It is not easy to sum up the figure of Josep Maria Sert or indeed his artwork. Sert was a vibrant, larger-than-life, man of the world and one of those exceptional artists that neither history nor his critics have ever succeeded in pinning down. He was one of the most internationally renowned Catalan artists of his time, with enormous creative talent and extraordinary social skills. He was also a great master of decorative painting, precisely at a time when interest in the discipline was beginning to wane. His forceful personality, the aplomb with which he steered his career, his grandiloquent style, far removed from the avant-garde trends of his day, his many non-artistic projects (including his involvement in the evacuation of artworks from the Prado during the Spanish Civil War), coupled with his friendships with magnates and politicians... all of these facets, together with the intensity with which he lived a life of many contradictions, still arouse very divergent and often passionate feelings to this day. His two wives, Misia Godebska (1872-1950) and Roussy Mdivani (1906-1938), were every bit as exceptional as Sert himself. And he was on close terms with some of the great figures of the period, including Pablo Picasso, Mlle Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. He rubbed shoulders with some of the wealthiest individuals of the time, whose homes he decorated to their aesthetic taste. He is, in short, one of the most fascinating characters of the first half of the twentieth century and, without a doubt, the greatest decorative painter of the period.

Sert's career began late. We have no record of any works from his youth in his native Barcelona, although we do know that he trained as an artist, probably intending to join his family's thriving fabric business. This grounding may have given him the confidence with which he unselfconsciously married art and business. Like many artists of his generation, he studied under Pere Borrell and Alexandre de Riquer. He regularly frequented such diverse artistic gatherings as the Saint Lluc circle and the Els Quatre Gats bar. In 1899, following the death of his parents, he moved to Paris to make a living as an artist. With his background and his contacts amongst Barcelona's haute bourgeoise, he soon became part of the musical symbolism scene in Paris, meeting such iconic figures as Paul-Albert Besnard, Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas and other emerging young artists such as Maurice Denis and Claude Debussy. It is hardly surprising, then, that when he came to choose his artistic niche, Sert should opt for decorative and monumental art, for which he had an unquestionable talent. And the critics augured a great future for him.

His big opportunity came in 1900, when the Bishop of Vich, Josep Torras i Bages, commissioned him to decorate the city's cathedral. This project, for which Sert ultimately made three different designs, became the centrepiece of his career, due to the unusual characteristics involved and the many vicissitudes suffered by the piece. While his reputation among the cosmopolitan elite of Paris and the eastern seaboard of the United States was built on private commissions, the worldwide fame he achieved with his decorations for Vich cathedral opened the door to international public commissions. It also obliged him to make a number of key decisions in his fledgling career. He decided to organise his business on a workshop basis, working with assistants and production in stages – an entirely normal approach, given the size of the assignment.

Sert exhibited his paintings for the first time at the 1907 Salon d'Automne. A few months later, he met his future wife Misia, already a legendary figure on the Parisian artistic scene. These two circumstances catapulted him out of his former anonymity, turning him into a rising star in the most aristocratic of Parisian circles, and earning him a host of new commissions. From the beginning of his career, Sert's decorative painting displayed a surprising and singular creative freedom in a genre that was inevitably tied to commissions and subject to architectural restrictions. He knew how to play with perception. He appropriated and transformed the space he decorated. And he was capable of misleading viewers with apparently real scenes of such profusion and artifice that the eye cannot fully take them in. Following the Great War, he began to water down the Italian influences and the mythological themes that had been such a feature of his earlier work. He developed instead a more plethoric style, with bright colours and intense golds, full of exotic 'oriental' features such as elephants and palm trees. Sert had an innate ability to observe, select and catalogue motifs, gestures and forms of different kinds, which he blended wildly in his compositions. The self-reference and repetition of this whole catalogue of works has much to do with the crucial role played by photography in his obsessive search for motifs. Sert travelled extensively, camera in hand, photographing scenes of all kinds. He used these to feed his inspiration and create an endless repertoire, constantly recycled from one work to another over the years. It was, however, in the workshop that photography played a key role in his creative process. He would build highly theatrical arrangements, first with models and later with figurines from nativity scenes and dolls, recreating the scenes he saw in his imagination and then drawing them. He used photography to work on every gesture and every shape. He studied the light and shade, the perspective and the framing of his compositions, which he often set up on platforms and daises.

