Barcelona & Modernity

We usually write about dance, not art, but when we heard about Cleveland Museum of Art’s "Barcelona & Modernity" it sounded so interesting we decided to go to the press luncheon. Not that we knew much about Barcelona the city. A highly unscientific survey of well-traveled friends and a Google search gave us pictures of buildings by Antoni Gaudí and other practitioners of modernisme. During further research we learned about rationalist architecture in Barcelona by members of GATCPAC (Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture). But the picture of Barcelona that emerged most frequently was one of decorative tiles covering, it seemed, every little apartment building and house in riotous colored curves.

During the press luncheon slides were shown of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró and Gaudí; all the big names, but Curator Bill Robinson promised a show that would provide a deeper context by showing works of less well-known painters as well, such as Isidre Nonell, whose portraits of the poor prefigured Picasso’s Blue Period. Both men were among the many who frequented the important Barcelona artists’ café, 4 Gats (4 Cats).

"Context" is one of our favorite things right up there with whiskers on kittens but we were left with many questions. What kind of city was Barcelona? Beneath the superficial impressions of contemporary tourists, what was happening there between 1868-1939, the period of "immense social turmoil" referred to by the Museum’s press materials, that fostered and brought forth some of the great names in western art? How did Robinson’s decision to assemble an exhibit centered on Barcelona play into the strengths of CMA’s collection? What was the political situation in Barcelona and why did that city become the center of Europe’s largest and longest running anarchist movement? What was the relationship between the artistic and the political in Barcelona?

A phone interview with Jordi Falgàs, one of the show’s curators and CMA’s de facto Catalan in residence, put things in perspective. First we asked for and got a lesson on history and geography.

"Barcelona has for a long time been the capitol of Spanish industry," Falgàs explained, "for a while probably the most industrialized city in Southern Europe. Geographically, Barcelona is Spain’s main port on the Mediterranean. Back to the Greeks and Romans, they all came to the Iberian Peninsula through that general area. Also, Barcelona is the capitol city of Catalonia, which runs north to the border with France forming a corridor for people and ideas going north and south. That’s what happened with the artists at the 4 Cats; they all went to Paris, picked up avant-garde ideas, and came back to Barcelona. In Catalonia we have our own language and a distinct, unique culture. One of the 4 kingdoms united by Ferdinand and Isabella, some call Catalonia a nation still. So it is a mixture of history, geography and culture that makes Barcelona special."

"Picasso, Dalí and Miró, three major names in western art, were part of that culture, spoke that language, associated with that circle of artists. Having this wonderful collection here in Cleveland with the most important paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period, a major works by Salvador Dalí, and several works by Joan Miró, Bill [Robinson] realized that in order to understand these artists and their influences it was necessary to know more of their Catalonian context."

In answer to our questions about politics and anarchy in Barcelona, Falgàs cut through the tangle of shifting alliances and antagonisms among the Catalans and Madrid, labor and capital. "In Barcelona in the late 19th and early 20th century you had two things. You had an upper middle class, a wealthy bourgeoisie who owned the industry and who commissioned the paintings, the houses and the public buildings. At the same time you had a large working population; for them living and working conditions were not good, therefore you had a long tradition of leftist ideas, including both anarchy and socialism, which continues to this day. Today the Socialist Party rules not only Catalonia but all of Spain."

One of the very first things museum-goers will see in the "Barcelona!" exhibit is Ildefons Cerdà’s "Plan for the Enlargement of Barcelona" (1859), an ambitious utopian plan that exemplifies the idea of architecture as a progressive social force. No coincidence, the first book about Barcelona that we flipped through (Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona 1898 – 1937 by Chris Ealham) also made early, prominent mention of Cerdà’s plan as case study of how a long succession of egalitarian plans for urban renewal in Barcelona were distorted beyond recognition by city fathers and vested political and economic interests whose priorities, according to Ealham, who minces no words, were graft and land speculation. Affordable public housing for factory workers? Despite the many excellent plans put forward, Barcelona’s landowners of the early 20th century preferred to build shanty towns (barracas) and rent them to workers.

