Diego Santos and Josephine Baker "squat" and introduce visitors to the British Hispanist's house in Malaga

Maze and madness in Gerald Bernan's home

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The British poet Edward Fitzgerald Brenan (1894-1987) is one of the adopted and favourite sons of this welcoming land with its arms open to the world, Malaga. So much so that the house he and his wife, the American poet Gamel Woosley, bought in the neighbourhood of Churriana in 1935, is once again a meeting point for Anglo-Saxon and Spanish artists and intellectuals, as it was for the almost forty years they lived there. From the moment they lived there, Gerald and Gamel were reflexive witnesses to the Spanish Civil War that was already taking shape, and more specifically to the battle of Malaga, better known as "La Desbandá", the personal consequence of which would be the publication of their best known work, The Spanish Labyrinth, published in 1943 and immediately banned in Spain, although it was widely distributed by the Ruedo Ibérico publishing house, established in France.

Ernest Hemingway, Caro Baroja, Anne Wright, Lars Pranger, Lord Timothy Willoughby of Eresby and Virginia Wolf were regular visitors and guests at evenings which, as Brenan himself said, could only be held in a paradise like this. Open to the public, the first thing visitors will find this summer is the exhibition by Diego Santos, entitled Labyrinth and Madness. 

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The painter Diego Santos, born in Churriana a few metres from the house, offers an exhibition in which he traces the biography of the multifaceted French-American artist Joséphine Baker, bringing together in various snapshots the chapters of her busy life, her personality, her experiences, her involvement and fight against injustice and her unequalled scenic fierceness.

Through the figure of Baker, Santos immerses us in the refreshing atmosphere of the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, evoking jazz and the Charleston, there is a splurge of Art Deco and rescuing the memory of these rhythms and this aesthetic he transfers them to the present day and to the very setting of the house. As the curator of the show, Mónica López Soler, states, Diego Santos resurrects Joséphine Baker, whose joyful daring is contagious". After all, she always performed naked, her pelvis covered with sixteen bananas, not one more, not one less. 

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Revivals and reflections for visitors without getting lost

Those who visit this place, this oasis of peace, have not lost their way. Although it is not difficult to get to Calle Torremolinos 56 in Churriana, the truth is that the profile of those who stop, enter and walk through the rooms of Gerald Brenan's house is that of those who are looking for his numerous, intense and very profound reflections.

Before he was a direct witness to our Civil War, Brenan had already fought in the battles of Ypres, Somme and the Second Marne, in the great carnage that was the First World War. By then Dora Carrington, Brenan's own great tortuous love, had already died, while Leonora Carrington was Max Ernst's no less tortuous companion. Javier Martín Domínguez, director of the film dedicated to the latter, The Surrealist Game, tells me that he had the good fortune to talk to her at her home in Chihuahua Street in Mexico City shortly before her death. 

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The Brenan House Library, set up by its director, Alfredo Tajan, has not only republished and presented the works of its illustrious former owners but has also started publishing new authors related to the scenario, life and adventures of Brenan, perhaps one of the best connoisseurs of the spirit of the Spanish, as one of the fragments of his work scattered around its walls says: "The truth is that the Spanish are a simple race in comparison with the English or the French. There are two aspects to the Spanish soul that correspond to day and night. The daytime Spaniard is the man we all see: sociable, positive, capable of great bursts of energy and animation. In his ordinary behaviour he is a simple but profound man. As if to say, it is a literature without Montaigne, Racine, Pascal, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Proust or Blake... but it possesses a Miguel de Cervantes, whose complexity surpasses all others. The other aspect of Spanish nature is what I call the nocturnal aspect of the Spanish soul, which is associated with the ideas of death and disdain for life. The Spanish, although it may seem otherwise, are very realistic. Of course, they examine things with meticulous objectivity. And it is precisely the cruelty and precision of their vision that brings them back to themselves. From this comes their nobility, their generosity and prodigality".

  
 

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