his Parisian connections—French dealer Léonce Rosenberg was a major lender, sending works by Braque, Gris, Irene Lagut, Léger, André Lhote, Picasso, Diego Rivera, and Gino Severini, among others.

In 1923, Dalmau relocated his gallery to 62 Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona’s l’Eixample district, where he maintained an active exhibition schedule until it closed in 1930. Yet Dalmau remained involved in the art world until his death in 1937. He was appointed artistic director of the Llibreria Catalonia in 1933, and served as President of Barcelona’s Associació Artistes Independents in 1936; paintings by Dalmau were included in the organization’s exhibition that same year. Antiquities and modern art from Dalmau’s personal collection were auctioned at Sala Vayreda auction house in 1956, following the death of his widow.