Photos Of Pollensa: Guillem Bestard

There is a black-and-white photo of Cala San Vicente rock and cliff formations that dates back to 1930. The photo was part of a series that the national tourism directorate commissioned between 1928 and 1936 and which is called the "Catálogo Monumental de España". The catalogue comprises 3,861 photographs of different places in Spain, all of them related to tourism. It, in turn, forms part of the national tourism patronage series - a colossal archive of posters, brochures, leaflets and photos. It has over 80,000 photos in all.

The Cala San Vicente photo is notable as much for its quality as it is for the name of the photographer. No photographic record of Cala San Vicente, of Pollensa, of Mallorca would be complete without works by Guillem Bestard. Find an old photo of Pollensa, Alcúdia, Sa Pobla, and the chances are that Bestard's name will be on it. He didn't confine himself to Pollensa and the surrounding area - he photographed the whole of the island - but he specialised in Pollensa, and his name is intrinsically linked to the town, and in more ways than you might imagine.

Guillem, or Guillermo if you prefer, got the photography bug when a German painter turned up in Pollensa in 1898. He was seventeen years old at the time. The Bestard family home was also an inn, and this painter was one of its guests. He introduced Guillem to the camera, and an astonishing legacy was about to be created.

His success as a photographer was not confined to taking photos of landscapes, of fishing villages and towns - ones with which many of you may well be familiar. He also did photographic portraits. The Infanta Isabel was one of his subjects in 1913. Two years before, he had photographed Antoni Maura, the Mallorcan who was prime minister of Spain on several occasions. Barely ten years after having picked up a camera, he received the gold medal for artistic photography at the international exhibition in Paris of 1910. Two years later, he received another international award in Paris and a couple more besides - in Brussels and Barcelona. He also photographed ordinary people. The Bestard archive is an indispensable record of Mallorca at the turn of the twentieth century and was, through successors, to become a record of the island until 2006.

Important though Bestard was, his photographic work was largely overlooked when it came to the promotion of Mallorca in the early years of the last century. Indeed, photography was generally not used; paintings were instead. But paintings, or rather painters - and it is here that the Bestard story begins to broaden - were to prove to be as much a part of the making of Bestard as his photographs.

In the 6 September, 1913 edition of the Mallorcan "La Almudaina" newspaper, there was an article entitled "Illustrious painters, today's guests in Mallorca". The article was subtitled "The Mecca for artists". The writer of the article was Pedro Ferrer Gibert. Three years later, it was he who was to coin the term "the Pollensa school", something which didn't physically exist but which was founded as an artistic movement around the time that the article appeared. (1914 is usually taken as the starting-point.)

Ferrer had taken himself off to Cala San Vicente, to the improvised Can Niu pension that was home to several of these "guests". He was accompanied by two painters - Antoni Gelabert and José Singala - and by a photographer, Guillem Bestard. There is a photo of these painters, fifteen of them in all. They are all smartly dressed. Had they put on their best bib 'n' tucker for Bestard's photo in the newspaper? Quite possibly. Though it isn't certain that this was a photo taken at that time, one presumes that it was.

Bestard was thus drawn into this artistic movement, one of which one can say, with no exaggeration, that it was fundamental in informing the world about Mallorca and in revealing to the world the magnificence of the island: the "island of calm", as one of these painters, Santiago Rusiñol, dubbed it.

His fame and reputation spread. Though photography might not have been used by the Mallorca Tourist Board at that time, his work still reached a wide audience. It was published in the Madrid daily "El Sol" but more significantly in "National Geographic", which proves that Bestard's role in the early years of promoting Mallorca's tourism, generally ignored, was of considerable importance.

In Pollensa, he became a pillar of local society. He co-founded the cultural Club Pollença in 1913 and became a director of the Colonya co-operative bank. He was, therefore, a close associate of Guillem Cifre de Colonya, someone with whom he shared liberal ideas. These ideas led him to leave Mallorca during the Civil War. He was later to return, but he lived primarily in London, where he died in 1969.

The Mystery Of Ritch Miller

Twenty-one years ago the newspaper "El País" published an obituary to an American painter who had been resident in Mallorca since the 1960s. Appropriate for the memory of a painter, the obituary was extraordinary in the vivid language it used to paint its own picture of the painter.

"Alone in his world, filled with absence and silence, he was attentive to the hidden voices of nature and the echoes he had left in the past." "The solitariness and anguish of this man were translated to the figures (of his paintings), contorted with horror and the hopelessness of amnesia." "He didn't live an isolated life, but he was tremendously lonely."

The painter was Ritch Miller. His work wasn't always easy to comprehend. He is perhaps best known for a Harlequin montage and a portrait of a child holding a balloon, though the child could as easily be an adult of either sex, regardless of the blue dress. The obituary made reference to the work of Francis Bacon, one of the art world's greatest drunks and cross-dressers, who died in Madrid a year after Miller's death. In Miller's at times tormented, figurative imagery, there is indeed some hint of similarity.

The history of art is littered with the bodies of those who lived very odd lives in pursuing creativity born out of some inner torment bordering on psychosis. Another American, Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), was an extreme example. He took himself off, or rather back, to California's Mojave Desert to engage in artistic, expressionist weirdness with the same obsessiveness that had driven him to imprison and humiliate the musicians of his Magic Band during the making of the truly weird "Trout Mask Replica" album. 

But whereas Bacon and Beefheart were both a couple of brushstrokes short of the full canvas, Miller wasn't. Or at least didn't seem to be. He looked and appeared to be perfectly normal, and a film made for the culture ministry when he died features testimonials to his having been not just a great painter but also a good bloke. Yet the obituary suggests an altogether more complex character, one who lived a life of self-imposed solitude at his finca in Santa María del Camí and who died in solitude at the finca; he hanged himself.

The mystery of Ritch Miller has influenced attempts to find out more about him. These have included a publication by the culture ministry and now includes a documentary, presented in the Ca s'Apotecari museum in Santa María, based on correspondence between Miller and Eliane Koeves who used to live in Santa Margalida before moving back to the US. The correspondence lasted from 1982 until Miller's death in 1991.

Miller hadn't intended to come and live in Mallorca. He was on his way to find a Greek island when he came across Mallorca, was taken by it and so stayed. He wasn't the first artist from overseas to be captivated by Mallorca and to make it home. Yet what was curious about Miller was that, unlike artists who used Mallorca as their theme in creating landscapes, he didn't specialise in them. He wasn't necessarily seeking inspiration from Mallorcan or Greek scenery, which makes the real mystery of Ritch Miller what he was in fact seeking and what it was that he was trying to forget and leave behind in America.

In a different way, however, Miller wasn't so curious. Mallorca is a home to those who, for various reasons, have something to forget. It is a home also to those who can turn this forgetfulness into a revision of their own histories. They become other people. Their pasts are inventions or, as with Miller, they are just blank canvasses waiting for someone, after their death, to attempt to paint in the missing pieces.

Nowadays it isn't quite so easy to make the breaks with the past. In the early '60s when Miller arrived in Mallorca, it was. Whatever his past was, and what little seems to be known is that at one point he had been a TV presenter in New York, it is what the future held for Ritch Miller once he had settled in Mallorca that is as intriguing and perhaps even disturbing. The extraordinary obituary makes the point that increasingly Miller portrayed a sense of self-destruction, "each work was part of a long goodbye".

Maybe this is the solution to the Ritch Miller mystery and to what he had really been seeking. He came to Mallorca to seek his own death and eventually he discovered it.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.