Serendipity has always had a large part to play in my relationship with Gaudí. I can still remember my shock and disbelief on discovering that the Mas de la Calderera in Riudoms was just a few hundred metres up the flash-flood riverbed from where I had played as a child, under the railway bridge, catching bats, running from scorpions and smoking my first, and only, Celta cigarette.
In nearby Montroig del Camp we had become close friends with the Bargalló family, who farmed the lands next to Joan Miró’s farm. It meant nothing to us then. Years later, however, Rosita Bargalló, my sister Marianne’s close friend, disappeared to enter a convent of the Teresian sisters in Tortosa. We lost contact when she went to Rome. Forty years later I managed to talk my way, on a Sunday, into the Teresian convent in Barcelona, built by Gaudí. The Mother Superior was curious about how a Dutchman had become so fascinated by Gaudí, so I explained to her the kindness and generosity of our Baix Camp friends. ‘How strange,’ she said, ‘one of our dear nuns died last week and Rosita has come for a few hours to attend the funeral.’ She was upstairs having breakfast, and as she came down the stairs, that beautiful radiant smile I remembered as a child brought me to tears.
No less surprising was the visitor who turned up at the door of my home in Bridport when I was busy finishing my biography of Antoni Gaudí. For three-quarters of a century, Gaudí enthusiasts and experts in Catalonia had been trying to discover who the mystery man was who had tried to save his life after finding him run over by a tram. My visitor Joan Bolton lived just a few streets away in the lively market town, and had spent every summer in Catalonia with the family of Ángel Tomás Mohíno, the man who ran to Gaudí’s assistance.
I also remember a strange set of coincidences back in 2002, during the wonderful Año Gaudí celebrations, which had boosted Gaudí appreciation for a new generation. I was there in Barcelona preparing myself for my first Diada de St Jordi, the Catalan national book day, when open-air book stalls, and flower stands selling single red roses, transform the city into a wonderful festival of literature. Walking down the Gran de Gràcia to my first signing, outside La Pedrera, I spied through the grilled shop window of the quaint Libreria Viuda Roquer the title of a new book on Gaudí that had obviously passed me by. I started to leaf through the book, Comillas: Preludio de la Modernidad, by Maria del Mar Arnús with trepidation and found myself absorbed by the clarity of the text to the point where I was almost late for my own appointment. I don’t know why, but I felt the need to tell the author how wonderful it was, sought her out in the phone book and that afternoon was invited for tea. Over Gaudí gossip, she asked me what I was working on now. ‘Guernica,’ I replied. ‘How strange,’ she said, ‘just this morning I sent my uncle-in-law the architect Sert’s correspondence with Picasso to the Musée [Picasso] in Paris.’ I couldn’t believe it. Neither could I, on returning to Gràcia to have drinks for the first time with the great Gaudí expert Daniel Giralt-Miracle, believe that he had actually been there in the Casón del Buen Retiro when Picasso’s great masterpiece first arrived in Spain. Two chance encounters all in one day.
And so it goes on. On 28 July 2014 I was driving back to Barcelona after a weekend in my beloved village of Arevalillo de Cega up on the edge of the Castilian meseta, where we had just celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Asociación Cultural Arevalillo Vivo. On entering the city the heavens opened dramatically in the nearest thing to a full-blown monsoon. Running for cover to the Restaurante El Roble on the Riera de Sant Miquel, I took a place at the bar next to the only other client, an elegant gentleman sipping quietly at his tea.
From the side I recognised my companion. By chance I had found myself sitting next to the man known in his home country as the Japanese Gaudí, the sculptor Etsuro Sotoo. This was most certainly not his normal port of call – in fact, it was Etsuro’s first time in El Roble; he, like me, was escaping from the storm.
I remembered reading a news report in March 2014 that Esturo Sotoo, who was highly active in promoting Gaudí’s beatification, had travelled to Rome in the company of José Manuel Almuzara, the acting president of the Association for the Beatification of Antonio Gaudí, to offer to Pope Francis a copy he had crafted of Gaudí’s bust his taken directly from his death mask. Of course, a wax cast taken from Gaudí almost immediately after his death has the stamp of verisimilitude, but it is far from a hollow shell, and still at one remove breathes his passion and determination in the face of death with a mysterious strength.
Sotoo’s background is completely atypical. Aged twenty-five, back in 1978 Sotoo left his home city of Fukuoka on the shores of Japan’s Kyushu island and the relative safety net of his job as professor of art at Kyoto University. His pilgrimage to Europe, like that of so many other Japanese, was an essential part of getting acquainted with European culture and its plethora of museums and cathedrals. Having started his odyssey in Paris, the art he saw didn’t speak to him. He felt it dead. Planning to move on to Germany, he had a week to fill and took the train to Barcelona. It was there that he came upon the Sagrada Família in its strange solitary state of abandon, and was instantly seduced by the blocks of stone waiting to be carved.
