11 years ago, the artist Ramón Palmeral, a native of Piedrabuena (Ciudad Real), uploaded to YouTube a simple montage of images in which he reviewed the pictorial portraits of the poet Miguel Hernández. From the iconic Buero Vallejo to others by Miguel Abad Miró, Eduardo Vicente or Benjamín Valencia, Palmeral stated that Hernández is perhaps “the Spanish poet to whom the most portraits have been dedicated.” Among those he rescued were two made by Pontevedra-born Xosé Conde Corbal, an unavoidable figure of Galician art from the second half of the 20th century and whose work can be seen these days in the exhibition. Grotesque. Popular art and aesthetic revolution of the Reina Sofía. His family, which works to maintain his memory, has managed to reconstruct the events of both works, a kind of parallel lives around the year 1967. One is found in the legacy that Hernández’s descendants deposited in the Jaén Provincial Council, but misattributed. The other, in the Museum of Pontevedra, but under the title Portrait of man and with its unidentified protagonist.
It was a descendant of Conde Corbal who stumbled upon the YouTube video. One of the two drawings, ink on paper, looked familiar. I had seen it somewhere. So review the recordings of the days that the Pontevedra Museum itself dedicated to Conde Corbal for the centenary of his birth, in April 2023. There it was. The art historian Ángeles Tilve, current director of the center, spoke about the painter’s first forays into the genre of portraiture. “This magnificent Portrait of man shows his special ability to capture the physiognomy of the sitter,” he explained before a projection of it, “with nervous, dynamic, deforming and expressive strokes.” He made no reference to the man being Miguel Hernández. The file available on the museum’s website does not include it either. Contacted by elDiario.es, Tilve confirms that she was unaware of the link. “Corbal had a close relationship with the museum and often left his work here. When he died, the museum legalized the situation with the family, but the protagonist of that portrait is unidentified. Yes, he has a certain resemblance to Hernández, it is true,” he admits.
Tribute in Pontevedra in 1967
The Palmeral montage provided, however, some solid clues. If you stop at minute 2.57, it is not difficult to see how it is a poster from the Ateneo de Pontevedra that advertises a tribute to the poet. Conde Corbal’s family pulled on that thread to certify that, indeed, the painter had drawn the poet of Town wind (1937), republican and communist, left to die by the Franco regime in post-war prisons. And this thread also serves to correct the date attributed to it by the Pontevedra museum, 1957, based on an interpretation of the signature’s handwriting. The act of reparation to Hernández, organized by the librarian and scholar Antonio Odriozola, an intimate of Conde Corbal, took place between December 14 and 19, 1967. In those years, the regime allowed a certain margin and the poet Hernández began to be vindicated in an increasingly loud voice. That did not prevent some Falangist hierarchs, in low times within the balance of the dictatorship, from refusing to recognize the height of the one they called “red rapist of nuns.”
Another element contributes to reinforcing the family thesis. The portrait on the Ateneo poster is perhaps inspired by one of the best-known portraits of Hernández, the one made by Antonio Buero Vallejo, a fundamental playwright of Spanish literature, during their shared stay in the Conde de Toreno prison, in Madrid, in 1940. .
But one image leads to another. In the tribute papers, kept in the Pontevedra Museum, two paintings by Hernández appear. It is the same one that, along with the one inspired by Buero Vallejo, exhibited Ramón Palmeral’s montage on YouTube. Conde Corbal’s family began to investigate. And he found his trace in the Jaén Provincial Council. The descendants of Miguel Hernández deposited their legacy there after the Elche City Council rejected it for political reasons. And this includes the other portrait of Conde Corbal, but poorly attributed. According to the file available on the website, the author of it is Andes.
A gift to Josefina Manresa, his widow
A quick comparison between signatures is enough to verify that, indeed, it is a work by Conde Corbal and not by a certain Andes. His family also investigated the history of the work. The newspaper library helped him. A clipping of Vigo Lighthouse (above) reproduces both works on the occasion of the tribute of ’67 and attributes them to the painter from Pontevedra. In other newspaper pages, the poet’s widow, Josefina Manresa, the one to whom he had written from prison the shocking Onion lullabiesappears with Conde Corbal’s painting in the background. It was he who sent it to her, although the relatives do not know the reasons. They do point out that he came into contact with the work and history of Miguel Hernández thanks to Antonio Odriozola, organizer of the ’67 event. Nor have they located any writing, neither among Conde Corbal’s papers nor in the poet’s legacy, that exposes the reason for the gift.
Regarding the error in identifying the authorship, elDiario.es tried to obtain the version of the Jaén Provincial Council, responsible for Hernández’s legacy, but at the moment has not received a response.
‘O fardel da guerra’, the engraving as a document of the world
Xosé Conde Corbal was born in Pontevedra in 1923 and he died 76 years later at his home in Vilagarcía de Arousa (Pontevedra). His parents were neighbors of Bibiano Fernández Osorio Tafall, a Republican biologist and diplomat who later went into exile. He worked in his laboratory even before beginning studies in law and biology. He abandoned them to dedicate himself to painting. Installed in Ourense, there he held his first individual exhibition in 1958. A certain expressionist realism, perhaps a distorted figurativism, is perhaps the common characteristic of a work that acts as a bridge between Os Novos – the Galician and largely Galician avant-garde decimated by the war and exile – and subsequent promotions. He had joined the dynamics of the artists who frequented Café Volter in the 60s, from Xaime Quessada to Xosé Luís de Dios.
Prolific and tireless, Conde Corbal painted in oils, illustrated books, was a poster artist, created beautiful artistic maps, essayed mules and dedicated himself to engraving, according to critic Antón Castro on the website dedicated to his figure, “the most interesting thing about Corbal as an artist.” Because, after all, the man from Pontevedra was a modern, and the moderns were concerned about the communicative dimension of his work. “From the beginning I wanted to communicate, I worked to say… but without taking into account the bourgeois scales of communication,” he said. O fardel gives warthe 88 prints that can be seen these days in the Casares Quiroga House Museum in A Coruña, is one of the most finished examples of his work with the recording technique. Completed in 1986 but elaborated over a decade, they offer his child’s vision of the war, mediated by a childhood trauma when, as a child, he saw the body of a murdered person in the gutter. “This bundle of engravings has been traveling with me for years,” says the porch of the work, “it contains a vision of the War [Civil] in Galicia and the trail of mourning and terror that accompanied it.” As in a nod to Virgil who guides Dante in the Divine ComedyCorbal is guided by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, and the first of the illustrations is dedicated to him.
They are a trembling and deformed story of ’36, of its protagonists and some of its traumatic moments: I’m not looking for two roxos [En busca de los rojos], Na try of all [En busca de todos], Falanxist riots [Griterío de falangistas], The rides: take them higher claudias [Los paseos: llevarlos a las claudias], Chimps in the gutters [Arrojados en las cunetas], Benigno Alvarez [dirigente comunista gallego], dead after dying [Benigno Álvarez, muerto después de morir]titles some of them. Castro links Corbal’s general career to “the tradition that made art a document of the world” and this O fardel gives war It does nothing other than corroborate it. “Defending Galicia was the only thing that mattered to him,” concludes one of his descendants in conversation with this newspaper.
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