Feliu Elias, “The Gallery”, 1928, Oil on Wood, 520 x 630 cm, Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
Born in Barcelona, Spain in 1878, Feliu Elias was a painter, art critic, caricaturist, and writer. Known not only as the foremost political caricaturist in Catalonia, Elias was also a precursor to the American and European Neo-Objectivists and, as a painter, aligned with its movement away from expressionism and towards political outrage and action.
Elias studied at the Hoyos Painting Academy and the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc in Barcelona. Gaining popularity as a political cartoonist under the pseudonum ‘Apa’, he founded in 1908 the satirical magazine “Papitu”. Elias also contributed political cartoons and comics to such magazines as “Mirador” and “L ‘Esquella de la Torraba”. After a series of his published drawings in “Papitu” offended the Spanish government in 1911, he fled to Paris.
In Paris, Feliu Elias became aware of the avant-garde movements and the artwork of Pablo Picasso. It was in Paris that he first began exhibiting his paintings at the Galeries Dalmau and the Faianç Catalá in 1915 with Les Arts i els Artistes, an artistic association promoting a strong cultural identity with Catalonia and a rejection of modernist symbolism. Elias devoted himself to painting in a Magic Realist style, portraying a realistic view of his world in landscapes and portraits while also adding mythical and allegorical elements.
Elias’s political cartoons in favor of the allied cause in World War I were collected in the book “Kameraden” which earned him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. He wrote a treatise entitled “L ‘Art de la Caricatura (The Art of Caricature)” and published critiques of art under the pseudonym of Joan Sacs. Elias published his art theories and wrote numerous monographs on the work of his friends and other contemporary artists, including the work of Spanish painter and ceramicist Xavier Nogués.
Feliu Elias taught art history for many years at Escola Superior dels Bells Oficis, an arts and technical school founded in Barcelona. He died in August of 1948 in Barcelona, Spain. Feliu Elias’s 1928 painting “The Gallery” was acquired by the Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya after its exhibition at the Barcelona World’s Fair of 1929.