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are shown here in their entirety. However, more familiar to most will be the
masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age, notably Velázquez’s
Saint Paul
and
Zurbarán’s
Immaculate Conception
.
The modern art collection
MNAC ends on a high note with its unsurpassed
nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Catalan art
collection, which is particularly good on
modernista
and
noucentista
painting and sculpture, the two dominant schools of the period.Rooms
highlight individual artists and genres, shedding light on the development of art
in an exciting period of Catalunya’s history, while there are fascinating diversions
into
modernista
interior design (with some pieces by Gaudí), avant-garde sculpture
and historical photography.
Although he died young, in 1874,
Marià Fortuny i Marsal
is often
regarded as the earliest
modernista
artist; he was certainly 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
was based on a visit to Morocco in 1859 to
observe the war there. Closer to home are the intricate street and market
scenes of El Born neighbourhood the work of the main name in Catalan
Realism, 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
later emergence of
Ramon Casas i Carbó
(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 a progressive sheen,
taking its cue from the very latest in European styles, whether the symbolism
of Whistler or the vibrant social observation of Toulouse-Lautrec. Hot on
their heels came a new generation of
modernista
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 landscapes tended towards the abstract, and
Isidre Nonell i
Monturiol
, who from 1902 until his early death in 1911 painted sombre
naturalistic studies of impoverished gypsy communities.
Noucentisme
was 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
.This was also a period when the Barcelona art world
flourished under the patronage of private galleries like the Galeries Dalmau,
whose important shows in the city after World War I promoted Cubism and
avant-garde works to a wider audience.
Museu Etnològic
From MNAC, Passeig de Santa Madrona snakes downhill towards theTheatre City
and Poble Sec, first passing the
Museu Etnològic
(June–Sept Tues–Sat noon–
8pm, Sun 11am–3pm; Oct–May Tues & Thurs 10am–7pm, Wed & Fri–Sun
MONTJUÏC
|
Museu Etnològic