The Gathering at the Café de Pombo
José Gutiérrez Solana (1886 to 1945) · 1920
Eight men in dark suits sit and stand around a marble table in a Madrid cafe, lit by a single electric lamp hanging above a mirror. The man standing at the centre with his hand raised is the writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, and the others are the members of his Saturday night tertulia, the literary gathering that met at the Café de Pombo near the Puerta del Sol for more than twenty years. On the wall behind them hangs a portrait of the painter himself, and on the table are coffee cups, a bottle and glasses. Everyone looks a little tired, a little grey, and utterly serious.
Gutiérrez Solana was a novelist as well as a painter and belonged to the group. He painted the picture in 1920 in his heavy, sombre style, all browns, blacks and greys, with the paint laid on thickly and the faces modelled like masks. Look at the mirror, which reflects the backs of the men's heads and the cafe beyond, and at the way the lamp makes the marble table glow. The picture is a group portrait in the tradition of the Dutch guild pieces, but its mood belongs to the Spain of the black paintings of Goya, whom Solana revered.
Gómez de la Serna presented the painting to the Spanish state in 1947, and it hung in the Museum of Contemporary Art before passing to the Reina Sofía. It marks the beginning of the museum's story of the twentieth century, standing for the literary and artistic Madrid of the years before the Civil War, when cafes were the real cultural institutions of the city. The Café de Pombo itself closed in the 1940s.
Did You Know? Ramón Gómez de la Serna, standing at the centre, was famous for one line aphorisms called greguerías, such as: the moon is the bank of lost metaphors.
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