Néstor, a 'queer' prophet in Noucentista Barcelona

The important exhibition that the Museo Reina Sofía is dedicating to the Canarian painter Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre (1887-1938) has, among other virtues, the ability to shed light on a little-known aspect of Barcelona life. After training in Madrid, London, and Paris, where he immersed himself in Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist aesthetics and came into contact with Freemasonry, Néstor lived in Barcelona between 1907 and 1913. That is, between the ages of twenty and twenty-six, a period decisive in the consolidation of his style and also a time of the emergence of Catalan Noucentisme, with its Mediterranean sense , to which he brought an Atlantic intensity.

In Barcelona, as explained in the exhibition curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga, Néstor was a regular at the Café Continental, where he met Santiago Rusiñol and Adrià Gual. He decorated the Tibidabo Festival Hall with works inspired by Verdaguer's poem L'Atlàntida , and exhibited some paintings from this series in the Sala Parés.

The Las Palmas-born artist painted the musician Enrique Granados and executed the work that gave him fame in the city. Epithalamio (or The Marriage of Prince Nestor) is a wedding portrait in which the painter himself offers his face to the groom and, supposedly, his sister Josefa to the bride. Many considered Nestor to be both the groom and the bride of the piece. The baroque and somewhat morbid tone—including the youngsters—attracted attention.

The painting was intended for the Spanish pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair; it was initially rejected for its "decadent" subject matter, but eventually overcame official reluctance and was exhibited.

Néstor was homosexual and, according to Aliaga, throughout his work he often offers a tribute to homophilia and to the figures of the androgynous and the transvestite, clearly escaping “the binary canons of masculinity and femininity, which were totally hegemonic in his time.”

His aesthetic, "alien to naturalism and realism," with nods to alchemy and perennial wisdom, was firmly established in Barcelona. One section of the exhibition is dedicated to the "decadent circle." In 1911, Néstor starred alongside Laura Albéniz, Ismael Smith, and Mariano Andreu in an exhibition at the Faianç Català that was surprising for the bold and unashamed nature of its themes. Néstor portrayed Smith dressed as a bullfighter, striking a suggestive pose with a carnation in his mouth; his illustration "Los vicios ," based on a poem by Rubén Darío, depicted seven young men, "sometimes languid, sometimes ardent, ambiguous decadent princes." Although criticized for being "voluptuous" and "Venetian," praise for his great artistic personality was unanimous, as Aitor Quiney recalls in the catalogue.

Néstor's world, openly opposed to the orthodoxy of the time, is enhanced in works after his Catalan period, such as the cycle "Poema de los elementos" or "Poema del Atlántico", "one of the most outstanding pieces of love that dared not speak its name."

Also a stage designer for musicians such as Falla and Albéniz, and playwrights such as Alejandro Casona, he was a champion of Canarian folklore.

In his later years he had as a companion Gustavo Durán, later a famous soldier of the Spanish Republic - he inspired a character in L'espoir by André Malraux - and future mentor of the Barcelona poet Jaime Gil de Biedma.

For all these reasons, it's a shame that this comprehensive exhibition, which sheds light on little-known moments in the Catalan artistic scene, isn't coming to the MNAC or any other center or museum in the city.