Barcelona (10 page)

But (to simplify a little) part of its peculiar character, its
fet differencial,
as one would call it in Catalan, is that it originates in a different kind of Latin, the “low” vernacular spoken by the Roman line soldiers rather than “high” literary Latin. That is why it has so many words in common with other Latin-rooted European languages. “Fear” in Catalan is
por,
in Italian,
paura,
in French,
peur,
and so on, all coming down from the Latin
pavor.
Whereas in Spanish it is
miedo,
reflecting the “high” Latin word for it,
metus.

The official line given out by the Franco regime used to be that Catalan was a degenerate form of Spanish, a sort of hillbilly Spanish gone to seed, or at best a mere dialect. This has never been true. They are distinct tongues, each with its own linguistic integrity. If you measure the importance of a language by the literary works written in it, then it is obvious that Castilian Spanish comes out dominant. But what do you expect, when Catalan speakers are such a minority in Spain's general population? This does not imply a lack of Catalan masterpieces; some would say that the greatest early chivalric novel produced in Spain was itself a parody of the chivalric mode, an exceedingly funny and occasionally scabrous epic named
Tirant lo Blanc,
written in Catalan. But it is a novel more cited in academe than read with gusto in real life.

Not everyone in Barcelona speaks Catalan, and indeed for official purposes the definition of “Catalan” is not a linguistic one. There has been too much migration from other parts of Spain, notably Andalusia; and since everyone there speaks Spanish as a matter of course, those who arrive speaking
only
Spanish have only the weakest of incentives to learn and regularly use Catalan.

And so, when I tried out my few Catalan phrases, hoping to start at least the rudiments of a cat-sat-onthe-mat dialogue in this strange language, I failed utterly. If the person I addressed (behind the bar, say) was Catalan, he or she would reply in Spanish out of courtesy, to make things easier for the foraster. Or else he or she would answer in Spanish to make it plain that no foraster could possibly be expected to have grasped enough of the ancient, melodious, complex, and rich tongue of Catalunya to make any conversation in it worthwhile. Either way, one tended to be shut out.

I
T IS A STRANGE FACT—WELL, IT CAN ALWAYS BE ARGUED ABOUT,
but it seems a fact to me—that although Barcelona in the twenty-five years between 1885 and 1910 produced a flowering in architecture, not much of the kind happened in painting and sculpture.

Later it did foster two Catalan painters, who went on to make a great impact on world painting after 1920 and without whose work modern art, surrealism especially, would have been much impoverished: Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Joan Miró (1893-1983).

But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the time Catalans always liked to call their Renaixenca, although there was expert, witty, and sometimes moving painting done in Barcelona in the studios of Ramón Casas, Santiago Rusinyol, and others, it did not add much to the substantial glories of fin-de-siècle European art, and could scarcely be compared to the achievements of the school of Paris. Barcelona fostered Picasso, but Picasso was not a Catalan artist, just passing through. Barcelona had no figure of comparable greatness to Adolf Menzel in Germany or Isaac Levitan in Russia, Frederic Church in the United States, or even (at his best) Arthur Streeton in Australia. In fact one of the things that struck me most forcibly about late nineteenth-century Catalan painting, when I first saw some examples of it in the Museu d'Art Modern in Barcelona back in the late 1960s, was how much it resembled the kind of impressionism that filled the museums of Sydney and Melbourne—the tonal impressionism, descending mainly from James McNeill Whistler, whose influence swept London, Paris, New York, and places as far apart as Melbourne and Mexico City, in the 1890s. One might have been looking at Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, with a grayer light and the gum trees edited out.

Catalunya's Renaixenca did not translate into English as “Renaissance.” Catalunya never had a Renaissance, not in the Italian sense. What it did have was generally enjoyable but largely derivative painting and sculpture, and plenty of architecture of stunning and almost implausible originality.

Domènech i Montaner (1849-1923) was the great theorist, and the practical all-rounder as well, of Catalan architectural nationalism. He was widely traveled, deeply read, and a scholar of everything from iron forging to medieval heraldry. The son of a Barcelonan bookbinder, he was a protean figure: a gifted draftsman, a historian with a solid base in fieldwork, a nationalist politician, an inspiring teacher, and a publisher who turned his father's firm, Editorial Montaner i Simón, into Spain's leading creator of
éditions de luxe.
Though he was more politically conservative than William Morris in England, he was a somewhat analogous figure and as delightfully attractive a personality.

