SOURCE: Pearsall, Priscilla. “Julián del Casal's Portraits of Women.” In The Analysis of Literary Texts: Current Trends in Methodology, edited by Randolph D. Pope, pp. 78-88. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1980.

[In the following essay, Pearsall analyses Casal's representations of women in his prose and poetry, remarking that his powerful images of women represented one of the major culminations of his poetic vision.]

Julián del Casal's portraits of women in prose and poetry were central to the development of his aesthetic world. There is a need to examine the way in which Casal's deeply ambiguous and fragmented attitude toward women evolved through his poetry and how it continued to develop in his prose.¹ It was in large part through the portraits of women that Casal developed the powerful, independent imagery that represents one of the culminations of his poetic vision.

Casal portrayed creative women like the French actress Jeanne Samary, the Cuban novelist Aurelia Castillo de González, and the young Cuban painter Juana Borrero. Cultivated intellectual women living in Havana interested him, women who seem the heiresses of the eighteenth century and who were a catalyst for others' creativity. Casal drew from a variety of subjects outside middle-class life, including, often, the courtesan and the prostitute. From the beginning we find a tendency to see the female as an aesthetic object rather than in terms of a more direct experience of her. It was easier for him to relate to a portrait—whether it was created through oils, photography, poetry, or prose—than to a mujer de carne y hueso.

The works to be examined in this paper are from 1890-91, the period in which Casal was publishing the poems of Nieve, his second book of poetry. These were years in which the aesthetic and confessional strands of Casal's poetry were developing rapidly; he wrote about portraiture at this time. One of the most revealing statements appeared in an article published March 3, 1890, in which he explains that the portrait exists not only at an aesthetic level, but on a psychological plane as well:

Para hacer un buen retrato el artista digno de este nombre debe reproducir, no sólo la figura que tiene ante los ojos, sino el espíritu que la anima … Hay que mirar el modelo, decía el gran David y leer en él.²

Casal initially sought in his ethereal, idealized image of the woman the child's highly fantasized vision of the mother. Casal's own mother died when he was four years old, and this trauma left him obsessed with an unrealistic idea of her. In “A mi madre” in Nieve he writes that her image rises from the depths of his remote past;³ he tended to project this vision on the women he portrayed. Accordingly, like much of his art world, Casal's retratos de mujeres must be understood in terms of the creation and destruction of illusion. They belong to a group of poems and articles in which Casal deals with the theme of the impossibility of love. In the early poem “La urna” he had written about his loss of enchantment with women. In Nieve the process is complete; in “A la castidad” Casal states flatly, “Yo no amo la mujer …” (Poesías, 120), for he feels that she is incapable of enduring love. Yet Casal sought in poem after poem to recapture the illusory vision of the woman that belonged to a lost infantile dream.

The ambiguity of the portraits is paralleled by a simultaneous loss of artistic idealism. In one of his earliest poems, “El poeta y la sirena,” published when he was seventeen, Casal had assigned a transcendent role to the poet; he represented “la luz de la verdad,” as his voice resounded in eternity (Poesías, 205). By the time Casal wrote Rimas, his artistic aspirations had run aground within the mist of his own mind:

Como encalla entre rocas un navío
que se lanza del oro a la conquista,
así ha encallado el Ideal de artista
entre las nieblas del cerebro mío …

(Poesías, 188).

The portraits of women reflect the gradual disintegration of Casal's artistic and affective idealism, his increasing inability to believe that either love or art has any meaning. They are characterized, moreover, by his attempt to recreate, through aesthetic vision, the fantasies about both women and art which in truth he knew were lost forever.

We see how strong the element of illusion is in an early poem, “Ante el retrato de Juana Samary,”⁴ published October 18, 1890. The poem represents the contemplation of a painting of Jeanne Samary,⁵ the celebrated actress of the Comédie Française. Robert Jay Glickman, in his article “Letters to Gustave Moreau,” has studied the way in which Casal's love was most intense when it was directed to someone far away.⁶ In an article on Samary, published October 18, 1890, Casal discussed the way in which illusive, inaccessible women like the Samary of the painting stimulated his fantasies and were more desirable than any amada existente could ever be:

