The Artists of Catalonia

Picasso never spoke Spanish, only Catalan. He liked to be called “Don Pablo” and preferred the company of his bullfight cronies to the Beautiful People who were his best customers.

In 1971 a Madrid art critic was jailed for daring to call Picasso Spain’s greatest living artist while, at the same time in Barcelona, plans were under way for a Picasso Museum.

Joan Miro wintered in Paris, but spent his summers on the family homestead near Barcelona. Although best known for his abstracts, he carried samples of Spanish meadow to Paris so he could complete “The Farm” with utter authenticity.

Miro was modest, reserved, and worked in a spotless studio. He rarely left that Franco-Catalonia corridor, although he was once coaxed to New York to receive the Guggenheim Foundation’s International Prize from President Eisenhower.

Salvador Dali’s childhood temper tantrums advanced to impromptu jumps from high places and varnishing his hair to get attention. The egg-forms on the roof of his museum are explained as prenatal memories. For all his bizarre behavior in life and art, he always saw and presented his wife, Gala, as beautiful, Catalonia as his home.

Deep Roots in Catalonia

To visit the northeast corner of Spain and the one-man museums of the three great modernists is to understand the claim that modern art may have flowered in Paris, but some of its most vital roots were deep in Catalonia. Nor is it just the shows and tales of the three masters of Cubism, surrealism and symbolic abstraction. Artistic expression flourishes in unlikely places today just as it did at the turn of the century. It is honored and, most of all, enjoyed.

Free-form sculptures sprout in roadside rest stops along the A-17; art that moves and jangles is in the departure area of Barcelona airport. The sight of a crowd in a provincial town very likely indicates the unveiling of a new piece of public art.

While international in their appeal and scope, the arts are displayed for home consumption. Tourists, more welcomed than courted, rarely find subtitles in their language (in at least one museum, the subtitles are in Spanish--after Catalan) or even catalogues in their language. We found the galleries uniformly crowded, the lines at the museum shops long, American accents non-existent. Catalonia is still largely undiscovered by U.S. travelers.

Wonderland of Expression

Barcelona, long Spain’s most cosmopolitan city, is a wonderland of artistic expression. Knowing where to begin depends on how far back you want to go. There is the Archaeological Museum (Greek and Roman civilization in Spain), the Museum of Catalonian Art (Romanesque and Gothic periods; the Ceramic Museum is on the first floor), both in Montjuic Park and logically preceding the Museum of Modern Art.

The latter is in La Ciutadella, once a citadel, now the public gardens of Barcelona. This Spanish MOMA contains the work of 19th- and 20th-century Catalans: Tapies, Regolios, Fortuny, Zuloaga and others, including some fine pieces by Ramon Casas who is credited with bringing Impressionism to Spain. There are samples of Miro, Dali and Picasso, though their most significant works belong to their individual museums.

Picasso’s is only a few blocks from Ciutadella to the Gothic Quarter’s narrow Calle Montcada and the 14th-Century palace of the Aguilar family. Picasso gave 2,500 drawings and paintings to Barcelona for this collection, and more have been given by his widow. Two adjacent mansions have been connected to provide additional galleries, and the setting with its multi-storied inner courtyard is singular.

Don Pablo moved to Barcelona with his family at age 13. The year was 1895, and the city full of political and artistic ferment. It was politics that turned his visits to Paris into permanent exile, but before that his artistic education proceeded formally in Barcelona. The Blue Period is Catalan. His boyhood drawings are of special interest.

Artist in Retrospective

Across town on a hillside in Montjuic Park is the white open contemporary structure where the Joan Miro Foundation presents the artist in retrospective and also holds special exhibits of other contemporary artists.

Miro was 10 years younger than Picasso, although he attended the same art school in Barcelona and followed him to Paris. Miro never became an exile, dividing his year between Paris and Catalonia (he made ends meet by taking his Paris studio off-season) until he semi-retired in Palma de Mallorca.

Miro’s move from realism to surrealism to abstract surrealism is easier to show than tell to us non-experts, but he is often referred to as post-modern. The Miro humor is introspective and symbolic; his sculptures often delicate in execution, and all his works require space for full appreciation.

Unlike Picasso who never saw his museum, Miro was able to place his paintings, drawings and sculptures to his satisfaction. The original donation, 290 pieces produced between 1914 and 1975 plus 3,000 drawings, has been enlarged.

To appreciate the confluence of time and place upon artists, visit the structures of the legendary Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926), the architect of the day when Picasso, Miro and Dali were youths. His buildings have been called Disneyesque; his Palace of Catalan Music, “interior decorating turned inside out.” His unfinished masterwork is the Cathedral of the Holy Family (Templo de la Sagrada Familia), even in shell one of the city’s proudest attractions.

While Picasso claimed Gaudi exerted only a negative influence on him, Salvador Dali wrote of childhood memories in Gaudi’s Park Guell, of spending hours staring at the rising temple. For Dali and Miro, surrealism in stone led to logical extensions in other media.

Favorite Son of Figueres

Dali was born in Figueres, a small city about two hours north of Barcelona via the A-17. Although much of his life was spent in Barcelona, Paris and the fishing village of Cadaques, about 20 miles due west, he remains the favorite son of Figueres.

The Salvador Dali Museum is in a huge downtown theater, surely the appropriate setting for the talent of a man called the “Great Eccentric.” Outside its doors are Dali’s comments on late 20th-Century culture: a totem built of broken TV sets; a huge Dali face candled by a giant egg and leering provocatively.

Critics do not commonly rank Dali with Picasso and Miro. Even here in Spain there is more academic respect paid to the Cubists, but guess who is tops with the crowds. The Dali Museum is fun!

It is not just that we enter a lobby and explore stage, orchestra, balconies and loges, all jammed with paintings, sketches, sculpture, dioramas, light plays and various visual trickeries. It is not just the Cadillac in the pit, the life-size human figures, the larger-than-life spoofs, the color spinning against dark curtains or the surreal body parts reaching out from alcoves. It is more that Dali in his real or pretense of madness captured an absurdity we can all relate to, from the fluidity of “Time” to the artist-philosopher meditating from atop a pedestal of truck tires.

Of the three Catalonians who contributed so vitally to 20th-Century art, only Dali is still alive. At 81, he has emerged again the center of controversy and suspected flim-flam, his home at Port Ligat, Cadaques, a target for the curious.

Of the three young men who went to Paris, only Dali refused on principle to learn a word of French. Yet in some ways none of them ever left home or the wit and whimsy that still characterizes Barcelona. They have paid significant homage to the region of their first artistic flowering by endowing with their works three remarkable museums. In Catalonia such gestures are enthusiastically appreciated.

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Where the museums are: Picasso Museum, 15-17 Calle Montcada, a few blocks east of the cathedral in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. It is a wonderful street of 14th- to-18th-century residences. The Costume Museum is across the street. Open daily except Mondays and certain holidays. Open Sunday mornings and some holiday mornings. Free Sundays and holidays, $1 fee other times.

Joan Miro Foundation, Montjuic Park, Barcelona. Other museums in the park include the Archaeological Museum and the Museum of Catalonian Art. There is also Pueblo Espanol, an outdoor museum of Spanish architecture and crafts. Open daily except Mondays and certain holidays. $1 fee.

Theatre-Museum Salvador Dali, Placa Gala i Salvador Dali, Figueres (Girona). Open daily except Tuesdays, Christmas and Good Friday, $1 fee.