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Barcelona - Culture |
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A
hermit in the city: Antoni Gaudí Born in Reus in 1852, he qualified as an architect in 1878. His
first architectural work was as assistant to Josep Fontseré on the
building of the Parc de la Ciutadella during the 1870s. The gates and
fountain of the park are attributed to him, and around the same time he
also designed the lampposts in the Plaça Reial. His first major
commission was for the Casa Vicens in 1883-8. An orientalist fantasy, it
is structurally fairly conventional, but his control of the use of surface
material already stands out in its exuberant neo-Moorish decoration and
the superbly elaborate decorative ironwork on the gates. The Col.legi de
les Teresianes convent school, undertaken a few years later (1888-9), is
more restrained still, but the clarity and fluidity of the building, with
its simple finishes and use of light, is very appealing. An event of crucial importance in Gaudí's life came in 1878, when
he met Eusebi Güell, heir to one of the largest industrial fortunes in
Catalonia. Güell had been impressed by some of Gaudí's early furniture,
and they also discovered they shared many religious ideas, on the socially
redemptive role of architecture and (for Güell) philanthropy. Güell
placed such utter confidence in his architect that he was able to work
with complete liberty. He produced several buildings for his patron,
beginning with the Palau Güell (1886-8), a darkly impressive,
still-historicist building that established Gaudí's reputation, and
including the crypt at Colònia Güell, one of his most original,
structurally experimental and surprising buildings. In 1883 Gaudí first became involved in the design of the temple of
the Sagrada Família, begun the previous year. He would eventually devote
himself entirely to this work. Gaudí was profoundly religious, and an
extreme Catholic conservative; part of his obsession with the building was
a belief that its completion would help redeem Barcelona from the sins of
secularism and the modern era. From 1908 until his death he worked on no
other projects, often sleeping on site, a shabby, white-haired hermit,
producing visionary ideas that his assistants had to 'interpret' into
drawings (on show in the museum alongside). If most of his modern admirers
were to meet him they would probably say he was mad, but this strange
figure would have an immense effect on Barcelona.
In his greatest years, he combined other commissions with his
cathedral. La Pedrera or Casa Milà begun in 1905 was his most complete
project. Occupying a prominent position on a corner of Passeig de Gràcia,
it has an aquatic feel about it: the balconies resemble seaweed, and the
undulating façade the sea, or rocks washed by it. Interior patios are
painted in blues and greens, and the roofscape is like an imaginary
landscape inhabited by mysterious figures. The Casa Batlló Passeig de Gràcia,
was an existing building remodel-led by Gaudí in 1905-7, with a roof
resembling a reptilian creature perched high above the street. An
essential contribution was made by Gaudí's assistant Josep Maria Jujol,
himself a very original Modernista architect, and more skilled than his
master as a mosaicist. Gaudí's later work has a dreamlike quality, which makes it unique
and personal. His fascination with natural forms found full expression in
the Parc Güell, of 1900-14. Here he blurs the distinction between natural
and built form in a series of colonnades winding up the hill. These
seemingly informal paths lead to the surprisingly large central terrace
projecting over the hall below, a forest of distorted Doric columns
planned as the marketplace for Güell's proposed 'garden city'. The
benches of the terrace are covered in some of the finest examples of
trencadís or broken mosaic work, again mostly by Jujol. In June 1926, Antoni Gaudí was run over by a tram on the Gran Via.
Nobody recognised the down-at-heel old man, and he was taken to a public
ward in the old Hospital de Santa Creu in the Raval. When it was
discovered who he was, however, Barcelona gave its most famous architect
an almost state funeral.
