Joan Brossa

Stendhal, 1975

Graphic material, 48.3 x 37.4 cm

In life, events do not occur with either the coherence or the meaning that they have in novels. Novels seem to me a mongrel genre from when people had too much time on their hands. I prefer the arts of synthesis: poetry and theatre. [...]

Everyone can write a novel. But not everyone can write a book of poems or a play. I think it was Stendhal who said: ‘Don’t show me the first novel, show me the third and then I’ll know whether the author is a novelist or not.’ I mean that the novel is a genre from another era, when books were excessively long, with a farrago of words, of rhetoric. I think the arts most characteristic of our time are the arts of synthesis, such as poetry and theatre. [...]

There are a number of visual and mental investigations not found in the current narrative and that led me to visual poetry. Some of my poems that are located on the edge of literature are accurate descriptions of objects. From there to the object there exists a coherent step, right?

Cremades i Arlandis, Ferran: ‘Joan Brossa: l'eina i la feina’, Papers de cultura, no. 16, in Papers d'educació. Valencia, no. 45 (June 1989). pp. 26–29

Original title:: Stendhal
Registration number:: 4501
Artist:: Brossa, Joan
Date created:: 1975
Date acquired:: 2011
Fonds:: MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium
Object type:: Graphic material
Media:: Screen print on paper
Dimensions:: 48.3 x 37.4 cm (height x width)
Edition number:: Ed. 56/75
Credits:: MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Joan Brossa Fund. Long-term loan of Fundació Joan Brossa
It has accessibility resources:: No

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

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Stendhal, 1975

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