Can Prunera Museu Modernista, Sóller

Can Prunera Museu Modernista is located in an old art nouveau mansion built in the early 20th century. A combination of sinuous, natural and animal-like shapes welcome visitors to a museum which has become one of the features of the town of Sóller. Can Prunera, together with other buildings in Palma such as the Grand Hotel, Can Forteza Rey and Can Casasayas, belongs to a large set of buildings erected in Mallorca in the early 20th century following the models of Catalan Modernisme and French Art-nouveau. 

Can Prunera was restored through the joint efforts of the Sóller Railway company and the Serra Art Foundation who formed the Tren de l'Art Foundation to foster the cultural and artistic development of the Sóller valley. Two exhibition halls, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, were created at Sóller railway station plus a Sculpture Park at the end of the tramway line that links Sóller and Port de Sóller. In Palma, at the Sóller Railway Station, there is also a hall showing “50 Landscapes of Majorca”. After almost three years of restoration and refurbishing, Can Prunera Museu Modernista was opened in August 2009. Since its creation, the Foundation has organized a large number of exhibitions, which have turned Sóller into an important meeting point for artistic creation.

The ground and main floor rooms contain some of the original furniture along with paintings and sculptures from the Collection. On the second floor, is the exhibition Del Modernisme al segle XXI [From art nouveau to the 21st century], a set of paintings belonging mainly to the Serra Art Collection. The collection’s masterpieces encompass works by important artists from the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Miró, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger and Maurice Vlaminck. Alongside, are painters who were either born in Mallorca or have some link to the island and have reached international recognition, such as Rusiñol, Mir, Joan Fuster, Eliseu Meifrén, Ritch Miller and Miquel Barceló. The collection has been enlarged over the past few years with works donated by private owners and artists to the Tren de l’Art Foundation. On my visit I saw works by Helen Frankenthaler, Albert Gleizes, Rebecca Horn, Hermann Nitsch, Jaume Plensa, Diego Rivera, and Antoni Tàpies, among others.

In the basement, there are the rooms popularly known as botigues – the domestic service spaces and stores - which nowadays host temporary exhibitions and rooms devoted to Juli Ramis, a pioneer of materic abstract painting in Spain. In the 1960s Ramis achieved international recognition, with Time magazine including him in a list of the best one hundred painters in the world. He was friends and shared his atelier with Wilfredo Lam, Jean Fautrier, Serge Poliakoff and Nicolas de Staël. He also had friendships with Picasso, Juan Gris and Miró. As a result, he is the most internationally recognised Majorcan painter of the first half of the 20th century. The collection includes canvases from three of the most representative periods in his oeuvre: early years, Cubism and abstract works. Finally, in the garden, visitors can contemplate the Foundation’s collection of sculptures.

The current temporary exhibition Salva Ginard 20/20 presents 20 paintings from a 20-year project of painting human faces “as a secret, intimate and personal language, a partially veiled confession,” that lives in the “landscape of experiences” which “regrouped and forced to live together,” shape each face “in a sort of hallucinated and revealing cryptogram.” Across that 20-year period, Ginard moved from “absolute darkness”, scratching the surface until he could see “dull colours that drew out the map of a wounded heart” to vivid, pure, even brilliant colours sliding along the fringes combined with “partial or wholescale elimination of the image to take advantage of its echo to begin again.” In between, are figures that have been “deconstructed into layers, pieces or blotches of colour, even until their disappearance” - scratched, uprooted violently, in order to delve “deeper into the idea of destruction / reset, wounding / curing.”

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Peter Sheppard Skaerved - Telemann B-Minor Fantasie.