Adolf Fargnoli Iannetta (1890-1951), a son of a humble family from Italy, was a self-taught artist, gifted with a unique quality forged in Noucentist Girona, a city he deeply loved. Fargnoli was lucky enough to have Rafael Masó and Carles Rahola as his mentors, who were responsible for the city’s regeneration project, who realised his value. Between 1916 and 1932 he lived in Girona, where he had two workshops, at carrer de Santa Eugènia, 32, and from 1927 – shortly after the birth of his son and the death of his wife – at carrer de la Força, 23. He specialised in the carving of boxes, crosses and other objects in wood and metal or wood and argerata ceramics, to which he gave their own names and which turned him into a myth of Noucentist Girona. This artistic and personal uniqueness made him deserving of national and international success. The fifty or so individual exhibitions he held between 1918 and 1933 show the breadth of his framework of relationships and his integration into the contemporary cultural world. This was the Fargnoli known until now.

But it wasn’t just the Girona Fargnoli, the artist of the caskets and “the poet of simple things”, as more than one critic had defined him. From 1932 on, he set his sights on Barcelona and set up his home there. Although he never left the workshop in carrer de la Força and often went to Girona to see his parents and son, who lived in Anglès with his wet nurse, he was convinced that Barcelona would open up new horizons for him. However, he was of a bohemian nature and detached from social norms, increasingly distant from the successes of the Girona scene. In 1933 he suffered a deeply emotional episode, the product of his confusion between art, friendship and love. Barcelona then became an unfavourable environment for him, which led to a more serious crisis. In the meantime, he abandoned the boxes, and the craftsman became a designer, with the creation of the D’Annali brand. It would not, however, end well. He left these unique pieces he carved with such care to devote himself to the design of women’s Art Deco-style jewellery and the Girona of the Masó school was overtaken by modernity, Hollywood aesthetics and the American dream, which dazzled him completely. The consequences of the Spanish Civil War, during which he lost tools and materials, and the harsh post-war period caused him to withdraw, and until around 1945 he did not return to his creations and, at the same time, to his poetic prose, some reflections and hitherto unpublished thoughts, which he wanted to edit. Fargnoli died on March 17, 1951, shortly after the retrospective exhibition he had held at the Institute of Italian Culture in Barcelona.

Presentation of Girona artists at the Galeries Laietanes in Barcelona in June 1918

On June 27, 1913, the architect Rafael Masó and his friend, the writer and intellectual Xavier Monsalvatge, opened the Athenea society in Girona, which centred on the arts and fine crafts promotion. It was a first action in favour of the cultural revival of the city, which until then was relatively dormant. Athenea closed in 1917, but a year later Masó coordinated the Exposició d’Artistes Gironins at the Galeries Laietanes in Barcelona. The exhibition was to be the presentation of the goals achieved by the architect from Athenea. Exhibiting at the Galeries Laietanes allowed them to spread the word far beyond Girona.

In the text of the catalogue, Monsalvatge announced the revival of Girona, “You, people of Barcelona, will now be able to see embodied the spirituality of a Catalan city unknown to everyone, and even to the Girona residents themselves…”. It was the presentation of Noucentisme from Girona in Barcelona. Monsalvatje called Masó a “way maker”, a good way of defining the job of opening the eyes of young people to the new European artistic paths. This is why we can talk about Rafael Masó’s school. Fidel Aguilar, a sculptor (now passed away); Joaquim Coll, a sketcher; Joan Corominas, a painter; Adolf Fargnoli, a cabinet maker; Joan Solà, a painter; Joan Surós, pseudonym of Joan B. Coromina, a ceramist and painter, and Pere Vallmajó, a leather embosser, coordinated by Masó, exhibited in Barcelona and constituted the second Noucentist generation of Girona. Fargnoli had become part of it, well recognised for his creations in carved wood. It was the starting point of a unique career path.

Fargnoli lived at carrer de les Olles, 3, on Rambla d’Álvarez de Castro, today rambla de la Llibertat. Some handwritten notebooks with stories in Catalan and a few plaster and model drawings from 1908 are preserved, which suggest that he could have gone to classes at the School of Fine Arts of the Girona City Council, in the basement of the old high school. He had also been an apprentice with the photographer Artur Girbal until around 1909 and had worked at the Grober factory, where he acted as an interpreter between the workers and the Italian directors.

