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                                                                                OLYMPICS, Page 52

1992 SUMMER GAMES

THE CITY: Homage To BARCELONA


Teeming and gritty, the historic Catalan capital is jealous
of its independence and proud of its brilliant culture

By ROBERT HUGHES/BARCELONA


    "You can fall in love, or at least into some kind of
infatuation, with Barcelona. But not everyone finds the course
of the affair smooth, for as the Spanish historian Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto recently wrote in his short history of the
city, "like one of those tryingly beautiful and energetic women
whom all men are able to identify among their acquaintances, she
can excite passion only for short periods." It can be a
confusing place for those who expect the stereotype of tourist
Spain -- flamenco, bullfights, serenades under the moonlit
balcony. It is a gritty city, crowded, with brusque street
manners, a high crime rate, a seemingly ineradicable drug
problem and some of the worst traffic in Europe. Romantic Spain
it is not. But it evokes an extreme, sometimes even delirious,
attachment.

    Barcelona is and always has been a place of industry. In
fact, for most of the 19th century it was the only industrial
city in Spain, a sort of Mediterranean Manchester raised to
wealth on cotton, silk and metal, presided over by a triumphant
bourgeoisie and racked by working-class (especially anarchist)
rebellion. Catalans are archetypally producers rather than
dreamers, and they tend to pride themselves on what they call
seny, common sense raised almost to the level of a theological
virtue. They like you to know they have molta feina, a work
overload. They do not see themselves or their capital as
picturesque; that they leave to the Andalusians. Barcelona is
no more like Seville or Granada than Milan is like Naples.

    How is one to approach this teeming, impacted port that
Joan Maragall, Barcelona's greatest turn-of-the-century poet
and grandfather of the city's present mayor, Pasqual Maragall,
called la gran encisera -- the great enchantress? Only in terms
of its own history -- one not always shared with the rest of
Spain, and often in opposition to it. Barcelona is a very old
city, founded by the Romans late in the 1st century B.C.; their
massive walls, topped by medieval additions, still encircle its
core.

    It was not, to begin with, an important town; the Roman
capital of what is now Catalunya was farther south, at
Tarragona. But Barcelona began to gain significance after the
Roman Empire collapsed and the invading Visigoths took over, and
it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's
heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken
charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of
Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman,
Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan
state.

    From then on, Catalans ran Catalunya, and Barcelona, for
themselves. They were jealous of their independence and
determined to sustain their own laws and language. From the 13th
century through the 15th, their outward thrust created a Med
iterranean trading empire that stretched from the coast of North
Africa to the gates of Byzantium. With the money this brought
home, a city grew: the greatest Spanish city of the Middle Ages.
Even today the Barri Gotic, or Old City, of Barcelona, facing
the port, contains in its winding alleys more functioning Gothic
structures than any other such enclave in Europe.

    Catalan Gothic is austere, primal, bony architecture,
nowhere near as decorated as French or English. Its grandeur is
all in the structure, and no building displays this more
piercingly than the 14th century church of Santa Maria del Mar,
the "workers' church" of Barcelona, with its sublimely plain
interior, a solemn Sequoia grove of stone hewed from the
quarries of Montjuic, the mountain that guards the port.

    Barcelona's democratic traditions and sense of
independence go back to the Middle Ages. There were menestrals
-- shopkeepers and artisans -- on the Consell de Cent, or
Council of One Hundred, the governing body of the city, in the
13th century. The city's charter of citizens' rights, the
Usatges, or Usages, predates the Magna Carta by a century. And
the Catalans' sense of otherness -- the separation, cultural and
institutional, from the rest of Spain -- comes through loud and
clear in the oath of allegiance their leaders swore to the
Aragonese kings in the 15th century: "We, who are as good as
you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as
our king and sovereign lord, provided that you observe all our
liberties and laws -- but if not, not." Catalans have always
waxed lyrical over their medieval defiance of kingship and
railed against "centralism" -- rule by Madrid. Their political
history is one long rebuke to the dominant ideology of Europe:
that of the nation-state that subsumes and represses cultural
differences within it.

