The journalist and writer Raimundo de los Reyes witnessed a key moment for two authors of the Generation of ’27: the first greeting between Federico García Lorca and Miguel Hernández. The meeting took place in Murcia, in January 1933 and was “thanks to Raimundo de los Reyes, journalist for LA VERDAD, poet and driving force of the Sudeste magazine,” says doctor of Art Nacho Ruiz in the catalog of the exhibition ‘La Silver Age in Murcia: one hundred years of the Literary Supplement of LA VERDAD’, which opens this Thursday at the Almudí Palace. «Federico brought ‘Life is a Dream’ with La Barraca –continues Ruiz–, which had sets by Benjamín Palencia and Ramón Gaya (‘The Two Talkers’ of the Salamanca school), both collaborators of successive magazines. […] Federico was already a famous poet and he walked around La Trapería with the monkey from La Barraca without a hat, which caused some gossip in the provincial city. That year, the man from Oriola would publish his first book, ‘Perito en lunas’.
The exhibition evokes the Murcia of the 20s and 30s, where the ‘Página Literaria’, the Literary Supplement, ‘Verso y Prosa’ and ‘Sudeste’, among others, take place, and includes a small retrospective of Benjamín Palencia (Barrax, Albacete , 1894-Madrid, 1980), one of the few illustrators of the Literary Supplement. “The three magazines had many painters but the Literary Suplemento only published images of Vázquez Díaz, Benjamín Palencia, Vicente Ros and Almela Costa and, what’s more, only Vázquez Díaz and Palencia made drawings.” For this reason, “the latter later went on to ‘Verso y Prosa’ and has a lot of correspondence with Juan Guerrero Ruiz,” explains the curator of the exhibition promoted by La VERDAD with the Autonomous Community and the Murcia City Council, who indicates that “Benjamín Palencia, In one way or another, he was always present.
drawing ‘Three fishermen of Altea’, by Benjamín Palencia.
The selection of pieces for the exhibition, made up of 135 works (not including documents) from 22 providers, dates back to 1925 and among them you can find “a very interesting unpublished drawing by Benjamín Palencia, ‘Three fishermen in Altea’”, a work significant “due to its proximity to the date of the famous stay of Guerrero’s group of friends in this coastal town.”
The Almudí will host paintings representative of each of the creator’s artistic periods. “It is a very interesting part emotionally and pictorially, since great masterpieces are exhibited, for example ‘Landscape on’”, dated 1949 and loaned by the Antonio Ródenas García-Nieto Foundation.
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