Sotoo was searching for something less superficial than McCann-Erickson’s Japanese advert for Suntory whisky from the 1980s, which used the backdrop of some of Gaudí’s signature creations. Through misty shots peopled by strange sci-fi creatures, the viewer learnt that Gaudí’s buildings came from either a distant past or a distant future. ‘This is a house built by life itself.’ It brought the tourists in droves. (This bizarre piece of marketing can be found at the following link: http://bit.ly/1KlgFbz.) But Sotoo’s fascination was far more than skin deep.
Persuading the architects Puig Boada and Jordi Bonet that he was willing to work, Sotoo fought off the local competition and ended up as the principal sculptor on site. Struggling to decipher Gaudí’s code, Sotoo eventually had the revelation that he should try to imitate Gaudí’s vision of nature and the spirituality that emanated from that humbling encounter between man and the grandeur of God’s creation. After a decade doing battle with hammer and chisel to uncover Gaudí’s vision, Sotoo decided to take the next step. In 1991 he was baptised in the crypt of the Sagrada Família, where he adopted the Christian name Lluc Miquel Àngel in honour of Saint Luke, the patron saint of artists, and the great Michelangelo.
Before my encounter with him, I had followed Sotoo via his numerous interviews and lectures. His voice was quiet but direct: ‘I invite everyone who wants to know Gaudí not to pick the wrong door. If you really want to know him, find the door of spirit and faith.’
This was followed by another question: ‘Why do we build the temple of the Sagrada Família?’ Which naturally led him on to the simple and more fundamental question: ‘Why do we build?’ Sotoo’s answer was typically Gaudínian: ‘We don’t seek beauty in the vanity of men. No! The Sagrada Família is a tool for building us. Gaudí left the temple half finished. The temple of the Sagrada Família perfectly built the man Gaudí.’
And Sotoo is right. It is impossible to think of Gaudí without referencing his final masterpiece. It is just as impossible to come to an understanding of his character without taking into account what the building meant to him and how it transformed him as he created a new language of architecture and faith.
In another interview Sotoo discoursed on Gaudí and the centrality of love:
To stop at Gaudí’s architecture and not see the meaning of his work would mean not to know him. The Holy Family itself is like a great encyclopaedia in which there are topics that have answers, but Gaudí is much more than this.
It would worry me if the Holy Family acquired a purely economic dimension or impetus for fame: what is important is to seek truth and not to be afraid. There is no art, culture, or even material without love.
In El Roble, with the storm and rain lashing at the window, Sotoo stressed the importance of faith. I told him that I was writing about the Sagrada Família and he knew my work on Gaudí. ‘Promise me one thing,’ he begged. ‘Look at Gaudí through the eyes of faith. Without this you will be blind.’
I took on board Sotoo’s warning and am sure that there is space for the inevitable disagreements and misunderstandings. As a lapsed Scots Presbyterian, I hope that he will see that I have tried, in an ecumenical spirit, to walk the extra mile. Considering the past prejudice directed at Gaudí by serious architectural historians and the Protestant faith, I hope I have remained suitably judicious. If the ambition of the new Sagrada Família basilica is to function as an area for serious debate, it will listen to harsher criticisms than those aired in this book.
The building continues. The ambition for a completion date of 2026 now no longer seems impossible. The body of the church is not just an edifice in stone; it is its congregation. Perhaps, more importantly, the Sagrada Família will have to face its most pressing problems when the builders have finally left the site. How does a church connect with its people when they have to pay to get in?
Today it has become commonplace to hear bishops from all around the world and from all religious denominations ringing the alarm bells with regard to their shrinking flocks and the staggering cost of upkeep of crumbling façades. The Sagrada Família’s problem is not its lack of visitors but rather the opposite. How does it control the flow of pilgrims and function as a sanctuary for prayer? And how will its reaching out for universal appeal marry with its parishioners’ immediate local needs? Most important for Barcelona is how the Sagrada Família can find a way of re-engaging the sympathies and understanding of the congregation that over its troubled history it has lost. When, on Saint Joseph’s Day in 1882, the first stone of the expiatory temple was laid, it was impossible to imagine how complex and often conflictive its future would be.
It is only fitting that the Sagrada Família’s architect should have the last word. Gaudí, as he so often said, made the observation that God, his client, was in no hurry to see it finished.