Sert: Significance of Vich Cathedral

The Catalan muralist José María Sert is known for his fluid, epic murals overflowing with writhing humanity. His works are at

The Last Supper, 1927. Destroyed, 1936. Judas can be seen fleeing through the door far in the background.

home not only at the Cathedral of Vich, but also in some of the grandest interiors of the 1920s and 30s: 30 Rockefeller Center and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, le Palais des Nations in Geneva. His figures are muscular and sculptural and his themes allegorical and timeless. Some of his influences are clear: we see Baroque sculpture and painting, we see Titian, Tiepolo and Goya. But the inspiration he finds there is merely a starting point for him, and it is interesting to see how his work evolved over the course of his career.

The murals at the Cathedral of Vich could provide all the material necessary to study the artist’s evolving style, as the decoration of the walls of this historic building became his life work. He was first commissioned to execute the paintings in 1905, and because of unforeseen obstacles, he continued to work on them right until his death in 1945. Unfortunately, many of the earliest pieces no longer exist. There is, however, an informative volume by Luis Monreal y Tejada dedicated to the history of the Cathedral and to Sert’s murals in particular. La Cathedral de Vich was printed in 1948 as the first volume in a set on Cathedrals in the “Biblioteca de Arte Hispanico” of Ediciones Aedos, Barcelona. It discusses the first paintings and sketches from 1906, which were never delivered to the cathedral, as well as works of the second and third commissions, which are richly represented in the volume’s extensive illustrations.
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The Catalan bishop Torras y Bages asked Sert to submit a project for the blank walls of the church. It was a very prestigious project for the young artist in 1905, and he had to submit his sketches and plans for approval to a committee of art experts in Barcelona. They were well-disposed to Sert’s employment, but their taste for the Renaissance and Baroque precedents was well known, and Sert struggled to meet their polychromatic expectations. The first plans submitted employed mostly dark shades of blue or green, or were black and white with only one additional color. The committee requested more color and he did provide some colorful paintings in his next set but balanced these with even more chiaroscuro images. Thus, it seems that right from the start of his career he had already established his preferences in the use of color. This would be a constant throughout his career.

If anything, Sert’s insistence on a darkened palette seemed to grow with time. He made paintings, but never delivered final work to Vich, and when the bishop died in 1916, the loss of enthusiasm for the project seemed to indicate its doom. Monreal y Tejada lays the blame on Sert, saying, “The reason for these prolonged delays in the installation of paintings on the cathedral walls was José Maria Sert’s hesitation, who, in his Paris studio, was ever more inclined to create his work using very limited range of dark and somber colors atop a base layer of gold.”

But the project had more life in it, and with opposition fading in relation to his growing reputation, Sert was able to exhibit fully developed paintings for the walls in 1926 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. These massive works were delivered to Vich and installed in the church. After two more deliveries that year and in 1929, nearly all the work was completed. These murals are mature Sert: large tableaux of crowds worthy of an enormous operatic stage, all done in sepia tones with an occasional backdrop of deep color on a luminous gold background.

Sadly, this was a time of great turbulence and civil war in Spain, with the Catholic Church an active partisan and combatant. Much church property was destroyed throughout the country, and on 21 July, 1936, the Cathedral of Vich was set afire, and the interior was totally destroyed. In a strange parallel to the destruction of Diego Rivera’s murals in Rockefeller Center several years earlier, now it was Jose Maria Sert’s turn to see his work become victim of the clashes of right and left that were tearing at western society.

St. Luke, 1941. A rare field of color for the Evangelist traditionally known as a painter.

Peace finally returned, but in the form of a repressive regime. As soon as the calm of Franco’s dictatorship allowed, the Cathedral was restored. Sert was asked to paint the walls once again. Thus in the early years of the 1940s, in Nazi occupied Paris, Sert created completely new images for those walls. Now, fifteen years later, his third set of paintings would give full expression to the art of the mature and confident muralist without compromise or explanation. The subjects and the colors are the same, and imagery is quite similar, but there are some distinct differences between the works from the 1920s and the 1940s. This becomes apparent when we are able to compare images of the same scenes as illustrated in the Cathedral volume.

Monreal y Tejada describes it this way, “There is a fundamental difference of technique between the paintings destroyed in 1936 and the new ones. The former had expansive perspectives behind the figures as if they were great open windows in the wall that magnified the cathedral’s space. Now, on the other hand, Sert wants to establish with great precision the building’s limits, and for that reason he avoids those perspectives and sets the figures in masses and shadows, as if they were sculpted reliefs. Now there is a greater submission to the lines and demands of the architecture.” He goes on to say that Sert was fond of saying that an artist who will decorate a monument finds out that “the architecture imposes its discipline.” The author sees more differences, stating that the real genius of Sert’s new work was his composition. It is naturalistic but with the details magnified and fantasized.

In setting the new works alongside the old we see the differences immediately. Gone are the great horizons and mountainous backgrounds. Now the overflowing masses of workers, admirers, proclaimers, live in a shallow foreground, seemingly ever in danger of falling right off the walls they are painted on, into the arms of the viewer. As for the composition, the most striking innovation for me is the way in which the characters now project their mass and become the central focus as soon as one sets his eyes on them, in a sort of trompe l’oeil of perspective. There is an immediacy and an intimacy here that was missing from the earlier works.

Pilate showing Jesus to the crowd, 1926. Destroyed 1936.

Jesus before Pilate, 1941

Inside the front doors of the Cathedral on the interior wall is now installed the monumental painting of Jesus before Pilate. Directly facing it through the great depth of the cathedral is the central piece of the ensemble, the Crucifixion on the back wall of the apse. It is this masterpiece which probably best illustrates the full development of Sert’s art.

Crucifixion, 1926. Destroyed, 1936.

Crucifixion, 1941.