Todo hombre, por muy poco desarrollada que tenga la facultad de soñar, tiene sus amadas ideales, por las que suspira, en horas de abatimiento, con todo su corazón. Esas mujeres, ya estén en el mundo, ya reposen en brazos de la muerte, llegan a adquirir mayor importancia que las amadas existentes, porque nunca se han conocido y la fantasía se complace en revistirlas de atributos inmortales.⁷

Casal writes that among the women he has loved without ever meeting, Jeanne Samary “figura en primera línea” (Prosas, III, 13). This is evident in the line with which he begins the poem, “Nunca te conocí, mas yo te he amado …” (Poesías, 127). Casal wrote the poem in front of the painting after receiving news of her death; the element of death and the remoteness of the woman link her with Casal's infantile image of the mother. Casal idealizes the painting calling it an “imagen ideal” (Poesías, 127), and he emphasizes Samary's ethereal, transcendent role when he calls her flight in death “el raudo vuelo hacia el bello país desconocido” (Poesías, 127). In addition, he underlines the dream-like quality of the entire collection, of which this is the first poem, by entitling it “La gruta del ensueño.” The desire to assign a transcendent role to woman in his art, yet its impossibility, was a conflict Casal never resolved. In his last poem, “Cuerpo y alma,” published posthumously, Casal still desires this vision of woman, as he captures it for the last time in Poe's incorporeal heroines who inhabit the golden mists of dream and show the way to the elusive “palacio de la Dicha.”⁸

Casal emphasizes first the surface happiness and beauty of the portrait, and then the contradictory emotional reality which it hides. Underneath the image he senses the woman's sadness and terror of death. Casal's poem is revealing not for what we learn about the French actress, but because of what it reveals about both Casal's aesthetic world and his psychology. The Poet can identify with his subject; he writes, “en ti hallaba un alma hermana, / alegre en lo exterior y dentro triste” (Poesías, 127). The tension between the apparent gaiety and the interior sadness are characteristic of Casal's whole art world in Nieve at that time, for there is a constant contradiction between the beauty and luxuriance of his aestheticism and the developing melancholy of his confessional poetry.

Ultimately the vision of the woman is so ephemeral that it hardly exists; the poetry is shifted into an affective plane as he muses

si tú nunca sabrás que yo te he amado
tal vez yo ignore siempre quién me ama

(Poesías, 128).

At the end of the poem Casal destroys the image he has created; the compelling reality is the poet's underlying sense of the inevitable failure of love.

In another poem from Nieve, “Blanco y negro,”⁹ published November 1, 1890, two weeks after “Ante el retrato de Juana Samary,” the attempt to seek a vision of transcendence through plasticity is more evident than in the previous poem. In “Blanco y negro” the woman is approached as a source of sculptural values through which the illusion of the infinite can be created. Ethereal images are heaped one upon the other; they emerge from the depths of the poet's unconscious into his awareness, associated through a stream of consciousness:

Sonrisas de las vírgenes difuntas
en ataúd de blanco terciopelo
recamado de oro; manos juntas
que os eleváis hacia el azul del cielo
como lirios de carne; tocas blancas
de pálidas novicias absorbidas
por ensueños celestiales …

(Poesías, 129).

The female images of “Blanco y negro” are surrounded by an ambience created through a series of related images which are ethereal and at the same time extremely sensuous. Some of them evoke delicate tactile qualities: “… los finos celajes errabundos / por las ondas de éter …” (Poesías, 129). There are joyous auditory values: “… francas / risas de niños rubios …” (Poesías, 129); and, especially, shimmering visual qualities: “tornasoles / que ostentan en sus alas las palomas / al volar hacia el Sol …” (Poesías, 129). This world of sensation heaped upon sensation is the means of seeking a metaphysical realm.¹⁰ Casal beseeches the profusion of imagery, which spirals upward with accelerating speed, to carry him to transcendent heights; he writes mysteriously that that which he has loved will probably be in this infinite region.

In the second part of the poem there is another series of three-dimensional values, each more violently destructive than the other. They represent an opposing downward spiral; the images here, too, are female

hidra de Lerna armada de cabezas …
… hachas
que segasteis los cuellos sonrosados
de las princesas inocentes …

(Poesías, 130).

The plasticity of the second part exists in a world as filled with sensation as that of the previous one. Now there are violently wracking impressions, including visual, “… relámpago del cielo / que amenazas la vida del proscrito / en medio de la mar …” (Poesías, 130); tactile, “… rachas / de vientos tempestuosos …” (Poesías, 130); and entirely interiorized emotion, “… pesadillas / que pobláis el espíritu de espanto …” (Poesías, 130). The downward spiral, just as the ascending thrust, carries the poet to a nihilistic region where he searches for an elusive lo que yo he amado.

