If You Love Barcelona, You’ll Like “Barcelona”

Antoni Gaudí, “Palau Güell, Dressing Table,” Güell Family Collection, Barcelona, Spain. Photo © Ramon Manent
Who doesn’t feel more footloose and festive when sojourning in Barcelona? If you’ve ever been there, you’ll recapture some of the exuberance of Catalan élan at the Metropolitan Museum’s latest megashow, Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí, opening tomorrow.
The city and its environs also seemed to unleash a daring creative energy in the four big names who anchor the show: Gaudí, Picasso, Miró and Dalí.
On a less positive note, this exhibition, organized by the Met and the Cleveland Museum (where it first appeared), reminded me of what I liked least about the Met’s recent (and mostly admirable) Americans in Paris show. In both exhibitions, the curators spotlighted several lesser-known, also-ran artists as exciting discoveries. But you came away thinking that their relative obscurity was, for the most part, deserved.
The Barcelona show gets off to a slow start with far too many of these ho-hums. Catalan painter Ramon Casas‘ greatest contribution to Barcelona’s cultural life may have been helping to establish the famed artists’ hangout, the Quatre Gats, as well as the eponymous art magazine. But the show gives us 17 of his works. Isidre Nonell? Don’t even get me started.
Gaudí, as usual, inspires amazement and pleasure. His delightfully askew “Palau Güell, Dressing Table” (above) gets my vote for most-engaging-in-show. And I was engrossed by a Gaudí-related model, created in 2006: “Polyfunicular Model of the Main Nave of the Expiatory Temple of the Sagrada Familia.” A delicate construction of thread and fabric bags weighted with buckshot, it recreates Gaudí’s method of using the arcs in the thread, created by the arrangement of the weights, to outline “the skeleton of the building of inclined supports, parabolic towers, and undulating hyperbolic paraboloid surfaces—a chapel whose form would contain within its equilibrated structure all the loads and thrusts incumbent upon it.”
Okay, I admit that this catalogue description fails to capture the ingenuity of the object. You’ll just have to be there, and see how it is reflected in a mirror beneath it: Only the inverted image reveals the skeleton of the building, rightside up.
The show ends, literally, with a bang: The last gallery is devoted to the passionate art that the Spanish Civil War wrenched from Picasso (weeping women, “Guernica” studies), Dalí (“Soft Construction with Boiled Beans [Premonition of Civil War]”), González (a bronze “Head”) and Miró (“Black and Red Series”).
Picasso, as always, dominates. Throughout the show, he is represented by some of his choicest works. Not the least of these: “Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebre,” a seminal 1909 Cubist painting that is the latest in the continuing New York museums’ retrospective of “Great Paintings that the Museum of Modern Art Should Never Have Deaccessioned.”
Don’t get me started on that either. But if you must, you can read my further thoughts on that Picasso’s lamentable disposal in this Wall Street Journal article.