He was absorbed by the enormous problem of defining the parameters of a national architecture. All talk about design and building, he claimed in a manifesto published in 1878, has to center on this. In writing, we can say who we are. We can imagine painting that makes similar declarations. And so can music. But can architecture do it? And if so, how? On what terms of material and style? In his manifesto Domènech laid the foundations (at least in theory) for an architecture which could be genuinely and forthrightly modern while still incorporating regional difference.

As Europeans living at the end of the nineteenth century, he argued, we all live in a culture which is still, in some sense, a museum. Thanks to the multiplication of images through publication and reproduction, we can get access to a huge vocabulary of prototype and shape. We can copy Greek, Gothic, Vitruvian, Indian, Egyptian, and Islamic building forms, and it behooves us to be proficient in all of them. But none of these attach to our central myth. This myth is nothing other than Technology. In a world of iron, glass, chemistry, and electricity, Domènech wrote, “mechanical science determines the rudiments of architectural form” and “everything heralds the appearance of a new era for architecture.”

The demands of architecture, he went on, go far beyond the merely scholarly. Spain has two great wells of architecture. One is the Romanesque and Gothic in Catalunya, especially in Barcelona. The other, in the south, is Islamic: Granada, Seville, Córdoba. Neither excludes the other and local patriotism must not make it seem to. A truly national architecture, said Domènech, has to draw strength from them and use them, but it will not come into being from merely copying them. “Only societies without firm, fixed ideas,” he wrote, “which fluctuate between today's thinking and yesterday's, without faith in tomorrow—only these societies fail to inscribe their histories in durable monuments.” And, if you think of American postmodernism a century later, with its flittering clever references to architectural style, how right he was!

Domènech quoted too, and incessantly. But he did so with intelligence and verve. He was only thirty-seven when he was asked to do two of the main buildings of the 1888 Universal Exposition in Barcelona. The Café-Restaurant survives and is a landmark in modernista design. The Hotel Internacional was demolished after the fair, but from what we know of it Domènech was already, at this tender age for an architect, a master of building systems. Barcelona then had no hotels that even the most fervent Catalan patriot would have called first rate (and as a matter of fact, it still overrates its own hotels in the guidebooks). But he brought off the feat, incredible by modern standards of construction management, of finishing the Hotel Internacional, a five-story iron-frame structure clad in brick and terra-cotta, with 1,600 rooms and street elevations five hundred feet long, within budget and on time. We have no idea how well it would have stood up to the wear and tear of long-term use, but merely to finish it was a phenomenal feat of organization.

The Café-Restaurant, however, is with us yet in its changed incarnation as a zoological museum. It looks medieval, with its crenellations and white ceramic shields. Some of these shields, however, are a prediction of pop art—instead of armorial bearings, they carry advertising slogans for Catalan produce, such as the drinks the Café-Restaurant was offering its clients, and are a light-hearted parody of Domènech's own interest in heraldic history.

But the building is made of plain brick and industrial iron. The span between its medievalism and the modernity of its materials is what makes the Café-Restaurant an early modernista landmark.

To use plain brick in 1888 was considered close to a violation of etiquette. Brick was a “dumb” material. The very word for brick in Catalan,
totxo,
means “ugly, stupid.” The notion of making a
festive
building from brick was unheard of in Catalunya.

But Domènech thought brick ought to be used plainly. You could make practically any shape you wanted from it: flat Catalan arches, round Moorish ones, cogging, diapers, tricky reveals, corbels. Being made from the very earth of the homeland, brick was patriotic. It was
clar i català,
in a phrase used by both him and his younger colleague Puig i Cadafalch, and by Gaudí, too—clear and Catalan. The same with iron, about whose unembellished use young Domènech was just as explicit. He let his iron beams show, and no effort was made to dissemble the iron window frames and door jambs of the Café-Restaurant. He used painted, glazed, and molded ornament, but never to deny the structure underneath—a habit of mind that reached an extreme in the thick blossoming of ceramic and mosaic roses across the structural grid of his Palau de la Música, 1905-08.

The Palau de la Música, and his enormous Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (finished two years later), are the masterworks of Domènech's long, varied career. Both show his genius for innovative planning. In doing the hospital he was expected to work within the square grid of Cerdà's Eixample, but the project was so large—a site of nine full city blocks—that he didn't feel obliged to.

