| When I saw Joan Miro’s Woman Strolling on the Rambla of Barcelona at the Met, it reminded me of my own visit to that Spanish city several years ago, when, walking up the Rambla, I thought: "I can live here, all right." I was in a cafe, sipping absinthe for the first time and talking with fellow travelers about Salvador Dali and his efforts to champion Gaudi, the number of whose works barely made 20 when this obscure genius died in an accident in 1926. And now both artists are in the same show celebrating the city they so loved and in which they found inspiration. |  |
Mediterranean Objects of Desire – Valery Oisteanu
When I saw Joan Miro’s Woman Strolling on the Rambla of Barcelona at the Met, it reminded me of my own visit to that Spanish city several years ago, when, walking up the Rambla, I thought: "I can live here, all right."
I was in a cafe, sipping absinthe for the first time and talking with fellow travelers about Salvador Dali and his efforts to champion Gaudi, the number of whose works barely made 20 when this obscure genius died in an accident in 1926. And now both artists are in the same show celebrating the city they so loved and in which they found inspiration.
Barcelona remains the western capital of Mediterranean culture, an ancient Greek-Roman seaport city, at least 1500 years old, full of architectural wonders, museums devoted to the likes of Miro and Pablo Picasso, verdant parks and the legendary hipsters’ paradise, the Pipas club. Many contemporary artists from all over the world hear "Barcelona calling" and establish their studios there.
The grand exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with the Museum National d’Art de Catalunya, is titled "Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudi to Dali." It examines the 71-year period (1868-1939) when history collided with magic, and the city became the epicenter of modernist art. Curators Jared Goss and Magdalena Dabrowski have assembled more than 300 works of art and design that proves Barcelona was a living laboratory of urban forms, architecture and art, all of which left an original Catalonian mark on modern culture. Indeed, the word "Modernism" first appeared in the Barcelonan magazine, Leaven (Advance), in 1884.
The exhibit is organized in nine historical periods/rooms with names such as Rebirth; Catalan Renaixenca; Modernisme: Painting Sculpture Graphic Arts; Modernisme: the Quatre Gats; Modernisme: Art and Society; Modernisme: Architecture and Design; Noucentisme and the Classical Revival; Avant-Gardes: the Rational City; and Avant Gardes and Civil War, all following the breathtaking trajectory of a political and aesthetical roller coaster lasting from 1888 to the January 1939 fall of Barcelona, a story told in paintings, sculptures and photographs.
Modernity began with technological advances in the old city, the imposition of a new urban grid, new construction, a new rail line linking Barcelona to Paris and the incredible surge of the textile industry. Art flourished exponentially and brought cultural ferment, while nationalists and anarchists brought political torment. But, let us try to piece together a sequence.
Ramon Casas, son of a wealthy textile owner, went to Paris and fell under the spell of the French impressionists and soon displayed his Bohemian portraits of friends such as Erik Satie and Santiago Rusinol at the Salon des Champ Elisees. He gravitated toward modern, urban subjects such as the newly constructed landmark of Sacre-Coeur in Montmartre. His 1892 painting, Au moulene de la galette (Madeleine, L’Absinthe) is thematically related to Claude Monet and resonates with contemporaneous work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent Van Gogh.
Casas’ close friendship with Rusinol began in Paris, and in 1897 the two helped found Els Quatre Gats (Four Cats) in Barcelona, an influential establishment that they modeled on the Chat Noir café, a meeting place for the French avant-gardes in Montmartre. Rusinol became an insider in "fashionable" artistic circles and started writing informally about modern art for La Vanguardia magazine and Pel y Ploma from Paris. Meanwhile, Casas painted a great portrait of Picasso in Montmartre, and a friendly rivalry ensued. All three Catalonians, Picasso, Rusinol and Casas, became close and divided their time between Paris and Barcelona, establishing a parallelism of French and Catalan modernism.
Picasso had first moved with his family from Malaga to Barcelona in 1895 and entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes and later the Llotja Art Academy. He began to frequent Els Quatre Gats, and he put on his first solo exhibition there. For the next four years he shuttled between Chat Noir and Els Quatre Gats, picking up inspiration from Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse and, especially, Toulouse-Lautrec. Finally, in 1904, he took residence in Montmartre and soon began to create the cubist paintings that so revolutionized art.
The Harem is one of the best paintings in the show: Picasso’s vision of a naked man sitting on the ground, drinking wine from a pitcher, while four nude women bathe and an old procuress sits in a corner, is reminiscent of The Turkish Bath by Ingres. It is a classical composition, realistically executed, but painted in a post-impressionistic, almost metaphysical style. Also on display is Picasso’s talent for expressing despair and agonizing death, as in his studies for Guernica: Contorted Horse and Mother With Dead Child are not only very intense visually, but also share a symbolic language with all of his war narratives.
