Joan Brossa Biography
Joan Brossa (1919 - 1998) Born 1919, Joan Brossa was a 20th-century Catalan poet whose work encompassed various styles of poetry, including literary, urban, visual, and object poetry. At 18 he was forced to take part in the Spanish Civil War, followed by a period of military service in Salamanca. At that young age he began to write. In 1941, Joan Brossa returned to Catalonia and met the poet Josep Vicenç Foix, a surrealist literary exponent of the period before the civil war. Foix had a major influence on Brossa's work, as did other members of the ADLAN group (a group that promoted avant-garde art in the 1930s), such as artists Joan Miró and Joan Prats. Alongside them, Joan Brossa explored the European avant-garde of the time and in 1948, Brossa created the disruptive magazine Dau as a set together with artists Joan Ponç and Antoni Tàpies, among others. The magazine dealt with surrealism and tried to spread the ideals of this movement in Barcelona and its surroundings. Within this social current, Brossa became acquainted with Marxism and his work began to take on a political position, to the point of becoming a pioneer of what is called antipoetry. From the 1940s onwards, the author began experimenting with visual poems, also known as calligrams, and began including them in his literary poetry collections. He created a total of fifteen hundred visual poems during his career, which have been grouped in different ways, silk-screened and featured in several public and private collections. Many of the poems were even censored. Brossa continued to publish, including Poemes del Seny (1977) and Rua de Llibres (1980), until his last official publication, Ball de Sang, in 1982. Furthermore, Brossa was recognized for his conception of poetry with the Crítica de Serra D'Or award on five occasions between 1971 and 1996, the UNESCO Picasso medal (1988) and the gold medal for merit in fine arts in 1995, among others.