When his father José Ruiz Blasco was hired to teach at Barcelona's
art school in 1895, 13-year-old Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a budding young
artist whose drawings suggested a firm academic training. By the time of
his definitive move to Paris in 1904 he had already painted his greatest
Blue Period works, and was on his way to becoming the most acclaimed
artist of the century. Barcelona's Picasso Museum is testimony to these
vital formative years, spent in the city in the company of Catalonia's
nascent avant-garde. The museum arose out of a donation to the city by Picasso's private
secretary and friend Jaume Sabartès, complemented by holdings from the
artist's family. It graces a row of elegant medieval courtyard-palaces on
C/Montcada, beginning with the mostly fifteenth-century Palau Berenguer
d'Aguilar, with a courtyard almost certainly by Marc Safont, architect of
the patios of the Generalitat. Since it first opened in 1963 it has
expanded to incorporate two adjacent mansions, the later but also
impressive Palaus Meca and Castellet, each with its own courtyard. In
order to add another 3,500sq m the City of Barcelona has now begun further
extensions in the next pair of buildings along the street (the baroque
Casa Mauris and the early Gothic Casa Finestres, Nos. 21 and 23) and into
a large courtyard behind them, which should be ready by late 1999. All to
show as much of the collection of over 3,000 paintings, drawings and other
work as possible, complemented by temporary shows on early
twentieth-century masters and Picasso-related themes. Two things stand out in the museum. The seamless presentation of
Picasso's development from 1890 to 1904, from schoolboy doodlings - he was
a constant, and very skilful, doodler - to art school copies to intense
innovations in blue, is unbeatable. Then, in a flash, one jumps to a
gallery of mature cubist paintings from 1917, and completes the hopscotch
with a leap to oils from the late 1950s, based on Velázquez' famous Las
Meninas in the Prado in Madrid. This veritable vistus interruptus could
leave the visitor itchy for more. The culmination of Picasso's early
genius in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the first cubist paintings (1907
and beyond) is completely absent.
As he gained in artistic independence, his taste for marginal types intensified, with perversely beautiful paintings like Margot and La Nana (1901). The intense Blue Period is well represented by El Loco (1904) and Dead Woman (1903), as well as an azure oil of Barcelona rooftops recently donated by the Picasso heirs. The chronology is broken with the works from 1917 - the last extended period Picasso spent in Barcelona - including one titled Passeig de Colom, before you arrive at the many works inspired by Las Meninas and a series done in Cannes in 1957. Finally, the museum has an extensive collection of his impressive limited-edition lithographs and linocuts. MUSIC La Locomotora Negra is one of the oldest Jazz Bands existing in Catalonia and Spain. They made their début in 1971 as a quintet. The band has been expanding, and currently comprises sixteen members. La Locomotora Negra style leans towards the black Jazz in its more clearly popular forms. They take as a model the most famous orchestras of the Swing Era, such as Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, etc... with some incursions into the New Orleans style. La Locomotora Negra have taken part in the Barcelona International Jazz Festival, El Vendrell, Sitges, San Sebastián Jazz Festival (where they won the first prize in the Amateur Groups Competition in the Traditional Jazz Category (1977). For more info please click Here |
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Barcelona,
located at the Mediterranean Sea in the very north of the Spanish coast,
is certainly the most cosmopolitan and economically most active city in
this country. It has always proved its will to be modern, to follow the
latest international tendencies or be ahead of them. To the tourist this
is evident especially in its architecture, which so well reflects the
general approach to life in this always-pulsating city.
The Sagrada Família became the testing ground for his ideas on
structure and form. However, he would see built only the crypt, apse and
nativity façade, with its representation of 30 different species of
plants. As Gaudí's work matured, he abandoned historicism and developed
free-flowing, sinuous expressionist forms. His boyhood interest in nature
began taking over from more architectural references, and what had
previously provided external decorative motifs became the inspiration for
the actual structure of his buildings. 
Picasso
So, there's nothing one can do but accept the collection's gaps as
twists of history, and enjoy its many strengths. After some wonderful
ceramics - donated by his widow Jacqueline - the chronological galleries
begin in 1890, when young Pablo still lived in his native Málaga,
sketching pigeons like his father (who painted them incessantly). Already
at the age of nine his drawing was sure and inventive. After he had
painted some perceptive portraits of old people and sailors in La Coruña
(1895), Picasso and his family came to Barcelona, living on the nearby
C/de la Mercè. Work from Picasso's student years includes portraits of
his family, life drawings and landscapes, including some of Barceloneta
beach. Pressured by his father to attract patrons, he did some large
realist paintings, one of which, Science and Charity (1897), won a prize
in Madrid. Only in the late 1890s did he begin to sign his bawdy nightlife
scenes and caricatures with Picasso, his mother's last name. There are
fascinating sketches of Barcelona 'decadents', letters-in-cartoons done on
his first trip to Paris, and his menu cover from Els Quatre Gats, his
first paid commission. 