The world of sensation of the first part of the poem is destroyed by the second; it bore the seeds of its own destruction, for Casal's world of female imagery is as filled with the pathologically destructive as it is with the sublimely ethereal. They both lead only to “el seno de la nada.”¹¹ As the illusion created through female imagery collapses, its extreme luxuriance contrasts with the nihilism which underlies it, for it represents a vain attempt to pursue something elusive, beyond, which even Casal does not understand, cannot define. The underlying preoccupation of the poem, just as in “Ante el retrato de Juana Samary,” is the frustration of love, here of love lost and not clearly remembered. As in the earlier poem, an artistic realm that had been created as a means of seeking transcendence is in the end the way to a vision of nihilism and pathology.

There are other female images in Nieve in which we see the same combination of ethereal and destructive values that we find in “Ante el retrato de Juana Samary” and “Blanco y negro.” One of them is the portrait of Casal's muse whom he describes in the poem “La reina de la sombra,”¹² published May 10, 1891. He portrays her as an incorporeal being existing in a voluptuously supernal ambiance:

Tras el velo de gasa azulada
en que un astro de plata se abre
y con fúlgidos rayos alumbra
el camino del triste viandante,
en su hamaca de nubes se mece
una diosa de formas fugaces
que dirige a la tierra sombría
su mirada de brillos astrales

(Poesías, 138).

Yet she also has a bizarre aspect; Casal shows in her retrato the juxtaposition of the sublime and the pathological so characteristic of his art¹³

Ora muestra su rostro de virgen
o su torso de extraña becante …

(Poesías, 140).

She is above all the muse of his confessional poetry:

Esa diosa es mi musa adorada,
la que inspira mis cantos fugaces,
donde sangran mis viejas heridas
y sollozan mis nuevos pesares

(Poesías, 140).

It is this pathological element—not the ethereal—that Casal will increasingly emphasize in the portraits of women.

The failure to sustain the illusion of the ethereal qualities associated with woman takes its final toll in the poem “Kakemono,”¹⁴ published March 22, 1891, three weeks before “La reina de la sombra.” The poem can be related to the earlier “Ante el retrato de Juana Samary,” for Casal also wrote “Kakemono” before a portrait of a woman. In this poem, however, the poet reproduces the Oscar Held photograph of María Cay so that the poem, instead of being the contemplation of a painting, represents the transposition of a photograph into poetry. María, the sister of a friend of Casal, had dressed for the photographer in the Japanese costume she had worn to a masked ball given a short time earlier.¹⁵

The title “Kakemono” means Japanese hanging scroll, and the poem is in fact envisioned as an Oriental screen. Casal uses the same technique of heaping imagery upon imagery that we saw in “Blanco y negro.” We are drawn into his art world; sensation is heaped upon sensation in the creation of an extraordinarily sensually-charged poetic vision. The auditory, the olfactory, the visual, and the tactile all come into play as we become lost in Casal's artifice. Esperanza Figueroa Amaral has studied the way in which art form is piled upon art form as was never done in Europe.¹⁶ The poem's rhythm, too, is typical of Casal. He breaks his hendecasyllables irregularly; this contributes auditorially to a sense of incantation to dazzle us further with his aestheticism. Yet the portrait is haunting for its absence of human emotion. Casal is interested in its artistic properties only; the woman he portrays interests him little as a person. In fact, her identity is changed as she is transformed into a Japanese woman.

In the poem we see the collapse of Casal's attempt to create illusion through the sensuous portrait of a woman; the ethereal, idealized vision glimpsed in “Ante el retrato de Juana Samary” is no longer accessible to Casal. The portrait is paradoxical because, although it is made as light and diaphanous as an Oriental screen by such technical elements as the use of light and the airy landscape images on the gown, it becomes entrapped in its own delirium of aestheticism. Its extreme sensuousness leads nowhere beyond itself.

