Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
European
RenaissanceandBaroque
art,aswellasanunsurpassedcollectionof
nineteenth-
andtwentieth-centuryCatalanart
(up until the 1940s; everything from the 1950s onwards
is covered by MACBA in the Raval). In addition, there's a changing roster of blockbuster
exhibitions and special shows based on the museum's archives. There's also a
café-bar
and
gift shop and art
bookshop
in the gloriously restored oval hall, a bar service on the terrace
and a separate museum restaurant with more extraordinary views over the city.
THE BRILLIANT FLOWERING OF CATALAN ART
Between about 1850 and 1940 Catalan art entered a modern golden age. Break-out artist
was
Marià Fortuny i Marsal
- often regarded as the earliest
modernista
artist, and cer-
tainly the first Catalan painter known widely abroad, having exhibited to great acclaim in
Paris and Rome. He specialized in minutely detailed pictures, often of exotic subjects - his
set-piece
Battle of Tetuan
, for example, was based on a visit to Morocco in 1859 to ob-
serve the war there. The main name in contemporary Catalan Realism was
Ramon Martí
i Alsina
, while the master of nineteenth-century Catalan landscape painting was
Joaquim
Veyreda i Vila
, founder of the “Olot School” (Olot being a town in northern Catalunya),
whose members were influenced both by the work of the early Impressionists and by the
distinctive volcanic scenery of the Olot region.
However, it wasn't until the emergence of
RamonCasasiCarbó
(whose famous picture
of himself and Pere Romeu on a tandem once hung on the walls of
Els Quatre Gats
) and
Santiago Rusiñol i Prats
that Catalan art acquired its first contemporary art superstars,
taking their cue from the very latest in European styles, whether the symbolism of Whist-
ler or the vibrant social observation of Toulouse-Lautrec. Hot on their heels came a new
generation of artists - Josep Maria Sert, Marià Pidelaserra i Brias, Ricard Canals i Llambí
and others - who were strongly influenced by the scene in contemporary Paris. The two
brightest stars of the period, though, were
Joaquim Mir i Trinxet
, whose highly charged
landscapestendedtowardstheabstract,and
IsidreNonelliMonturiol
,whofrom1902un-
til his early death in 1911 painted sombre naturalistic studies of impoverished gypsy com-
munities.
The other dominant contemporary trend was
noucentisme
, a style at once more classical
and less consciously flamboyant than
modernisme
- witness the portraits and landscapes
of
Joaquim Sunyer i Miró
, perhaps the best known
noucentista
artist, and the work of
sculptors like
Pau Gargallo i Catalán
.
The Romanesque collection
From the eleventh century onwards, great numbers of sturdy Romanesque churches were
built in the high Catalan Pyrenees as the Christian Reconquest spread. Medieval Catalan stu-
dios decorated the churches with extraordinary biblical frescoes, with even the most remote
