Ramón Gómez de la Serna

RAMÓN GÓMEZ DE LA SERNA (Madrid, 1888-Buenos Aires, 1963).
"Salvador Bartolozzi".
Handwritten quarto (16).
Signed on page 16.
Measurements: 23 x 16 cm.
Set of 16 handwritten quartos signed by Ramón Gómez de la Serna on the last page, dedicated to the figure of the illustrator and artist Salvador Bartolozzi. The text adopts a hybrid tone between biographical portrait, free essay and literary evocation, characteristic of the author's style, in which objective description merges with metaphor and witty image.
In these pages, Gómez de la Serna constructs a portrait of Bartolozzi marked by his usual capacity for poetic synthesis, going so far as to define him as "a Picasso before Picasso but he fled to Paris as if renouncing a glory that was not intimate, human and Madrilenian", a phrase that condenses both his vision of the character and his particular form of fragmentary and aphoristic thought. The text is not limited to a conventional biography, but turns the portrayed into a symbol of Spanish artistic modernity at the beginning of the 20th century.
Salvador Bartolozzi, an essential figure in the renovation of illustration and editorial design, maintained a close relationship with the avant-garde circles of Madrid, especially with the environment of the Café de Pombo, where Gómez de la Serna exerted a central influence. His career as an illustrator in publishing houses such as Calleja and his creation of iconic characters such as Pinocchio or Chapete place him as a key reference in the history of Spanish children's and popular visual culture.
The manuscript reflects not only the author's personal admiration for Bartolozzi, but also his interest in visual languages and his constant dialogue between literature and the visual arts. The writing, free and associative, progresses through chained images, brief observations and reflections on the artist's character, in a structure that eschews traditional narrative linearity.
From a literary point of view, the whole constitutes a representative example of Gómez de la Serna's prose in his maturity, where biography is transformed into an autonomous literary creation. The manuscript thus acquires a double value: as a direct testimony of the author's creative process and as a document of the intellectual and artistic network of the Spanish avant-garde, due to its autograph condition, its handwritten signature and its link to a key figure of modern illustration, this set of pages represents a piece of remarkable bibliographic and documentary interest within the Ramonian universe, while offering an intimate and literaturized vision of one of the great names of Spanish graphic art of the 20th century.