The Maricel Museum incorporates two sculptures by Gustau Violet and Miquel Oslé in their collections
The exhibition about the Rossellonian sculptor Gustau Violet organized by Museums of Sitges has allowed to incorporate two interesting sculptures to the funds of Maricel Museum. This is a bust made by the same Violet and a figure of his disciple, the sculptor Miquel Oslé. Both can be seen currently in the exhibition The sculptor Gustau Violet: art, thought and territory, that presents the Museum of Maricel until October 21.
Oslé's work is titled Picador and is a large piece of bronze (66 x 66 x 43 cm), which he did in the second half of the first decade of the 20th century. Miquel Oslé i Sáez de Medrano (1889-1951) worked in the workshop of Gustau Violet in Prada de Conflent in the summer and autumn of 1906 and became one of his disciples. He had met him shortly before at the Masriera foundry in Barcelona, where Violet was going to cast some of his works
The Picador d'Oslé will become part of the permanent exhibition of the Maricel Museum once the Violet exhibition ends. The work will be integrated into the room where there are several sculptures from the Pérez-Rosales Collection that embrace the period between Modernisme and Noucentisme. It is a remarkably representative work of the sculptor and one of the greatest ones he did, except for those he did to exhibit in public roads.
The other work obtained by the the Maricel Museum is the Bust of Juli Carsalade du Pont (1847-1932), bishop of Elna-Perpinyà since 1900 and a key figure in the Catalan culture of the early twentieth century. The work was put up for sale at an auction in London a few months before the inauguration of the Maricel Museum exhibition. In the auction the work was attributed to an "anonymous Spanish sculptor" and also was poorly documented chronologically, so it was possible to acquire it, thanks to the inquisitions of the head of the Collections of Museums of Sitges, Ignasi Domènech. The bust, 60 cm high and made towards the year 1905, presents a good state of conservation and will also become part of the collection of the Maricel Museum.
Juli Carsalade gained the nickname "of the bishop of the Catalans", thanks to several actions that he carried out in the defense of Catalan language and culture at a time when in Northern Catalonia, intellectuals and artists like Gustau Violet, fought for the restitution of Catalan as a language of culture.
In spite of its Gascon origin, the bishop learned Catalan when he arrived in Roussillon and started teaching catechism in the parishes and schools of his bishopric. This policy in favor of the language allowed that Catalan - always in a very inferior position with respect to the French - lived a certain impulse. Carsalade also welcomed the Jocs Florals in Perpinyà in 1902, when for political reasons, they could not be celebrated in Barcelona, he also presided them in 1914.
Carsalade collaborated in the writing of the Catalan-Valencian-Balearic Dictionary of Antoni Maria Alcover, but above all, he is nowadays remembered for the purchase and restoration of the monastery of Sant Martí del Canigó and for the restoration of Sant Miquel de Cuixà. Violet made for this monastery a half-body sculpture - a bronze cast made in the Masriera workshops in Barcelona, of which the MNAC retains one - and a terracotta bust for which he made a limited edition, a piece of the which is, precisely, the one acquired by the Maricel Museum.
The two works are integrated into the Maricel Museum:
Miquel Oslé i Sáenz de Medrano (Barcelona, 1879-1960)
Picador , circa 1905-1910
Bronze
Gustau Violet
Bust de Juli de Carsalade du Pont, bishop of Elna. Sant Martí Workshop. Prada, circa 1905
Terracotta