One aspect of Cerdà’s plan that was realized, however, was the Rambla, a central thoroughfare that to this day connects the port with the Eixample, the area of new growth. Broad and tree-lined, the Rambla passed among government offices and gathering places of the social elite as well as large plazas, markets, and fountains frequented by factory workers and their families. Processions featuring characteristically Catalan Gegants (giant figures personifying saints and royalty) and Nans (smaller grotesques) traditionally used the Rambla. So did the labor movement’s May Day parade of 1890, the first of many parades to use the form of the religious procession to make a political statement, ending at the office of the Civil Governor where they presented a petition for an 8-hour day much as a religious procession would end by beseeching the church dignitaries for blessing.

The Rambla exemplifies Barcelona’s vibrant civic life and its unusually pervasive connections between political issues and indigenous popular artistic and cultural forms. So our question about the relationship between politics and art proved something of a no-brainer. Because, as Falgàs pointed out, Barcelona and Catalan language, culture and art have been subject to repression from Madrid back to the 18th century, Catalan culture is inherently political.

The politics of Catalan autonomy mingled notably with the artistic at 4 Cats. One of the café’s founders, Santiago Rusiñol, and his associates displayed, praised and were influenced by a variety of artistic forms: Romanesque and Gothic Catalan religious art (exhibited for its aesthetic and regional significance), puppets and puppet shows in the Catalan language (in which only the devil and the police spoke Castilian), contemporary miracle paintings (which Picasso parodied and the conventions of which he incorporated into later works), and the designs of the Catalan iron works, whose product differed markedly from that of Castille. A clear case of avant-garde artists appropriating popular Catalan forms and materials, right? "I wouldn’t put it that way," said Falgàs. "They shared the same ideals and were willing to put their art at the service of those ideals."

Another book we used for background on Barcelona was "Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso’s Barcelona" by Temma Kaplan, whose view of the relationship between the artistic and the political is more in terms of the struggle between labor and capital with special emphasis on women’s issues. Kaplan finds the artists at the 4 Cats sympathetic to the plight of Barcelona’s poor but faults all but one of those artists for failing to show Barcelona’s energetically political people as anything more than victims of poverty. During the years of 4 Cats operation, 1897 – 1903, only Ramon Casas, Kaplan says, documented the increasingly violent struggle between labor and capital.

As Falgàs named and described works of art to be displayed in "Barcelona!," we were struck by how accurate Kaplan’s characterization proved to be. Casas’ "The Garroting," which depicts a public execution with a highly political back-story, is in the CMA’s exhibit. Not in CMA’s exhibit but more explicitly demonstrating the political content of Casas’ works, "The Charge" (1899, 1902) depicts members of the Civil Guard on horseback with sabers drawn charging into a large gathering of unarmed demonstrators. Other than Casas’, works Falgàs cited from that period depict the poor as victims rather than activists. Picasso’s "La Vie" (1903) from CMA’s collection and "The Blind Man’s Meal" (1903) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for instance. Nonell, whom Falgàs described as an artist a little older than Picasso, is well represented in this exhibit. Falgàs cited Poor People Waiting for Soup (1899) and "Repatriate from Cuba at the Warf" (1898) (Spain lost its colonies in Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish American War) as Nonell paintings on socially concerned topics. Also a major topic in Nonell’s work, Gypsy women, the lowest of the low; included in the CMA exhibit are "Young Gypsy" 1903 and "Two Gypsies" 1903. "Nonell will be a surprise for many in this country," says Falgàs. "He’s not well known here."

Later sections of CMA’s roughly chronological exhibit show artists becoming more overtly political. As Falgàs put it, "then all the posters." First he cited what he described as "a very famous poster by Josep Obiols advocating the teaching of the Catalan language. It pictures a young kid going to school and it shows how artists were engaged in the very political struggle for Catalan culture and language." Perhaps more familiar to Americans, Miró’s "Help Spain!" ("Aidez l’Espagne!") provides the template for CMA’s Barcelona! poster. “It was originally intended as a French postage stamp," Falgàs explained. Another iconic image, "Let’s Crush Fascism!" (1936) was based on a photograph by Pere Català-Pic. Falgàs summed up the posters as "a very interesting coincidence of artists working side by side with political leaders."