In recreating the portrait of María as she looked on the night of the masked ball, Casal attempts to evoke, in an almost Proustian sense, the youthful illusions which he had felt then. Yet he reveals that his experience has been the opposite; although he can recreate the image of María, he is incapable of recapturing the memories and emotions of that night. The woman's image remains at the end of the poem as a hollow shell, weighed down by its own dazzling artistry, and stripped of the emotions of joy which originally gave it meaning. The theme of the poem becomes the failure of all illusion because plasticity has become incapable of reaching beyond itself to glimpse a metaphysical realm, and joyous, youthful illusion is revealed to be as evanescent as aesthetic vision. The emptiness of the image is all that remains; it evokes the artist's glacial tristeza, the feeling of interior coldness which was to become a hallmark of Casal's poetry.

The vision of the woman as image or aesthetic object and a sense of the failure of illusion pervade Casal's prose articles on women. On June 3, 1890, he published two portraits which are important to the development of the imagery of his later poetry. In one of these, entitled “La derrochadora,”¹⁷ Casal portrays a Parisian demi-mondaine, a high-class prostitute; the figure of the courtesan was one that intrigued Casal, and he wrote numerous articles about her. She became for him a symbol of his aesthetic world, for her artificial beauty and elegance were as transitory yet compelling as those of his own artistic vision.

In this article we find that with the failure to create transcendent illusion through his aesthetic world, Casal's portraiture of women has lost its ethereally diaphanous quality. Now it is becoming increasingly hard and jewel-like. The demi-mondaine lives surrounded by objects; she reminds one of Manet's Olympia as we see her at her morning ritual of bathing and being perfumed by her maid among glitteringly polished mirrors, jewels, and jasper. Their hard surfaces are accentuated by the contrast with the soft texture of the courtesan's robe and skin. The maid transforms her into an aesthetic object and a sex object. In this world of cosas, in which she is herself another one, the woman spends her days buying art objects

… en cada tienda, halla algo nuevo que comprar. Ya es un brazalete de oro, cuajado de pedrería digno de una Leonor de Este; ya un abanico ínfimo, con paisaje grotesco, todo hecho con tintas de relumbrón; ya una estatua de mármol, obra maestra de un artista desconocido, pero que firmaría un Falgiere; ya un cromo americano …

(Prosas, I, 238).

The aestheticism, in spite of its hard, object quality, is now very evanescent; her search for these art objects is frenzied and compulsive. What she buys one day is discarded almost immediately to make room for the next day's purchases—as the prostitute herself is interchangeable with many others who are objects bought and used for a short time.¹⁸

The one emotional quality which Casal emphasizes in this woman is her lack of attachment to any other person; the demi-mondaine by definition has an ambivalent relationship to the bourgeois society which exploits her and off which she lives. The prose portrait is related to the retratos in poetry in their conflictual attitude toward love. Here the woman's attitude is entirely cynical; Casal writes that when anyone mentions love to her, her response is an ironic, “¡Desdichados! ¿Todavía créeis en eso?” (Prosas, I, 238).

Ultimately the portrait reveals much about Casal's aesthetic world for he was becoming as detached from reality as the woman he portrays.¹⁹ He would write two years later in the busto of the young Cuban artist Juana Borrero that artists construct in their fantasy an ideal quarantine where they live “con sus ensueños.”²⁰ Casal's portraits of women seem increasingly to belong to this family of imaginary beings created within his own fantasy.

As Casal felt that aesthetic illusion and reality were slipping from his grasp, he attempted to concretize that illusion—and eventually all experience—in compensation for its extreme tenuousness. In Nieve his art became one where, at times, everything was seen in sculptural terms. Although the concrete, dazzling aestheticism of the portraits of women becomes increasingly frenetic, its coldness only reflects the underlying emotional sterility of the writer who created it.²¹ Three days after he published this portrait of the French courtesan, Casal would write in a review of Aurelia Castillo de González's Pompeya that modern art is essentially the expression of ennui and pathology: “el malestar permanente, el escepticismo profundo, la amargura intensa, las aspiraciones indefinidas y el pesimismo sombrío …²² There is no better metaphor for Casal's own glacial tristeza, his sadness expressed in icily sculptural form, than the Parisian demi-mondaine as she is seen dwelling in a nightmare vision of life experienced entirely in terms of objects by a psyche devoid of emotion.

