The work of the libertarian gypsy Helios Gómez enters the MNAC

“Dangerous and active, a propagator of ideas.” This is how the police file kept in the Salamanca Archive describes the painter and poster artist Helios Gómez (Seville, 1905-Barcelona, ​​1956), a gypsy, avant-garde and libertarian, a key figure in understanding our modernity, whose work has become part of the MNAC collections thanks to the donation of his son Gabriel Gómez, who has given the museum six oil paintings, twenty-seven drawings and a book that the artist wanted to keep for himself. “The museum’s collection was one thing and after this donation it is another. That doesn’t happen often,” says Pepe Serra, for whom he is “an absolutely key artist in the story of the avant-garde in Catalonia and in Spain. And I don’t think there is another more relevant in his double condition as avant-garde and revolutionary, so representative of this idea of ​​art and conflict.” The museum has also purchased three paintings ( Evacuation, which was part of the pavilion of the Republic in Paris , Agro Andalúz and Dolor Aerotransportado (parachute with eye)) that were in storage and are permanently on display in the modern art galleries.

Helios Gómez, who was the subject of an exhibition at La Virreina in 2020, was an artist who participated in the European creative networks of his time, but here he remains unknown. A Sevillian from Triana, where he forged himself as both a revolutionary and an illustrator, Gómez was a flamenco gypsy who in Barcelona, ​​the city he first arrived in at the age of 18, frequented the local POUM and CNT people like Juanito el Dorado, on whose stage he sang, danced and recited Lorca. He died at the age of 51, was persecuted by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and lived in exile in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow.

“The museum's collection was one and after this donation it is a different one,” says director Pepe Serra.

“My father painted and drew and showed the people with their hardships, the people who had been imprisoned, tortured or killed. He showed us all this side that is normally hidden,” recalls Gabriel Gómez, who says that he only lived with his father for a year. The rest of the time he had to go and visit him in the Model prison, where he was admitted in 1945; he was released a year later and shortly after he was admitted again. He left in 1954, two years before he died.

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Commissioned by the prison chaplain, he painted The Gypsy Chapel in a cell in the fourth gallery used as an oratory next to the cells for those condemned to death. It is a mural in which the Virgin has Gypsy features, the child holds a windmill and the little angels are black, like Machín's song. At their feet, the condemned men writhe surrounded by barbed wire. In 1998, it was covered with white paint by decision of the Generalitat's Penitentiary Services, which cited hygienic reasons. Now, the Department of Culture has begun to restore it.