In an autobiographical text he explained that in 1914 he had entered the lantern competition during the celebrations of the Three Kings in Girona and two of them won a prize. Masó was a member of the jury and was, apparently, the one who had “discovered him.” It is not surprising that Masó paid attention to it, since, as is well known, his will was to recover and promote beautiful crafts, a characteristic feature of the Noucentist ideology, which claimed the arts of the past to build a quality present. Masó, as he would also do with Fidel Aguilar, realised the value of the self-taught young man and introduced him to the cultural circles of Girona and Barcelona. He was the one who showed Fargnoli’s boxes to Santiago Segura, director of Galeries Laietanes, who would organise the first exhibition for him in January 1918. In addition to this, he put him in contact with the Marcó ceramic workshop, in Quart. The workshop notebooks show Fargnoli’s relationship with Marcó, whose representative he was throughout the Peninsula.

In 1919, Masó, with whom Fargnoli had collaborated on certain projects, put him forward as a model craftsman in a text published in Nostres Arts. He praised his qualities and above all his ability to overcome and integrate into the world of Girona. He claimed he could be the “Prince of the Arts.” In fact, he was one of the most recognised artists of the so-called by Folch i Torres “Girona school” or “Masó school”, whose mastery and friendship Fargnoli always valued.

It seems that Fargnoli made the first “casket” in the workshop on the balcony of his house in 1916, but it was in 1917 that he began to devote himself to it regularly. Boxes and caskets – in diminutive, as he called them –, crosses and other neatly carved objects, with metal additions, helped him succeed locally and internationally. Wood and metal carving had a distant origin, but Fargnoli, who was self-taught, excelled at it with remarkable technical skill and exquisite refinement in the selection of wood, metal and other materials, as in the plates of the evangelists of argerata ceramics of the crosses, by Ceràmiques Marcó. It is understandable that his work fits into the Girona Noucentist project, led by Masó.

The boxes of “the medieval craftsman of carrer de la Força”, as they had been known since 1927, were truly unique, but the taste for this type of object was quite widespread, beyond Girona. He designed a large number of models. They were unique pieces, in which a carpenter and a locksmith were involved in their making. Then he carved them, sometimes painted them, applied metal and mother-of-pearl, pyro-engraved the name with which he distinguished them, the date and the signature at the base, and would then line the inside with silk. The value of the unique, artisan piece was highly noted by critics, and this quality turned him into the legendary “artisan monk” who worked miracles with his hands. Between 1918 and 1932 he was well recognised by critics and by other artists and writers, women and men, who admired his work and who became captives of his aura.

Fargnoli also designed ceramic pieces of terra cotta with the black and argerata patina technique, with a bronze tone, and with a personal incised decoration, not dissimilar to the decorative motifs of the boxes. They highlight a series of vases – he called them gerricons – made by Marcó, a work little known until now, which he presented in an exhibition and which had a wide diffusion, although his authorship, as was usual at the time, was not included.

Fargnoli’s exhibition career was intense. The period from 1918 to 1933 represents his stage of creative splendour, when he was well known in Catalonia and far beyond. From the first individual exhibition at the Galeries Laietanes in Barcelona, in January 1918, to the last one that took place there, in October 1933, there are about fifty of them in the most diverse exhibition rooms. Not only the many he did in Barcelona, Girona, Vic, Sitges, Olot, Igualada, Mataró…, but also a few in Madrid and one in Buenos Aires, in 1922, which made him very famous. In addition, his participation in international exhibitions, in Paris (1925), Monza (1927) and Milan (1936), and in some Spanish competitions, in which he was awarded, is a sample of the intense activity and local and international recognition, visible also in the sale of works in New York, a coveted city that, despite some opportunities, he did not get to visit.

