04/07/2010: "Barcelona is a City of Artists"

Barcelona is a city of artists.

While Paris and Rome display the works of classical, medieval, and renaissance masters, Barcelona is know for its modernist and contemporary art. The Catalan surrealists Salvador Dali and Joan Miro are represented, as is Picasso who spent his early years in the city.

Antonio Gaudi is God here and his monuments are everywhere, especially in his unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia church. Gaudi was on the way from morning mass to the construction site in 1926 when he was hit by a train and died. Work continued but his blueprints were destroyed by anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Since then a series of new architects have added their vision to his. The estimated completion date for the church is 2040. But it keeps getting pushed back every decade.

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) is designed to teach as much as to showcase the work of individual artists. My English tour focused on the social and political aspects of contemporary art, especially the use of art to further nationalistic agendas, and to propose new ways of organizing society. It was an eye opener for me. Afterwards I took a wander through the rest of the gallery to view the work of featured artist Rodney Graham, a Canadian I had to come to Spain to discover. Despite the benefit of my recent education, I had some trouble decoding the video installation of Rodney pitching potatoes at a gong.

Three quotes from three artists:

1. "The creation continues incessantly through the media of man." Antoni Gaudi
2. "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." Salvador Dali
3. "For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings." Joan Miro

Yours with creativity and imagination,
Darlene