Cabeza de gitana (Roma Woman's Head)

The work of Isidre Nonell is bestrewn with representations of individuals from Catalonia’s most disadvantaged social strata at the turn of the twentieth century. From 1900 to 1906, Nonell, who had recently arrived in Barcelona after time spent in Paris, worked almost entirely on creating portraits of women of Romani ethnicity. By way of this motif, his pictorial language would acquire maturity and modernity, observable in the force and expressiveness of his brushstrokes, the serpentine black line accentuating the silhouette of the figures and the introspective atmosphere they evoke. Nonell visited the city’s marginalised neighbourhoods with regularity and passionately frequented its theatres, café-concerts and flamenco clubs, spending time with Roma families and thus substantiating a gaze that was divested of the racist exoticism to which these communities were often alluded. Over one hundred works are a testament to Nonell’s interest in depicting people of Romani origin — recurrent is the face of the model Consuelo Jiménez, who died in 1905 at the young age of seventeen, falling victim to a collapsed building in one of Barcelona’s shanty towns. Thus, with a gaze that engaged with this way of life, Nonell attested to the link between artistic bohemia and the Roma people, affirming ideals of freedom and a rupture with the values extolled by bourgeois society. 

Suset Sánchez Sánchez