01.12.2008  Pepín Bello , Generation of  '27 

 CONCHA BARRIGÓS (EFE)  MADRID.- José “Pepín” Bello, died 10^th of January (103 years old), he was the last survivor of the “Generation of  ‘27”, the inseparable friend of a broken group. He never painted, written… but he will always be remembered as the “glue” that made the group remain together.

Pepín Bello , José“Pepín” Bello, died 10^th of January (103 years old), he was the last survivor of the “Generation of  ‘27”,the inseparable friend of a broken group. He never painted, written… but he will always be remembered as the “glue” that made the group remain together. 

  Pepín Bello died sleeping in his bed,as he wanted. He was born in Huesca on May the 13^th of 1904; he wasthe son of an engineer, friend of Joaquin Costa and Francisco Giner de los Ríos, who create the Free Education Institution and the Students residence.

  Because of this his life was always linked to this institution, he studied there at 11 years old and passed, when he grew up, at the university section to study medicine, but he never finished his career and abandoned it in 1928. 

  On that residence, he became very friend of Luis Buñuel, who inspired “An andalusian dog” on his life; García Lorca, the artist with more geniality, ecstasy and subyugation as Pepín says, and Dalí.“We had very fun together”, remembered Pepín last year on the homage that was given in the student’s residence. Since 1927 he began spending large periods in Sevilla, and in fact he is was the author of the famous picture of the homage to Góngora in Sevilla. Bello stayed always in the shadow behind his so acclaimed friends, in spite of never having written or painted, he never lose his magnetism. Buñuel defined his friend as “Nothing more than an inseparable friend”

   He always resist on writing his memories, even if painting and writing were one of his passions. He also never answered Lorca’s or Rafael Alberti’s letters.

   His only work was “Conversations with José (Pepín) Bello” edited in May 2007, and it’s compounded by more than 40 hours of dialogues between David Castillo, Marc Sardá and Pepín. 

  Only a few draws and two theatrical dramas (one with Alberti and the other with Buñuel) make the totality of his work.

  He developed the most the fantastic genre, named as “rotten” or “putrid”, and that Dalí and Buñuel also develop as well. Most of intellectual creators told that it was the introduction of surrealism in Spain.

  He spent the Civil War in Madrid and the post-war in Burgos, with the pain of having loose most of his friends, who were killed or exiled. In that period, he started working as fur trader and cinema producer, this way he could regain lots of relationships with the intellectuals that stayed in Spain, in “internal exile” as they called it.

   Bello never get married nor had children, and was since 1986 the honour president of the “Student’s residence friends association”, organization that in his 103 birthday made a homage edition of “Ola Pepín”, the way that Dalí started the letters he wrote to Pepín.

   In that act, people recognized the fundamental role of Bello in The Generation of  ‘27.

As he said:“I’m as well a writer as a Martian”, told Pepín in the same room that he’d arrived 92 years before.