The 1920s were a decade of change and success for Sert. His fame spread to the United States, where he exhibited for the first time in 1924 at the Wildenstein Gallery. The next year, he met the young Roussy Mdivani. It marked a turning-point in his life. After several years during which the trio were rumoured to be conducting a ménage à trois, the painter finally separated from Misia. The apparently Bohemian existence he had shared with his first wife morphed into a life of refined elegance and glamour. The couple travelled frequently to the eastern states of the US, where Roussy's brothers, known popularly as the 'Marrying Mdivani,' held sway. Roussy liked the sea. The couple took long Mediterranean cruises on their boat and bought a house, the Mas Juny, on the coast of Catalonia. In the 1930s, it became a summer meeting point for their large and varied circle of friends, a place where projects were hatched and deals struck. Surprisingly, despite these summer visits, the Mediterranean practically disappeared from Sert's repertoire of themes in the 1930s, even though it had inspired many of his earlier works, together with the Orient and other parts of Spain. For Sert there was a clear relationship between temperament and form, and he saw links between the Baroque and the Mediterranean. It was that baroque nature of the Mediterranean that attracted and inspired him. Perhaps this was why he decided to return to it once more in 1934, when asked to decorate his brother-in-law Alexis’s palazzo in Venice, for which he painted his Mediterranean Fantasy. This work explores the sentiment even further, superimposing the theme of the 'Mediterranean' on that of the 'Orient', in a possible reference to the city of Venice or his client's eastern origins. Be that as it may, by blending the two themes, Sert once again showed his skill in understanding his clients' expectations. He brilliantly employed a series of common clichés from the collective imagination to create a fantasy atmosphere ideally suited to the ballroom setting.

Around the same time, the project for the cathedral at Vich, which had been abandoned due to disagreements over financing since Bishop Torras' death in 1916, received the necessary backing from Francesc Cambó to go ahead. The ensemble —the second in the series— was installed almost in its entirety in 1929. The triumph of the piece, which was widely lauded in the press, attracted further public commissions. Over the following years, Sert made paintings for two of the most iconic buildings of the political, economic and artistic order of the 1930s. The first was the Palais des Nations in Geneva (1935), headquarters of the League of Nations (the body created to ensure world peace). The second was the lobby of the RCA building, the best known art deco construction in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center complex, built between 1933 and 1940, at the height of the Great Depression, by John D. Rockefeller. The two projects gave Sert an opportunity to publicly manifest his belief in the place of decorative painting in modernism and the crystallisation of a language of vast, imposing quasi-sculptural forms, in keeping with the scale of the spaces he was decorating.

However, the triumphalist, celebratory tone of the two pieces was soon dimmed by the outbreak, in quick succession, of the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. On 21 July 1936, a group of Republican milicianos set fire to the cathedral in Vich, destroying Sert’s paintings. The choice of target was no accident. The city and its cathedral —whose decoration had been financed by the leader of a conservative middle-class Catalanist party— was seen by the revolutionary forces as symbolising the power and influence of the Catalan bourgeoisie. A similar attack in Madrid damaged the paintings Sert had made for the Duke of Alba in 1931. Sert was pained by these losses, but it was not until well into the war that he openly came out in support for Franco's national side. Roussy had been in ill-health since the death of her brother Alexis in 1935. She died in 1938, adding yet another misfortune to Sert's final years.

With the outbreak of World War II and the occupation of Paris, Sert saw a sharp decline in his work. He devoted his last years to projects in Spain. In particular, under the watchful eye of the Franco regime, he created a new decoration for Vich cathedral, which was partially re-opened in October 1945. Sert died just a few weeks later in a clinic in Barcelona. His funeral in the cathedral was packed. The people of Vich paid tribute to him by closing shops and hanging black ribbons from their balconies.

Pilar Sáez Lacave