Josep Maria López-Picó (Barcelona, 14 October 1886 - 18 May 1959) was a Barcelona-based poet with an immense corpus in verse, a prose writer, intellectual and publisher. He was one of the outstanding writers of the early-twentieth-century Catalan cultural movement known as Noucentisme, which was largely a reaction to Modernism.

With an Arts degree, he was the winner of the Jocs Florals literary competion in 1907 and, after the appearance of his two first collections of poems Intermezzo galant (Gallant Intermezzo) and Turment-Froment (Torment-Wheat), he regularly brought out books of verse. His poetry was well-received among the Noucentista critics and López-Picó soon became friendly with Eugeni d'Ors, Carles Riba and Joaquim Folguera with whom he founded the review La Revista and the publishing enterprise Les Publicacions de la Revista in 1915.

His poetic oeuvre of more than ninety "opuses", as he called them, constitutes a coherent, continuous whole, a spiritual evolution in the quest for God and pure poetry. Notable among these works are L'ofrena (The Offering, 1915), El meu pare i jo (My Father and I, 1920), Elegia (Elegy, 1925), Invocació secular (Secular Invocation, 1926), Variacions líriques (Lyrical Variations, 1935), winner of the Joaquim Folguera Prize, Epifania (Epiphany, 1936) and, from the end of his life, are the books of markedly doctrinal and theological tone, Via Crucis (1947) and Job (1948). The first volume of his Complete Works also appeared in 1948.

His prose work includes six volumes of Moralitats i pretextos (Moralities and Pretexts), scattered notes on history and literature that López-Picó wrote throughout his life and, among other texts, a diary written over the last three decades of his life, a work that is very valuable as testimony to his times.

Permanently characterised by the duality between constant, contained and solitary poetic creation and a certain intellectualism in accordance with the reality in which he was immersed, López-Picó was a senior official in the Barcelona County Council and secretary in perpetuity of the Societat Econòmica d'Amics del País (Economic Society of Friends of the Country), a member of the Institute of Catalan Studies from the year of its founding in 1907 and even clandestinely in the 1930s, and a participant in several literary gatherings and encounters in Barcelona before and after the Civil War.

He died in his Barcelona home in 1959.


Web page: Abel Ramon Vidal for AELC.