To visit Barcelona is to breathe in a complex and exciting visual art history. The streets map the impressions that have inspired three of Spain’s prime movers in the story of modern art: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies. Ironically, Picasso only spent a few years here before moving on to Paris; Miró also came and went. Only Tàpies, who died in 2012, made his permanent base here, but the legacy left by these three great artists is clearly appreciable through the work of young contemporary Catalan artists.
Rebecca Horn’s ‘L’Estel Ferit’ on Barceloneta beach.
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Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973) was born in Málaga, in southern Spain. His family soon moved on to La Coruña in Galicia before arriving in Barcelona in 1895, where his father took up the post of Painting Professor at the city’s La Llotja School of Art (for more information, click here). As a young man, before leaving the city, first for Madrid then for Paris, he was to encounter Barcelona’s artistic circle that met at the now famous Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats) café. It was here, on 1 February 1900, that Picasso exhibited for the first time.
The many drawings of friends included portraits of Jaume Sabartés, Picasso’s lifelong friend and secretary. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona was initially founded largely thanks to Sabartés, who donated his personal collection of the artist’s work. Picasso also designed the menu cover for Els Quatre Gats, which was influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). This influence was just one stage of many during Picasso’s phenomenal development. Picasso entered his melancholy Blue Period (1901–4) after the death of his Catalan friend Casagemas, before emerging into the warmth of the Rose Period (1904–6).
Then came the pioneering breakthrough into Cubism, which he was to develop over the next 20 years. He returned to Catalonia on several occasions, and donated a considerable number of paintings (almost all his youthful works and the Las Meninas series from the 1950s) to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona (for more information, click here).
The Picasso Museum occupies a series of 15th-century palaces. In the same medieval street, Montcada, several more palaces serve as venues for different cultural activities.
Miró paving on La Rambla.
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City of art
Barcelona is exceptional for the quantity and quality of exhibition venues and is a sheer delight for any visitor interested in art. You will find well-produced catalogues, usually with texts in English, and shows on a par with those in most capital cities. Start at the Palau de la Virreina in La Rambla for information about current shows throughout the city, including its own, or the revamped Arts Santa Mònica at the end of La Rambla, an exciting space with avant-garde and experimental work.
Detail of a Nativity frieze designed by Picasso, on the exterior of the Col.legi d’Arquitectes.
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Outside Terminal 2 at Barcelona airport you will find one of Miró’s ceramic murals, a collaboration with his friend Llorens Artigas. Barcelona born and bred, Miró (1893–1983) returned here throughout his life, between periods spent in Paris and Mallorca. While studying at La Llotja School in Barcelona, he joined the arts society Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, which still exists.
Miró was already aware of Dada at this time, though Fauvism, Cubism and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), in particular, were the major influences on his work. Catalan landscapes featured strongly. The Farm (bought by Ernest Hemingway and now in Washington), a major painting of his detalliste period, portrays the family farm, Mont-Roig, near Tarragona. It features many of his subsequent motifs: stars, insects and animals, as well as showing a characteristic respect for manual labour. Gradually, realism gave way to suggestion and poetry, a progression aided by his contact with French Surrealism.
Like his friend Picasso, Miró suffered greatly during the Civil War, and he produced (among other things) the ‘Aidez L’Espagne’ poster to raise funds for the Republic. Miró’s works, showing limited use of certain colours, were precisely composed. He also had wide-ranging skills, turning his hand to theatre design, printmaking, tapestry, ceramics and bronze sculptures as well as painting and drawing. The permanent collection at the Fundació Miró (for more information, click here) on Montjuïc covers all of these areas. This building is testimony to the understanding Miró had with his friend, architect Josep Lluís Sert, who designed both this and Miró’s studio in Mallorca. It is a celebration of Miró’s work, and showcases a varied programme of exhibitions, as well as other important works such as Alexander Calder’s Mercury Fountain.
You will find evidence of Miró all over the city, whether walking over his ceramic pavement in La Rambla, admiring the monumental Woman and Bird sculpture in the Parc Joan Miró (for more information, click here), or simply noticing the La Caixa bank logo he designed.
Miró and the Surrealists
An apocryphal story about Miró tells of how, in his desire to be considered a member of the Surrealist group, he went about trying to get himself arrested – the surest way to attain credibility among his peers. Although he was peaceful by nature, Miró summoned up the courage to walk around the streets of Paris shouting: ‘Down with the Mediterranean!’
Miró was invoking the Mediterranean in its symbolic role as the cradle of Western civilisation, but his choice of words was ironic given the importance of Mediterranean light and colour in his work. Of course, no one arrested him and the rest of the group scorned his efforts.
‘Dona amb barret i coll de pell (Marie-Thérèse Walter)’ by Picasso, 1937.
Corrie Wingate/Apa Publications
Sculpture on the roof of the Fundació Joan Miró.
