Xul Solar: Mad Genius of BA

I read Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote” when I was in my second year at the University of Chicago, and from then on I was hooked. Literary forgery is one of my favorite genres, and I feel a deep affinity for it, having perpetuated one of my own in 5th grade. (We were given an assignment to create a poster documenting the achievements of a famous person we admired. I chose the completely fictional George Marlinette, a famed car designer responsible for all of the Ford and Toyota SUVs that were advertised on the back pages of National Geographic.)

It was with a lot of pleasure, then, that I discovered the work of Borges’s close friend and spiritual brother, Xul Solar—an Argentine painter, astrologer, numerologist, and inventor. Solar’s artistic output was never very popular, and there’s never been a huge market for inventions like panajedrez (a modified version of chess in which each player has 30 pieces marked with characters of kabalistic and astrological significance) or his new piano (a radical modification of the keyboard allowing for the simpler playing of scales.) Yet, Solar was the spiritual leader of the 30s and 40s Buenos Aires avant-garde, organizing frequent meetings at his Palermo townhouse where discussions ranged from literary classics, to metaphysics and spirituality. The august guests were the cream of the crop of intellectual BA—Borges, Bioy Casares, the Ocampo sisters, among many others.

Solar’s most distinctive works, however, were the two languages that he created—neocriollo, a Spanish-Portuguese hybrid meant to unify South America; and pan, a mono-syllabic language meant to do nothing less than undo the work of the Tower of Babel. If you’ve read any Borges, you can see how these two would have gotten on swimmingly.

Since 1986, Xul’s Palermo home has been preserved as a museum housing the vast majority of his paintings, many of his inventions, and ample information on pan and neocriollo. On Thursday, I made my way to the museum for a guided tour—a Spanish-only affair of which I somehow managed to understand the vast majority. I was certainly helped by the fact that I was on the tour with a group of 20 or more elderly women who barked whenever the tour guide started to speak too quickly. (This was sort of the linguistic equivalent of lions hunting wildebeests on the savannah. If you’re a largely incompetent wildebeest, as I am, it’s safer to stay in a herd of sluggish, aging wildebeests. You’re much less likely to get picked out by some fast speaking castellano predator and made to feel like a complete ass.)

Unfortunately, the museum does not allow visitors into Xul’s preserved residence, although, according to one of the Museum’s directors, there are plans to do so in the future. Xul’s library was one of the finest in BA, much admired by Borges (who often borrowed from it), and is preserved in its entirety. At a later date, I may be able to get special permission to tour the residence, although it would certainly help if a major American publication wanted a story on Solar (if any prominent magazine editors are reading, feel free to drop me a line.)

My favorite anecdote from the museum, however, doesn’t involve Solar, but rather Oliverio Girondo, a friend of Xul, whose work is being shown in the museum as a special exhibition. Girondo was primarily a poet, and his work, like that of his friend Xul Solar, had something less than mass appeal. However, he had the audacity to publish 5,000 copies of his collection “Espanta Pájaros,” at which his friend Xul Solar scoffed that Girondo would be lucky to sell 1,000. Girondo, obviously as good a promoter as a poet, constructed a 12 foot tall papier-mâché of the scarecrow on the book’s cover (it actually looks a lot more like the monocled “dandy Eustace Tilly” who graces the cover of the New Yorker’s anniversary issues than does it resemble the typical bundle of hay scarecrows), and paraded it through the streets of Buenos Aires on a horse-driven cart. The figure created such a stir that Girondo sold all 5,000 copies within a week.

More on Museo Xul Solar for the December 7 issue of the Argentimes (yes, working for a fortnightly “mas o menos” publication causes one to plan ahead)…

(Images courtesy of Mueso Xul Solar)