The vision of pathology with which Casal's portraits of women are so closely associated is given deeper expression in another prose portrait, “Croquis femenino,”²³ published the same day as “La derrochadora.” The woman of this sketch, like the prostitute, remains unnamed, but she represents another type of woman Casal admired. She is one of the wealthy, cultivated Cuban women who lived apart from the haute-bourgeoisie of Havana, and whose houses were meeting places for writers and artists. Like the French courtesan, she lives in an environment dominated by objects. Casal gives an exhaustive inventory of her salón:

Espejos venecianos, con marcos de bronce, ornados con ligeros amorcillos; pieles de tigres arrojados al pie de olorosos divanes; tibores japoneses, guarnecidos de dragones y quimeras; mesas de laca incrustadas de nácar, cubiertas de un pueblo de estatuitas; óleos admirables, firmados por reputados pintores, todo se encuentra en aquel salón …

(Prosas, II, 141).

Just one month earlier, on April 26, 1890, Casal had written an article “Verdad y poesía”²⁴ rejecting Zola. Yet in these sketches Casal evidences a Zola-like preoccupation with exterior reality.

It is not, however, only exterior reality that is seen in terms of plasticity in this article; the objects which fill the world of the prose portraits are becoming interiorized. When Casal expresses the woman's psychology, he turns to the plastic qualities of the fairy tale to create an interior vision. He writes that this nameless woman is one of the people of his time who

… viven siempre inclinados sobre sí mismos, mirándose por dentro, como si llevaran allí, a semejanza de la heroína de los cuentos de hadas, una gruta formada de piedras preciosas, donde ven una ninfa encantadora que se adormece entre los cantos de pájaros maravillosos y los aromas de flores desconocidas

(Prosas, II, 140).

We see that even the woman's introversion is expressed in terms of glittering, gem-like preciosity, for the grotto, where she dwells within this fantastically sculptured psychological world, is formed of jewels.

Casal emphasizes that she, like the prostitute of “La derrochadora,” is detached from reality and incapable of feeling emotion for the people around her. Her writes ironically that she is so pathologically linked with the objects in her environment that she has fallen in love with one of them, a portrait of Murat which hangs in a corner of her living room:

En uno de los ángulos de su salón, hay un cuadro al óleo, puesto sobre un caballete de madera negra incrustada de bronce, que representa a Murat, con su traje de seda color de rosa, guarnecido de encajes; con su casco de terciopelo negro, coronado de plumas blancas; y con su espada brillante, de puño de oro, esmaltado de pedrerías, suspendida en el aire, en actitud de marchar al frente de invisibles granaderos

(Prosas, II, 141).

The art object is now so interiorized that it is becoming the imagery of the woman's mind. She fills the void of her soul with three-dimensional values in an attempt to give form to the nihilism within. Casal writes that as she drives through the streets of Havana she resembles a legendary queen in exile, trying to forget her lost kingdom,

… una Semíramis moderna derribada de su trono … que ha venido a olvidar entre los esplendores naturales del nuevo mundo, la imagen torturadora de su Asiria perdida

(Prosas, II, 140).

The woman is herself an image tormented by an image in this Through-the-Looking-Glass delirium of highly fantasized plasticity.

In this croquis femenino the future development of Casal's aesthetic vision can be perceived, for Casal was becoming as haunted by imagery as the woman he portrays. At the end of another prose portrait written two and one-half years later, Casal would confess that the image of the person depicted has become an obsession that tortured him, and that its expression was a pathological necessity:

… su imagen me obsede de tal manera que, cansado de tenerla conmigo, ya en mis días risueños, ya en mis noches de insomnio, yo he decidido arrojarla hoy de mi cerebro al papel, del mismo modo que un árbol arroja, en vigoroso estremecimiento, sobre el polvo del camino, al pájaro errante que, posado en su copa, entona allí una canción vaga, extraña, dolorosa y cruel.²⁵

Casal's attitude toward the image is as ambiguous as his view of other aspects of his art world. The poet's desire to free himself of the pain and cruelty with which it haunts him constitutes in part a rejection of the image; yet it is something he sought incessantly.

As the plasticity of his artistic vision evolved, Casal became less and less dependent upon pictorial devices like portraiture and landscape for its development. At the same time that he was writing about his portraiture in the passage quoted above, Casal was publishing the poem “Dolorosa,”²⁶ in which we see the emergence of the powerful, independent image of the dagger. It emerges from the depths of the poet's psyche and evokes the conflict between the forces of life and death within. In “Dolorosa” the imagery, which evokes sexual mystery and violence, exists in a much more abstract, psychological world than that of the portraits. The retratos de mujeres, however, had already begun to evoke the artist's inner conflicts—his anguished attitude toward love, and the meaning of aestheticism—for Casal in the early portraits, especially, seems undecided about whether his artistic world is the means of searching for transcendence or a route to a vision of pathology. It is only in the later portraits that it becomes understood as the means to a vision of nihilism and pathology.