Dali found a visual expression for Einstein’s theory of the space-time continuum as well as for the dark chimeras of his own mind. As American art historian and curator William Jeffett of the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, writes in the accompanying catalog, the artist’s Accommodation of Desire, a canvas filled with several lion heads, depicts Dali’s fear of intercourse and “impotence in the face of paternal powers.” Jeffett also refers to other Dali motifs, such as his invention of “sculptural hysteria” and “voluntary hallucination.” The Dream, offering the head of a woman with eyes closed, without lips or mouth, and with ants flowing from her nostrils and Medusa-like hair, dominates the room; an example of what Dali called the “blind lucidity of desire.”
Miro’s genius emerged in Barcelona from 1917 to 1934. A few years younger than Picasso, he assimilated abstract and cubism and made them more primitive, pure and symbolic, as in The Hunter (Catalan Landscape). His paintings, according to R. Krauss and R.S. Lubar, “often fulfill multiple functions, simultaneously ideogram, spatial marker (a horizon or rudimentary orthogonal), lingual sign (poetic phrases and words), etc.” His “Black and Red” series presents grotesquely distorted figures of the victims of the war. Dali praised him for moving beyond cubism toward a more poetic and lyrical conception of painting.
Gaudi invented and designed “inverted parabolic arcs” that comprised the base for the towers of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, which is still in construction today, as well as undulating hyperbolic parabolic surfaces that he used on the façade of other magic buildings.
Several lesser-known surrealists deserve mention, including Esteve Frances, one of the leading painters of the Catalan group, who shared a studio with Remedios Varos (also a Barcelonan surrealist) in the Plaza de Lesseps. They produced paintings, drawings and collages, and together played the surrealist game of “Exquisite Corpse”—a pastime involving chance, juxtapositions and unconscious association borne of several artists collaboratively building a composite image. The French artist Marcel Jean, who was a principal player in the group, wrote, “I met Remedios and Frances when I visited Oscar Dominguez. We spent time making together Exquisite Corpses. To the surprises of regular drawings, we added the charms of collage. The successive contributions, which were to build up to the final image, we borrowed ready-made, from illustrated advertisements from vintage magazines.”
In May 1936, in a small avant-garde bookstore gallery in Barcelona, a show was organized by a group calling themselves the “Logicophobists,” an alliance of artists and writers staunchly anti-logical, who proclaimed the union of art with metaphysics in the manifesto text that accompanied their first and only exhibition. Clave was also part of the group, with his found objects becoming sculpture assemblage, as in Telephone 1939 (a wooden spoon and thongs), a reference to fellow-surrealist Francis Picabia, or as in Man With a Monocle (also 1939; an eggbeater and a metal hoop), probably referring to a visit by Tristan Tzara.
Speaking of Tzara, this daddy of dada actually wore a monocle. From 1936 to 1945, he dedicated his life to anti-Fascist campaigns as a secretary for the defense of culture in Catalonia (he compiled a catalogue of avant-garde art treasures for the Catalonian Government), and he helped get many of these artworks to safety during the war years.
A more interesting figure, Antoni G. Lamolla made a small collage using strings and razor-blade wrappers in an interment camp 1939 and sent it in a letter to his wife. Miro, Christian Zervos and Roland Penrose noticed the collage and got him released from the camp, thus saving his life. Angel Planells and Joan Massanet were Catalan surrealists from Emporda, like Dali, and they shared similar surrealist symbols, such as a knife piercing a woman’s face in The Perfect Crime, echoing the famous razor-slicing-the-eye image of Dali and Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Leandre Cristofol, a surrealist from Lleda, produced the shadow box Moonlight Night, an elegant assemblage of found white wood objects on a blue velvet background.
This grand exhibition is accompanied by 540-page catalog by William H. Robinson, Jordi Falgàs and Carmen Belen Lord. The publication features 600 illustrations, a preface by Robert Hughes and essays by Magdalena Dabrowski, Jared Goss and 27 other scholars, published by The Cleveland Museum of Art, where the show originated, in association with Yale University Press. It is an invaluable source for scholars and public alike.
“Surrealist activities in Catalonia attracted a steady stream of artists and intellectuals,” says Robinson in the catalog’s essay, “Avant-gardes for a New Century,” thus transforming the region into a breeding ground and locus of interaction for the international avant-garde. The premature death of the scene in 1939 dispersed the artists around the world and ignited new fires through Vibracionismo in South America, and via émigrés such as Alberto Sanchez in Moscow, Remedios Varo and Frances Esteban in Mexico, Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Rafael Barradas in Uruguay and Antoni Bonet in Argentina. And it all started in Barcelona.
