The Iberian arena

Ignasi Mallol i Casanovas (Tarragona, 1892 - Bogotá, 1940) was a Spanish painter and pedagogue who played a key role in preserving the artistic and cultural heritage of Tarragona during the Spanish Civil War.

Biography

He moved to live in Barcelona very young and trained at the Martinez Altés Academy, the Joan Baixas Academy and the Galí School of Art. At that time he shared a workshop and friendship with Esteve Monegal and Francisco Vayreda. He traveled to Paris in 1911, once finished the decoration of the dining room of the lawyer Joan Permanyer's house. In fact, shortly before, his colleagues in the Barcelona workshop and Domènec Carles had already established themselves in the French capital. Again in Barcelona between 1916 and 1917, he directed a private Academy of Fine Arts which has been considered heiress of the school Galí, the so-called School of Bells Oficis, together with Romà Jori. In 1917 he left the academy and the projects undertaken in Barcelona, ​​depressed by the death of Prat de la Riba. He moved to Olot, where he was one of the greatest exponents of the new school in Olot. Member of the association barcelonedsa, Les Arts i els Artistes, exhibited in the halls organized by this entity and held individual exhibitions. On the way back to Tarragona, the green landscape changed by the countryside and the coast. He won the extraordinary prize at the Spring Exhibition of 1929 in Barcelona.

He directed, together with the sculptor Joan Rebull, the Taller-Escuela de Tarragona, an artistic training center founded by the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Tarragona town hall in 1934, whose development truncated the Civil War. were in Barcelona when the war broke out in July 1936, following the instructions of the culture advisor, Ventura Gassol, they put themselves at the head of a squad of mossos d'esquadra to protect the museum and a good part of the library of the Barcelona Seminar , Later they were appointed delegates of the Artistic Heritage Commission of the city of Tarragona, although in practice they played the role of delegates throughout the province. The archive of the Commission of Tarragona was conserved of unitary way in the dependencies of the Archbishop's Palace until the occupation of Catalonia by the insurrectionists.As for the Workshop-School, in 1938 a bombardment destroyed the building where it was, moving the teaching activity also to the Archbishop's Palace. Until the end of the war they continued imparting classes although in a precarious way. Among his students are Tomás Olivar, Garcianguera and Gonzalo Lindin, among others. He left exile fleeing the occupation troops in 1939, passing away in the Colombian capital in the following years. Binliography

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