Joan Brossa

Joan Brossa (; 19 January 1919 – 30 December 1998) was a Catalan poet, playwright, graphic designer and visual artist. He wrote only in the Catalan language.

He was one of the founders of both the group and the publication known as Dau-al-Set (1948) and one of the leading early proponents of visual poetry in Catalan literature. Although he was in the vanguard of the post-war poets, he also wrote hundreds of formally perfect sonnets, sapphic odes, and sestinas as well as thousands of free and direct poems. His creative work embraced every aspect of the arts: cinema, theatre (more than 360 pieces), music, cabaret, the para-theatrical arts, magic, and the circus.

Life and work For him, expression had priority over content, and he managed to give his poetry the appearance of plays on words. His lyrical work is connected with the theatre while the totality of his literature (more of 80 books, all written in the Catalan language) is impregnated with the theatrical dimension as he always employed a broad and interdisciplinary vision of culture, the arts in general and the performance arts in particular. This vision was expressed in his literary and visual works which often appeared as satirical, cutting, ironic and critical or, on other occasions, irreverent yet playful. In the latter years of his creative life, he received a number of awards such as the National Prize for the Visual Arts (1992), the National Theatre Prize (1998) and the UNESCO Picasso Medal. He has been posthumously awarded doctorate honoris causa from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1999). He was a member and then Honorary Member of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (Association of Catalan Language Writers). His visual poetry (poesia plàstica), obviously placed beyond all linguistic borders, is recognized as a reference the world over.

He collaborated in the foundation of the Espai Escenic Joan Brossa (The Joan Brossa Theatrical Space) in the Born district of Barcelona, this being the initiative of the theatre director and actor Hermann Bonnín and the magician Hausson, who continued along the theatrical lines espoused by Brossa.

Personal Archive Throughout his life, Joan Brossa gathered a huge and varied amount of materials. The photos of his first studio in Balmes Street are famous, showing the pile of papers he stored on the floor of all the rooms. It was this accumulation that prompted him to rent, in 1987, a second study in which he continued to preserve diverse documentation until his death.

To safeguard this documentary legacy, after a year of the poet's death, the Fundació Joan Brossa was established, which took over the custody and cataloguing of all this material. It is estimated that Brossa's personal archive consists of approximately 52,000 documents. It is an archive of a wide and complex variety of materials, including manuscripts of his artistic and literary work (final drafts and versions), documents produced during the preparation of editions (lists, summaries, texts, proofs of printing, galerades, etc.), facsimiles, translation of literary works, correspondence, a collection of brochures, associations, posters, etc. The archive also includes administrative documentation (invoices, receipts and accounts).

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