Three months after he published “La derrochadora” and “Croquis femenino,” Casal published, on September 3, 1890, an article in which he dealt with the problem which was central to Baudelaire's essays on the Salon of 1859, that of the distinction between historical and photographic reality and the deeper interior reality of the novel.²⁷ Baudelaire had dealt with the question of reality specifically in relation to the portrait; he had said that portraiture meant capturing the drama of a life.²⁸ When we study the images of women created at the time Casal wrote on Baudelaire's theories and made his own earlier statements concerning portraiture, we see that the retratos de mujeres evoke not so much the lives of the women he portrays, as they reveal the unfolding drama of Casal's own aesthetic and emotional development. They are central to his poetic world, beginning with a gradual sense of the failure of aesthetic and psychological illusion, through the increasing plasticizing of experience, to the eventual interiorization of the art object until it becomes the imagery of a landscape of the mind. Casal's portraits of women necessarily fail as portraits for they are essentially narcissistic—highly polished mirrors of the evolution of an art world. Although their subject is other human beings, they remain as Casal's statement of the impossibility of communication and love. In their final pathological vision of hard, cold aestheticism in an emotional void, they evoke above all Casal's own glacial tristeza, the coldness at the center of the artist's soul.

Notes

1. There have been several studies dealing with Casal's attitude toward women. Carmen Poncet sees Casal's dualistic vision of women as one more aspect of polarity in a work where everything tends to be seen in dualistic terms, the fragmented vision of an author hopelessly divided against himself. See Carmen Poncet, “Dualidad de Casal,” Revista Bimestre Cubana, 53 (1944), 193-212. In the same year Gustavo Duplessis studied the ambiguity of Casal's attitude toward women. Gustavo Duplessis, “Julián del Casal,” Revista Bimestre Cubana, 54 (1944), 31-75, 140-70, 243-86. Monner Sans discusses the mystery that surrounds Casal's relationships with women both in his life and in his art. José María Monner Sans, Julián del Casal y el modernismo hispano-americano (México: Colegio de México, 1952). More recently Robert Jay Glickman has noted Casal's compulsive need to give and receive affection, yet his inability to establish relationships with women. Robert Jay Glickman, “Letters to Gustave Moreau,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, 37 (1972-73), 101-35. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga has studied Casal's poem “Neurosis” in which the woman is one more meaningless object in a decadent turn-of-the-century society. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, “Crítica marxista y poesía: Lectura de un poema de Julián del Casal,” in Analysis of Hispanic Texts: Current Trends in Methodology, ed. Mary Ann Beck and others (New York: Bilingual Press, 1976), pp. 191-205.

2. Julián del Casal, “Armando Menocal: Nuevos retratos,” in Prosas (La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963), II, 63. Further notes in the text of this paper refer to Casal, Prosas (La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963-64), I, II, III and Casal, Poesías (La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963). All dates of publication for Casal's poetry and prose are from Esperanza Figueroa Amaral's chronological bibliography. Esperanza Figueroa Amaral, “Bibliografía cronológica de la obra de Julián del Casal,” Revista Iberoamericana, 35 (1969), 385-99.

3. Casal, Poesías, p. 117.

4. Casal, “Ante el retrato de Juana Samary,” in Poesías, p. 127.

5. The portrait which is the subject of Casal's poem is generally identified as the Renoir painting of the actress. In the “Crónica semanal” published the day after the poem, however, Casal himself identifies the artist as the French portrait painter Jacques-Fernand Humbert. See Casal, “Crónica semanal,” in Prosas, III, 13.

6. Glickman, p. 106.

7. Casal, “Crónica semanal,” in Prosas, III, 12.

8. Casal, “Cuerpo y alma,” Poesías, p. 196. In “Cuerpo y alma,” Casal's fragmented vision of women is especially apparent. Although he exalts Poe's incorporeal women and relates them to what he perceives to be the spiritual side of his nature, he equates the physical aspect of his being with frenetic, emotionless sex with a prostitute.