And what about the connection between Picasso and Barcelona? Did Barcelona have a lasting influence on Picasso? Born 1881, Picasso moved to Barcelona with his family in 1895 when he was 14 and left Barcelona in 1904 when he was 23, less than a decade at the beginning of a very long artistic career. "These are crucial years in anyone’s life," Falgàs argues. "You have to consider that during that time, Picasso was like a sponge, growing as an artist, influenced by all these older but still modern artists he met at 4 Cats. Later he was based in Paris but often returned not only to visit his family in Barcelona but other places in Catalonia up until the Civil War and the dictatorship when of course he refused to return to Spain." One result of a summer spent in Catalonia, Picasso’s "Head of a Catalan Peasant" (1906) is in the exhibit.

Ironically, it’s in two highly political pieces he made after he’d left Barcelona and Spain for ever, "Guernica" (1937) and "Dream and Lie of Franco I & II" (1937), that Picasso was most clearly influenced by Catalan forms and materials. The shapes of the light bulb, the lamp, and the many eyes in Guernica were, according to Kaplan and others, influenced by the eyes that proliferate in Catalan religious murals. Dream and Lie of Franco I & II are divided into panels in the form of an "auca, a style of Catalan printing that dated back to the 17th century, a traditional form that could be adapted to comment on modern life." (Kaplan) Guernica does not appear in the CMA exhibit. Falgàs explains, "We have studies for Guernica in the show, but it doesn’t leave Madrid any more; it’s huge and very fragile. Dream and Lie I and II are prints; CMA has a set and those are in the exhibit."

We’d heard that the curators of CMA’s Barcelona exhibit had made a conscious decision not to emphasize two subjects that many Americans identify with Spain, the bullfight and flamenco. The reason why, we were informed, was because neither form was native/indigenous to Catalonia and neither was the subject of popular enthusiasm in Barcelona until approximately 1913 when large numbers of immigrant workers from outside Catalonia brought their passions to the city.

After 1913, according to Kaplan, even republicans and anarchists (who had previously disdained bullfight as "a violent and decadent sport of conservative southern landowners") caught the fever. Picasso joined the crowd; the bullring had been his perennial subject since childhood. Nevertheless, the bullfight remained an imported commodity in Barcelona and Kaplan claims that it was always discussed in Castilian, even among Catalans.

It was a similar story for flamenco, a form that originated in Andalusia. By 1917, flamenco had become the object of popular enthusiasm in Barcelona but the most prestigious city for the form was Madrid, as illustrated in the back-story for "Blanquita Suárez" (1917). That flamenco performer’s success in Barcelona led to an offer from Madrid. Suárez tried to leave but Barcelona’s Tivoli Theater held her to her contract, enabling Picasso, visiting Barcelona for Christmas and New Year’s 1916-1917, to see and paint her in a cubist portrait.

Under Franco the bullfight and flamenco were considered tourist attractions and promoted while Catalonian culture was identified with resistance and suppressed. Laws and patron saints were changed by decree. Catalan language, festivals and saints were forbidden by law. Even Catalonia’s traditional dance, the sardana, was outlawed as it had been during earlier dictatorships.

"You can see flamenco and the bullfight in Barcelona," Falgàs stated, "but they are not as unique to Catalan culture as they are to other parts of Spain and that’s why they are not prominent in the exhibit." And is Suaárez’ portrait in the exhibit? We can only hope she found success in Madrid for she will not appear in Cleveland.

It would appear that "Barcelona & Modernity" is much more than a flimsy rack to hang some important paintings on. The title sets forth a rich subject and even a quick dip like ours into the city’s history, politics and art reveals some deep waters. For us, Barcelona’s history seems to vindicate preservation efforts directed toward indigenous and popular art. Perhaps Barcelona’s experience underscores the utility of public art, parades and festivals as well as museums and other repositories of high art. And for us Barcelona provides yet another example of the potential value and lasting effect of good, public spirited city planning, though we acknowledge that it is sometimes difficult to understand the long term effects of even good intentions, as opposed to short-sighted greed.

Draw your own conclusions. But if you’ve read this far you’re no doubt wondering as we are. What can Barcelona – and other cities – teach us about our own city? For instance, Barcelona’s waterfront was once like Cleveland’s, cut off from the rest of the city by a highway. How did Barcelona solve that problem and how successful was the solution?

Barcelona & Modernity on view at CMA October 15 - January 7. There are special rates for seniors, students and children under 5. CMA members enter free. 888-CMA-0033 or visit http://www.ClevelandArt.org.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net

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