Juan Eduardo Cirlot

Juan-Eduardo Cirlot Laporta (Barcelona, April 9, 1916 - id., May 11, 1973) was a Spanish poet, art critic, mythologist, iconographer and musician.

Biography

The son of Juan Cirlot and María Laporta, he studied high school with the Jesuits of Barcelona and worked in a customs agency and in the Banco Hispanoamericano. In 1937 he was mobilized to fight for the Republic; At the beginning of 1940, after the civil war, he was mobilized again, but by the Francoist army. He was in Zaragoza until 1943; there he frequented the intellectual and artistic circle of the city and related to the painter Alfonso Buñuel (brother of Luis Buñuel). In the summer of 1943, he returned to Barcelona to work at Banco Hispanoamericano and met the novelist Benítez de Castro, who introduced him to journalism as an art critic. He works at the Argos publishing house. He composes music and treats the artists of the group Dau al Set (Modest Cuixart, Antoni Tàpies, Joan-Josep Tharrats, Arnau Puig, Joan Brossa). In 1949 he collaborated in Dau al set (magazine). In October he travels to Paris and meets André Breton. Igor Stravinsky is published, his first essay. In 1951 he starts working at the Gustavo Gili publishing house, where he will remain until his death. He composes a novel, Nebiros , which did not pass censorship in 1951. When Cirlot destroyed his archive from before 1958, he left this novel intact, which was published posthumously in 2016 by Ediciones Siruela.

Between 1949 and 1954 he met and treated the German ethnologist and musicologist Marius Schneider in Barcelona. He works with José Gudiol Ricart. In 1954 The eye in mythology appears. Its symbolism. He becomes part of the San Cristóbal Lighthouse Academy. In 1958 he began to write collaborations in the magazines Goya and Papeles de Son Armadans , and his most famous work appeared, the Dictionary of traditional symbols , in the publishing house Luis Miracle; work that will reach international diffusion. A few years of intense activity as a critic and lecturer followed. In 1962 his dictionary was published in English under the title A Dictionary of Symbols with a foreword by Herbert Read. In 1966 he saw the Franklin J. Schaffner movie The Warlord.

In 1971, she fell ill with pancreatic cancer, underwent surgery and died on May 11, 1973 at her home on Calle Herzegovina in Barcelona. He was the father of the art historian Lourdes Cirlot (b. 1949) and the medievalist Victoria Cirlot (b. 1955).

Analysis

Cirlot joined the French surrealist school and Dadaism at the edge of the forties, to later assume a spiritualist tradition of very distant horizons (Kabbalah, Sufism and Oriental studies) of universal desire. From there comes his interest in symbology, which will inform all his literary activity and his important work as an art critic.^{[citation needed]} He did important studies on symbology and medieval hermeneutics, he gathered an important collection of swords and his copious and varied poetic production -more than fifty books- stayed away and independent from the currents that dominated postwar poetry because of its darkness and secrecy; Lately, however, his figure has not ceased to be revalued through continuous revisions, reissues, appearances of unpublished works, and tributes. The best known of his work is the phase of his poetic evolution centered on the actress Rosemary Forsyth, who embodies Bronwyn in the film The Lord of War (1965) by Franklin J. Schaffner and inspired the permutational phase of his poetry. According to Ángel Luis Prieto de Paula, his surrealist poetry was "generated through litanies, combinations, and permutations." As in atonal music, so influential on him, in his series there is no dominant order: it was not for nothing that he was an admirer of Schönberg, and a composer of music in his youth & # 34;.

Cirlot also cultivated the aphorism in his book Of the no world (1969), where his thought can be traced back to the sources of Nietzsche and Lao Tse; he defined himself as a nihilist. In 1986 the unprecedented The world of the object in the light of surrealism was published, which, written in 1953, was ahead of the conceptual currents of recent decades and which continues to be essential reference for teachers and scholars of the universe of the artistic object. In 1988 88 sueños appeared, a complete collection of dreams transcribed by Cirlot, partially published in the Catalan magazine Dau al Set and anchored in surrealism.

As a scholar he is known for his Dictionary of Symbols.^{[citation needed]}

In October 2009, his daughter Victoria Cirlot gave the artist's personal archive to the documentary collection of the National Art Museum of Catalonia for study and analysis. It was deposited by his daughters, Lourdes and Victoria Cirlot. It gathers documentation related to his work process, notes and reflections on literature and art, his correspondence, originals of his poems, material on aesthetic theory, and publications. The Cirlot Archive covers the years between 1958 and 1972 and provides valuable information on the personality of this intellectual.

Works

Poems

• Sad Birds and Other Poems to Pilar Bayona (1942)
• Song of Dead Life (1946)
• Where the lilacs grow (1946)
• Fourth chant of dead life and other fragments (1961)
• Regina tenebrarum (1966)
• Bronwyn (1967)
• Cosmogonía (1969)
• Orfeo (1970)
• 44 sonnets of love (1971)
• Phnomial variations (1996)
• In the flame. Poetry (1943-1959) (2005)

Essays

• Dictionary of ismos (1949)
• Fairs and attractions (1950).
• The Art of Gaudí (1950)
• Abstract painting (1951)
• The style of the 20th century (1952)
• Introduction to Surrealism (1953)
• The world of object in the light of surrealism (1953)
• The Eye in Mythology: its symbolism (1954). Reissued by Huerga " Fierro editors, 1992 and 1999.
• The abstract spirit from prehistory to the Middle Ages (1965)
• Dictionary of symbols (1968)
• From the non-world: Aphorisms (1969)
• 88 dreams; imaginary feelings and other articles (1988)
• Literary trusts (1996). Huerga & Fierro editors.

Novel

• Nebiros, unpublished because of censorship, published posthumous in 2016.