9. Casal, Poesías, p. 129.

10. The previous spring, Casal had translated an excerpt from Maupassant's La Vie errante which deals with one of the ideas most central to nineteenth-century thought, that the senses are the means to transcending the limits of the material. See “Casal's Translations of Baudelaire and Maupassant: The Failure of Transcendent Vision,” in Essays in Honor of Jorge Guillén on the Occasion of his Eighty-Fifth Year (Cambridge, Mass.: Abedul Press, 1977), pp. 64-73.

11. Casal had written only slightly more than one month earlier, on September 27, 1890, in his portrait of the Cuban poet José Fornaris, that the modern poet is a nihilist like Leconte de Lisle or Leopardi who want only to “disolverse en el seno de la nada.” Casal, “José Fornaris,” in Prosas, I, 278.

12. Casal, “La reina de la sombra,” Poesías, p. 138.

13. In the same year, on December 30, 1891, Casal would publish his poem “Sueño de gloria: Apotesois de Gustavo Moreau” (Poesías, 104); there a woman, Helen of Troy, symbolizes the decadent beauty Casal sought through his art. The image of Helen fuses the ethereal and the pathological, values which were becoming central to Casal's aesthetic. Casal admired Gustave Moreau's paintings of Helen and Salomé and transposed both of them into the poetry of “Mi museo ideal,” of which “Sueño de gloria” is the final poem. Moreau and Huysmans, both of whom had a decisive influence upon the poetry of “Mi museo ideal,” combined aesthetic and pathological elements in their portraits of women. See Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd ed (1933; rpt London: Oxford University Press, 1970); Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 70; and Lee Fontanella, “Parnassian Precept and a New Way of Seeing Casal's Museo ideal,” Comparative Literature Studies, 7 (1970), 466.

14. Casal, “Kakemono,” Poesías, p. 132.

15. Casal had discussed the Oscar Held photograph of María in “Album de la ciudad: Retratos femeninos” (Prosas, II, 95), published April 1, 1890, one year before “Kakemono” appeared. María Cay is the “cubana japonesa” of Darío's poetry. See Esperanza Figueroa Amaral, “El cisne modernista,” in Estudios críticos sobre el modernismo, ed. Homero Castillo (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1968), p. 313. María Cay's family had lived in the Orient because her father had been the Cuban consul in Japan.

16. Figueroa, “El cisne modernista,” p. 313.

17. Casal, “Croquis femenino: Derrochadora,” in Prosas, II, 147.

18. In this productive period during the final three years of his life, Casal would turn increasingly to Huysmans in the development of his aesthetic. In an article he wrote in 1892, Casal discussed the manner in which, for Huysmans, art was an unending search for sensuous stimulation; this sense of the artistic is apparent in these two prose portraits of women. See Casal, “Jorís Karl Huysmans,” Prosas, I, 173.

19. In the following year, on March 19, 1891, Casal wrote a letter to his friend Esteban Borrero Echeverría that he believed that the ideal life for him was now to live alone, in obscurity, “solo, arrinconado e invisible a todos, exceptos para usted y dos o tres personas.” Casal, “Cartas a Esteban Borrero Echeverría,” in Prosas, III, 85. Frank Kermode sees the isolation of the artist as essential to the pursuit of imagery. See Kermode, Romantic Image, p. 2.

20. Casal, “Juan Borrero,” in Prosas, I, 267.

21. In an article of art criticism published July 11, 1890, one month after this portrait appeared, Casal wrote that in the final period of an artist's development his work reflects the coldness of his soul. Casal, “Academia de Pintura: Dos cuadros,” in Prosas, II, 177,

22. Casal, “Libros nuevos: I Pompeya por Aurelia Castillo de Gonzáles,” ibid., p. 145.

23. Casal, “Croquis femenino,” ibid., p. 140.

24. Casal, “Verdad y poesía,” ibid., p. 115.

25. Casal, “El hombre de las muletas de níquel,” in Prosas, I, 233.

26. Casal, “Dolorosa,” Poesías, p. 178.

27. Casal, “En el cafetal,” in Prosas, I, 222.

28. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Portrait,” in Salon de 1859, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G Le Dantec (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961), p. 1072. Casal's portraits of men are more perceptively written in that they capture the conflicts central to the lives of their subjects—as his portraits of women never do.