Francesc Pujols

Who was Francesc Pujols?

Francesc Pujols i Morgades was a Catalan writer and philosopher.

Pujols began to write poetry during his studies on secondary school, influenced by the work of Jacint Verdaguer and Joan Maragall. He took part in the literary competition Jocs Florals of Barcelona in 1902, and won the Natural Flower with the poem “Idil·li”. In 1904 he published El llibre que conté les poesies de Francesc Pujols, with a prologue by Maragall, who saw in Pujols a representative of the “living word”.

On that same year, he gave his first lecture at the Ateneu Barcelonès on the subject of the painter Marian Pidelaserra, and thus began his career as an art critic which he continued later in the book Recull de crítica artística. He made a name for himself as one of the first defenders of the then controversial architect Antoni Gaudí, to whom he dedicated his book La visió artística i religiosa d’en Gaudí, translated into French by the painter Salvador Dalí and published in Lausanne in 1969.

In year 1906, under the pen name of Augusto de Altozanos, he published his only novel, El Nuevo Pascual o la Prostitución, a humorous work written in Spanish directly translated from Catalan. He moved to Madrid, where he went more deeply into his painting and philosophical studies and met the politician Francesc Cambó. In 1908, back in Barcelona, he frequented the group of the Ateneu Barcelonès, of which he became the secretary in 1924, when Pompeu Fabra was the president. He took part in the foundation of the group Les Arts i els Artistes and the weekly Papitu, which he later edited. On the theatre side, he published El llibre de Job, written in Pitarresque verse, and the tragedy Medeia.