Museu Apel·les Fenosa El Vendrell

The Apel·les Fenosa Museum, opened on 12 July 2002, is located in a 16th century Renaissance-style building, built over one of the portals that formed part of the town's walled enclosure and is the oldest civil building in El Vendrell.

The building

The building was the summer home and workshop of the sculptor Apel·les Fenosa and the engraver and photographer Nicole Florensa, who acquired it in 1958. The premises of the Apel·les Fenosa Foundation conserve both the permanent collection and the different rooms where the Fenosas and their friends, great intellectuals and artists of the time, spent the summers, which have been kept intact, as well as their garden.

The building is listed as a Cultural Asset of National Interest (BCIN). Throughout its history it has been the residence of the different family sagas that owned the manor house, such as the Nin and the Guimerà, but it also served as a notary's office or a school in different periods linked to the biographies of its notable inhabitants. Its two exterior façades on Calle Major and Calle del Portal -dedicated to Maria Anna Guimerà- are noteworthy, as is the view from inside the garden, where the volume of the tower can be appreciated.

collections

The collections include a selection of the original sculptures in clay, plaster and bronze, as well as explanations of the casting process. There is also a garden with large-format sculptures, some of the artist's most notable. Apel les Fenosa produced a significant body of work with hundreds of large and small-format sculptures, drawings and engravings. His sculptures evolved in various stages ranging from figurative to anthropomorphic, leading to a personal abstraction of bodies and stories. Apel les Fenosa was born in 1899 in Barcelona and settled in France in 1920 after fleeing military service. In Paris, the city where he lived most of his life, he held his first exhibition in 1924 at the Galerie Percier, where the prologue to the catalogue was written by Marx Jacob. There he met and became friends with well-known artists, writers and intellectuals such as Picasso, one of his main collectors, Paul Éluard, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, etc., many of whom also spent their summers at the house in El Vendrell. Fenosa exhibited individually and collectively in Paris, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Prague, New York, Tokyo, Osaka, Casablanca, Carrara, etc. and obtained important distinctions at the end of his life, such as the Gold Medals of the Generalitat of Catalonia and the City of Barcelona (1982 and 1987) and the Legion d'Honneur from the French Ministry of Culture (1983).