Barcelona in 1900 had never had an acceptable hospital. In the Raval, next to the Ramblas, the Hospital de la Sant Creu (Holy Cross) dated from the fifteenth century. Luckily for the Barcelonans, it was ruined in a fire in 1887. A new hospital had to be built. It made sense to erect it in the Eixample, on the less traffic-heavy and crowded side of town. After some dickering among the trustees, the job went to Domènech's office.

An enormous site was allotted—360 acres of urban space. Cleared and excavated, it would produce a garden city skewed at forty-five degrees to the grid city, since, Domènech declared, he loathed “the eternal monotony of two widely separated parallel lines.” Then this site would become one enormous basement, holding all the service areas of the hospital: operating theaters, storage, circulation, machinery—all underground. Above, at ground level, set among gardens, would be the richly decorated entrance block and the forty-eight pavilions for staff and patients.

Domènech's Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau

The Hospital de Sant Pau, then, was not a mere building but a large controlled environment. Keeping up the patients' mood was a necessary part of the control. To lift their spirits and banish some of the association of hospitals with death and suffering, Domènech lavished his imagination on the detail of each building.

The facade sparkles with mosaics depicting the history of hospitals back to the Middle Ages. Octagonal columns support shallow domes, and the whole vestibule is bathed in golden light from a stained-glass
claraboia,
or skylight, in the roof. Domènech, like Henri Matisse, believed that color had an actual therapeutic effect. It made you want to recover and live. His son recalled that “the material took on nobility even if it was ordinary … [In] the Hospital of Sant Pau, … he thought that everything that could give a feeling of well-being to the sick was also a form of therapy.” With inventive brio Domènech designed the effervescent roof-scape of pavilion domes, and the profusion of sculpture—allegorical, historical, or just decorative—that everywhere greets the visitor's eye. He gave the sculpture program to two masters, Eusebi Arnau and Pau Gargallo, who in turn employed dozens of assistant carvers and ceramists.

Oddly enough, there are no references to the Hospital de Sant Pau in English travel writing of the day. Yet perhaps it is not so odd, since passing Anglo-American eyes, used to the punitive grimness of their own hospitals at the time, might not even have identified this marvelous complex as being a hospital at all.

The quintessential building of Domènech's career, however, was the Palau de la Música Catalana. It was the one real institution of modernist culture that rose in Barcelona in the 1890s, prospered thereafter, and continues undiminished today. It housed a choral society, the Orfeó Català, which had been created to carry forward the work of Josep Clavé, father of Catalunya's folk-music revival in the 1860s. The Orfeó was started by two young men, neither of whom had ever met Clavé, but they both adored him and his work. Both were obsessed by cançó popular.

They would expand Clavé's work by using folk music as the ordinary public's bridge to
música universal,
classical music. Their choral society and its
Orfeonistes
would mingle folk music with symphonic and choral works by Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Wagner, Haydn, Berlioz, and Mahler.

Especially, there would be Wagner. Clavé had been mad for Wagner, but it was not a generally shared enthusiasm in Barcelona back in the 1860s. However, this changed by 1870, and now musical Catalanists saw the future, as one of them put it, in “Wagnerism, considered as an instrument and a sign of national culture.”

Why did Catalanists make such a cult of Wagner? Because they saw in his work for Germany an achieved parallel to their own desire to create a myth of national identity for Catalunya. Wagner's heroes had been to Catalunya. Their holy mountains were his holy mountains. “My name is Parsifal, and I come from Montsalvat”—Catalunya
was
Wagnerian Spain.

And there was a more general reason. The antiquity of Wagner's themes contrasted with the daring modernity of his musical forms. This fit perfectly with the spirit of the Catalan Renaixenca that now suffused the city's most advanced architecture. Wagner had intended the
Ring
cycle to be the founding epic of Bavaria, as Virgil's
Aeneid
was of Rome. Its mission was to describe the identity of the German race. Likewise, the Renaixenca was focused on, obsessed by, the supposed uniqueness of the Catalan race. It wanted to find its “modernism” by evoking an idealized past, albeit an absolutely mythic one.

No wonder then that Catalanists saw Wagner's operas as a guide to combining myths of a legendary past with the overarching myth of progress and innovation. Germany, too, was a culture identified with yearning and unattained idealism—enyoranca, as Catalan put it. Wagner's vision of the “total work of art,” in which all media played a part, had a strong allure for architects who were working out of a deep craft base and sought to combine the talents of painters, ceramists, bronze casters, iron smiths, joiners, glaziers, mosaicists, and masons. All these are represented at an abnormally rich level of skill and display in the Palau de la Música Catalana, the most Wagnerian building in Barcelona—or the world.