Corrie Wingate/Apa Publications
Antoni Tàpies
Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) was probably Spain’s best-known living artist of recent times. His work forms an artistic link between Miró’s generation and the new work being produced in the Catalan contemporary art world. Tàpies knew Miró and revered his work; the latter’s influence is seen in Tàpies’s early work, on view at the Fundació Tàpies (for more information, click here). The museum, which redeploys an important Domènech i Montaner building, has a permanent collection of work by Tàpies as well as high-quality contemporary exhibitions. Tàpies was ‘deeply committed to pluralism and diversity’ in art. The first thing you see when you arrive at the building is the mass of metal wires on the roof, entitled Cloud and Chair. Tàpies intended it to be an emblem for the building.
Exhibiton at MACBA.
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A dirty aesthetic
During the repression under Franco, when all Catalan culture was effectively illegal, methods of expression became highly creative. In 1948 the Dau al Set (Dice on Seven) group was set up, with members Tàpies, Tharrats, Cuixart, Ponç, Puig and Brossa. The ‘visual poems’ of Joan Brossa (1919–98), a long-neglected Catalan artist-poet, have been at the forefront of recent Catalan art (for more information, click here).
Catalan artists also employed street graffiti to voice dissent. The use of signs and symbols, already seen in Miró’s painting, appeared to different effect in Tàpies’s work. In keeping with the international Arte Povera and Art Autre movements, Catalan Informalism combines existentialist ideas with simple materials to produce the so-called ‘dirty aesthetic’ that still reigns in Barcelona. The Joan Prats Gallery in Rambla de Catalunya displays representative work from contemporary and earlier artists. Or try Consell de Cent, the commercial gallery street one block down from the Fundació Tàpies.
‘Dona i flors’ by Miquel Blay, in MNAC.
Corrie Wingate/Apa Publications
The art scene today
The Informalist legacy is tempered by Catalan Conceptualism nowadays, as represented in the permanent collection of the Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA). There is also work from the Dau al Set group, and the bed-piece hanging at the entrance is by Tàpies.
The Phenomenon of Street Art
Street art is prevalent in all areas of the city, thanks to the initiatives in the 1990s to create new urban spaces. Eduardo Chillida’s heavyweight sculpture Elogi de l’Aigua (In Praise of Water), in the Parc Creueta de Coll, is a fine example. Artist-poet Joan Brossa is ever-present in the city: his giant-sized letters are scattered about the Passeig Vall d’Hebron, and his bronze tribute to ‘Barcino’ is set in front of the cathedral.
In the Passeig Picasso, Tàpies pays homage to his idol with a large glass cube containing planks, a piano and painted blankets. The cube itself was designed by the great-grandson of Lluís Domènech i Montaner.
On the beach at Barceloneta is Rebecca Horn’s reminder of the original beach huts and restaurants which were torn down to make way for the new waterfront development. Models of the huts, cast in bronze and lit like beacons from within, lie piled one on top of the other. Nearby is Juan Munoz’s typically enigmatic and melancholic piece A room where it always rains, which is a caged ‘room’ filled with his figures that could perhaps roll on their round bases, but for their weight of cast bronze. Also down by the port is Lichtenstein’s Barcelona Head, in front of the main post office. It uses Gaudí’s technique of setting broken pieces of ceramic into cement.
Visit the theatre foyer at the Mercat de les Flors (for more information, click here) and look up at the ceiling to get some idea of Miguel Barceló’s vision.
Miguel Barceló is another contemporary Catalan artist with work in the MACBA’s collection. This Mallorcan painter now carries the torch for art in Barcelona. His stays in Mali, West Africa, have produced some epic ‘relief’ paintings.
Pere Jaume’s work is great fun, neatly fusing questions of representational art and how to frame it. This theme is on permanent display in his ceiling of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, rebuilt and reopened in October 1999.
Susana Solano, another internationally known Catalan artist, finally gained an ample retrospective of her enigmatic metal constructions here in the late 1990s. Other artists representative of established trends include painters Xavier Grau, Ràfols-Casamada, Hernàndez-Pijuan and Grau Garriga. Artists producing work in multidisciplinary techniques include Carlos Pazos, José Manuel Broto, José María Sevilla and Sergi Aguilar.
The Museu d’Art Contemporani is situated right next door to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). This labyrinthine building was set up as a force for social, urban and cultural development, and has a full programme of striking, thought-provoking exhibitions, talks, music, dance and videos.
Preserving the past
On Montjuïc hill, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (for more information, click here) is unmissable. It offers a fabulous opportunity to marvel at Catalonia’s wealth of Gothic and Romanesque painting and sculpture, including medieval wall paintings. In a bid to collect 1,000 years of Catalan art under one roof, the pieces from the former Museu d’Art Modern were transferred here in 2004, including important works by Ramón Casas, Santiago Rusiñol and other major modernista artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.