But Fargnoli, in addition to being a good designer and carver of wood and metal boxes and crosses and ceramic vases, was also a connoisseur of graphic arts and typography, an aspect unknown until now. The catalogues of the exhibitions up to 1933 and the advertising of the D’Annali brand, which he subsequently created, are good testimony to this. The catalogues of the initial ones still leave a glimpse of Rafael Masó’s printing and the way the family printing was done, so characteristic of the Girona Noucentisme, with the use of old woodcuts. But little by little, especially from 1924, Fargnoli moved towards a new Art Deco ornamental graphic line, and from 1929 moved on to rationalistic typefaces, linked to the European graphic avant-garde.

It should be noted that in order to carry out his projects, unique in form and colour, Fargnoli had to know the world of printing and he had to earn the respect of the operators, because he knew what he had to ask them to achieve. Likewise, the Girona printing houses had up-to-date typography.

In the summer of 1933, already in Barcelona, Fargnoli fell into a deep and critical depression. At the end of the year, he held his last exhibition at the Galeries Laietanes, where he showed some creations in chromed metal – portraits of characters and some frames – and just two caskets, and took the opportunity to present the D’Annali brand. This project, deliberately detached from the Adolfo Fargnoli brand of the boxes, reveals an organised artist with foresight, who prepared market studies and created commercial strategies to be able to make his dream come true. In other words, he stopped being the craftsman of carrer de la Força and became a designer, as we would call him now, who projected not only serial creations, but also a distribution and sales system.

D’Annali had come to link the name of Anna, the deceased wife, whom he never forgot, and the ending of his own name, “li. ” Fargnoli focused on a catalogue of pieces of jewellery, all with poetic names, such as a mysterious talisman of sympathy, a pendant to show off around the neck, some bracelets, pieces called the kiss, the pearl of your face, the star of thought and the coloured fish, currently all unknown, although the announcement of his new products seems to have aroused a certain curiosity in Barcelona. He was also the creator of the graphic design of the advertisement. Some small cards, which are sober and refined, with sans-serif typography or some type of Bodoni, in two or three different inks, with the signature D’Annali and, on the reverse, the coat of arms of the brand and scented with Diamant Noir, from the Parisian house D’Orsay. Many of these printed materials included the list of shops and galleries where the creations could be purchased: Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Buenos Aires, New York. There were often slogans with references to the elegant world of Hollywood and Paris, and some text by Fargnoli in Spanish or Catalan. Thousands of handwritten notes with advertising texts of this type are preserved. On the other hand, of D’Annali pieces, only a chrome photo frame is known so far, belonging to the family collection. It’s all a mystery.

Fargnoli’s life in Barcelona, after the failure of D’Annali, worsened even more when on March 17, 1938, a bomb aimed at a neighbouring building destroyed the workshop he shared with his brother Benet in carrer de la Riereta. Fargnoli lost all his tools and materials, and despite the fact that with his brother he moved to carrer de l’Aurora, 12, this setback would be decisive for his future. From 1937 to the early 1940s it was a period of scarcity and deprivation. At the same time, imitators of his work began to appear, which sank him. But he still held some exhibitions, and in the spring of 1945, he reappeared with his two brands, Adolfo Fargnoli and D’Annali. A brochure entitled “Reaparece Adolfo Fargnoli Iannetta con su delicado arte” (Adolfo Fargnoli Ianetta reappears with his delicate art) justified the isolation of the last few years and explained the return, although presenting the creations privately in a new space at carrer de Muntaner, 24. It was his last revival, visible in some pieces that followed the known models, plus some which were newly created and generally simpler, while he devoted himself to writing, with a personal poetic prose, thoughts, reflections and anecdotes that he wanted to turn into a series of books.

Without ever forgetting his Italian origins, the peak moment of this stage corresponds to the tribute exhibition organised by the Institute of Italian Culture, from March 16 to 26, 1950, where 33 pieces were shown – totally half – from private collections. Joan Estelrich, in the biographical text of the catalogue, described the Girona craftsman as having an unmistakable personality. He was capable of elevating his creations to the category of art, and recalled his connection with Masó, author of a “noble purification aesthetics” of the city. It was to be the last song of Fargnoli of the caskets and his beloved Girona, as he would die in Barcelona on March 17, 1951.