Josep Torrent Buch, the Painter of the Costa Brava

Josep Torrent Buch was born in Sant Feliu de Guíxols on 18 January 1915. His interest in art and painting began very early, at the age of seven, his talent already evident in the first drawings he made between the ages of seven and ten.

During his first years at school, at the La Salle “Los Hermanos” school in his home town, he attended drawing classes every Thursday, preferring this activity, in the artist’s own words, to going out to play with his friends. It was then that he became aware of his interest in drawing and began classes at the local School of Fine Arts, run by Gertrudis Romaguera.

His progress and innate talent in his early youth took him in 1933, at the age of eighteen, to the Escola Superior de Disseny i Art Llotja in Barcelona, where he continued his studies in drawing and painting until 1936, and where he won three first prizes in drawing. To pay for his studies he worked as a house painter and devoted his free time to his art, going to the zoo and the aquarium to draw from life.

He took part in a group exhibition in Palafrugell, which would be his first official exhibition, from 12 to 22 July 1936. But the Spanish Civil War broke out on 18 July that year, and the exhibition had to end early.

At the end of 1936 he left for the war, to the Aragon front. He survived on several occasions thanks to his boldness and agility, but also thanks to his drawings, which he exchanged for food in farmhouses, for himself and his companions.

Thanks to his studies in perspective, he joined the Cartography Service of his regiment.

At just twenty-two years of age, and thanks to his artistic talent, he became the chronicler of the time, drawing war scenes from the front that were published in the press.

Later, in Barcelona, he took part in an exhibition of propaganda posters of the period, at the Plaça Catalunya metro station, in collaboration with Martí Bas and Clavé, who would go on to become a renowned poster artist.

At the end of 1938 he fled to France with his regiment, and he was made a war refugee at the Agde Hérault concentration camp, near Perpignan, where he spent about four months. It was there that he began to win over the officers, making portraits of them with which he obtained a certain degree of preferential treatment.

On his return to Spain he was detained for ten days in Figueres, where he was lodged at the home of Salvador Dalí’s sister. Once again his art made it possible for him to free himself from this detention, in this case thanks to a drawing in which the coat of arms of Spain appeared with the face of General Franco in transparency.

He arrived in Sant Feliu de Guíxols at the end of 1939. He held his first exhibition of drawings and paintings, on war themes, in premises on Carrer Major. This same exhibition, expanded, was held again in 1940, for the Epiphany festivities, in the same premises. At this time he also took part in the making of religious altarpieces, under the direction of Sebastià Platja.

Throughout 1940 and into early 1941 he held a series of exhibitions, until he had to leave for compulsory military service, in Villa Sanjurjo, in Morocco, where he made a series of drawings on Arab themes that were exhibited right there.

In 1942 he returned to Sant Feliu, and it was then that he began to paint the coastal landscapes around the town: Cala del Vigatà, Cala de l’Ametller, Sant Pol, and different spots along the Costa Brava, from Sant Feliu to Tossa. It is here that we see the first transparencies that defined a style of his own and for which he received notable and well-deserved recognition.

From that moment his professional career as a painter began, and by 1950, according to specialist critics, it had made him the “Painter of the Costa Brava”. Seascapes clearly predominate in his work, with their transparencies, light and movement, and his work is a faithful testimony to the evolution of the landscape, in which the different eras can be seen, both physical and pictorial, brought about by the great tourist “boom” that took place on the Costa Brava in the years 1950–1970. During this period he exhibited in Barcelona, Girona, Madrid and other cities in the country; the written and radio press and the critics of the time mentioned him as an “emerging” artist, and he obtained very good reviews.

It was his most productive period as a painter; he made the most of the great growth of tourism on the Costa Brava, opened his own gallery in Platja d’Aro, and created the first advertising poster of the Costa Brava and of Platja d’Aro, which at that time was growing enormously in tourist services.

He continued to exhibit in the city of Girona for more than forty consecutive years, as well as in Barcelona, Madrid and Sevilla; every summer he exhibited in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Tossa, Lloret de Mar and Platja d’Aro. In fact, it is his territory, the Costa Brava. In winter he did so in the inland cities: Girona, Figueres, Barcelona, Rubí…

In 1962, in the midst of the December snowfall, he married Mercè Vilà Basart, and in May 1964 his son Carles was born.

They were years of a great deal of work; he could not stop producing work, and its sale was tremendous — in fact, he and his family lived from those sales throughout his life. Finally, it must be said that it was more than sixty years of painting and drawing under the most varied circumstances, but always without losing the sense of Art. It can be said without any doubt that it was a whole life devoted to painting, with more than 250 exhibitions and more than five thousand works created to his credit.

He held his last commercial exhibitions in 1984 in Girona and Sant Feliu de Guíxols. In 1994 he took part in a group exhibition of artists from Sant Feliu de Guíxols in Castellginest, in France.

In 1994, the Associació Turística de Sant Feliu de Guíxols awarded him the “Porta Ferrada d’Or” prize. This award has also been given to figures such as the President of the Generalitat Jordi Pujol and Baroness Thyssen, among others, in recognition of a life devoted to art and as an ambassador of the land where he was born.

In 1996 a Commemorative Exhibition was organised for him at the Centre Cultural Monestir de Sant Feliu de Guíxols, where he received various awards from the authorities.

He died in February 1999 in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, at the age of eighty-four.

His work forms part of private and institutional collections all over the world — more abroad than at home, since the first people to take an interest in his work were the first tourists who came to the Costa Brava.