Lluís Marsans i Julià (31 December 1930 – 16 January 2015) was a Catalan painter. Born in

Barcelona Barcelona ( ; ; ) is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within c ...

to a wealthy family, he grew up in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

, and in 1947 traveled to Mexico and the United States. In 1948 he returned to Barcelona where he studied painting with Ramon Rogent and became loosely associated with the Dau al Set group.Casamartina i Parassols, Josep (18 January 2015).
Luis Marsans, el pintor proustiano
. ''El País''. Retrieved August 2018. In the mid-1950s he became friends with

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, ; ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Pica ...

. In the mid-1960s, he destroyed the abstract art he had been making and, influenced by

Ramón Gaya Ramón Gaya y Pomés (10 October 1910 – 15 October 2005) was a Spanish painter and writer. Biography Ramón Gaya was born in Murcia to Catalan parents Salvador Gaya and Josefa Pomés. His parents had moved to Murcia so Salvador could bette ...

, dedicated himself to figurative work. Between 1966 and 1970, he explored the world of

Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ( ; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the novel (in French – translated in English as ''Remembrance of Things Past'' and more r ...

's work ''

In Search of Lost Time ''In Search of Lost Time'' (), first translated into English as ''Remembrance of Things Past'', and sometimes referred to in French as ''La Recherche'' (''The Search''), is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early twen ...

'' in a suite of drawings which he exhibited at Trece Gallery in Barcelona in 1972.Shannon 1985, p. 217 In 1980 he had a solo exhibition at Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris. In 1985 he was included in the group show ''Representation Abroad'' at the

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed ...

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

Marsans painted many

still-life A still life (: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or human-made (drinking glasses, books, ...

s and landscapes, usually in small formats and using mixed techniques. He is known especially for paintings of shelves filled with books, a subject he painted more than a hundred times. In 1985,

John Ashbery John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...

wrote that Marsans' works "suggest nineteenth-century American

trompe-l'œil ; ; ) is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a Two-dimensional space, two-dimensional surface. , which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving p ...

painting. Steeped in the light of memory, a Coke can and a Bic lighter become votive objects..." Described as a realist, Marsans says of his relationship to realism: "One cannot paint what one sees.... One can only paint what one remembers.... It ealismis the identification with some realities from the past".Shannon 1985, p. 140–141

Notes

References

*Ashbery, John, and David Bergman. 1989. ''Reported sightings: art chronicles, 1957-1987''. New York: Knopf. * *Shannon, Joe. 1985. ''Representation abroad''. Washington, D.C.: Published for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden by the Smithsonian Institution Press. * * 1930 births Painters from Catalonia 2015 deaths {{spain-painter-stub