An imaginative artist with a big idea had a little show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week. He was 41-year-old Jōan Junyer, Spanish-born and Paris-trained, whose five years in the U.S. have jolted him out of plain painting into bold dreams of stage designing. His big idea: stage and dance scenery should actively participate in the performance.
To illustrate his thesis, Junyer has exhibited eleven figure models, scenic projects, and a "dance composition in high relief"—an ingenious polychrome plaster plaque. These exhibits demonstrate ways of putting his idea into practice: 1) by molding and painting lifesize images of dancers into the props of ballet sets; 2) by setting up colored, abstract manikins as foils for dancers; 3) by shaping scenery surfaces so that they reflect all chance positions of lighting.
Junyer makes a parenthetical contention: that music concerts should be rid of visible musicians ("It is awful to look at the physical movements of musicians themselves"). Instead, he argues, listeners' visual attention should be diverted to scenery—especially adapted to different compositions, different composers.
Via Haiti & Cuba. Junyer's interest in stage design began with ballet, which was a logical development from the pictures he had been painting: ceremonial native dances of Haiti and Cuba. The Picasso-like touches in some of his paintings were equally logical. Junyer grew up in Barcelona, where his father was a collector of Spanish Romanesque art and one of Pablo Picasso's early patrons. When the boy, who lost his hearing while still a child, went to Paris to start his painting career he fascinated the great Pablo by his uncanny mastery of lipreading.
Junyer exhibited his graceful paintings in Paris, Berlin and other European centers, and for ten years running in the Carnegie International show at Pittsburgh. In 1936 he returned to Spain to become a Government art consultant. The Spanish civil war blasted him into wide wanderings—back to Paris, to London, then to the U.S. by way of Haiti and Cuba. With him came his vivaciously pretty wife Dolores Canals, an expert on child psychology and care.
Jōan (pronounced Joan) has recently decided to call himself John. The Jōan has led to mishaps. Once he got a form letter from Frank Sinatra which assumed that Jōan was a girl, and how about a new fan photo for 50¢?
Now that he has extended his work beyond the bounds of easel painting, Junyer's Manhattan studio looks more like a handyman's workshop than a painter's retreat. On a shelf rests his most prized possession, a scrapbook about the great Barcelona rugby team of 1924-25, amateur champions of Spain. He was scrum half.