    Traditionally, the rallying point of the Catalans is their
language -- "our ancient, melodious and abundant tongue," as the
19th century poet Joaquim Rubio i Ors put it -- spoken by about
6 million people today and matrix of an important national
literature that goes back to the days of the troubadours.
(Catalan and Provencal were sister languages, and poets writing
in both moved among the courts of France and Catalunya.)

    At various times since the reign of Ferdinand and
Isabella, Castile has tried to take Catalunya over and suppress
its speech. Francisco Franco banned all publishing and teaching
in Catalan, hoping to prevent his subjects from thinking
separatist thoughts. But obdurately, Catalan survives, and now
that separatist dreams have faded -- Jordi Pujol, the president
of the autonomous region of Catalunya, dropped the separatist
plank from his party's platform last October -- it is the
language that remains the focus of Catalun ya's enthusiasm for
cultural distinction.

    Barcelona did not develop smoothly. It has had three
convulsive spasms of rebuilding and self-renewal, with long
stretches of inertia in between. The most recent one began in
the late 1970s and has been going on for the past 10 years under
Barcelona's socialist Mayor Maragall: the refashioning and
sprucing up of the city, from its infrastructure -- sewers, ring
roads -- to the restoration of its huge deposit of historic
buildings, most of which had decayed badly during the Franco
years, through to new works such as the refurbished waterfront,
the Olympic Village and the magnificent covered stadium on Mont
juic by Arata Isozaki.

    The first spurt of renewal was in the Middle Ages,
creating the Gothic city. Then came a slump, as the ascendancy
of Castile and the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic thrust Barcelona into a 200-year depression, from which
it began to recover by industrializing only at the end of the
18th century.

    The second boom occurred at the height of Barcelona's
industrial prosperity and misery, between 1860 and 1910. Its
main frame, the huge grid of chocolate-square blocks that
stretches from the Barri Gotic up the slope toward the Coll
serola hills, was designed in 1859 by a socialist engineer named
Ildefons Cerda. It is known as the Eixample, or Enlargement, and
is the ancestor of all the Utopian schemes of 20th century
architecture. The cultural contents of this grid, as it
developed, proved no less remarkable. The trade-obsessed city
of powerful clerics and stuffy businessmen was the closest place
to northern Europe in Spain. It received the ideas of the French
Enlightenment, and later those of socialists and anarchists; its
music, literature and painting were permeated by French
Symbolism, by Wagner and Nietzsche, by Impressionism.

    Barcelona was the place where Picasso studied, where
Salvador Dali grew up, and out of whose deeply conservative
traditions of family and rural life Joan Miro, Ca talunya's
greatest painter since the 14th century, was able to fashion an
art of the most radical poetry. And the best buildings
constructed anywhere in Spain between 1860 and the outbreak of
World War I were all in Catalunya, and mostly in Barcelona. The
combined talents of its turn-of-the-century architects made it
La Ciudad de los Prodigios, or the City of Marvels, as the
Catalan writer Eduardo Mendoza titled his savagely ironic,
picaresque novel of fin-de-siecle Barcelona.

    The civic style, if one can so compress it, was more than
just a Spanish mutation of Art Nouveau, which the Catalans
called modernisme. It was obsessed with the meaning of local
nationality and the eternal pressure of the past. It was full
of myth, decoration, narrative, metaphor: a speaking
architecture, overrich for some purist tastes but of interest
to anyone today who wants to see how social and historical
meanings are embodied in new building.

    Gradually it filled Cerda's grid, which is now the world's
greatest museum of 1900s architecture. The big Catalan
mercantile families who made their piles after 1850 and ran the
city tended to preen themselves on being modern versions of
Renaissance princes -- all the more so since most of their
grandfathers had been artisans or colonial hustlers. There was
a lot of pent-up vigor and ambition itching to glorify itself.

    So they built copiously through the three decades of what
Catalans still call their Renaissance. La Renaixenca was a
powerful, diffuse movement. It revolved obsessively around the
issue of Catalan independence. It embraced politics, social
theory, poetry, architecture. It was both progressive and
intensely nostalgic. It believed in the future; it also drew its
confidence from invoking the vanished era of the Catalan counts,
the troubadours, the Cistercian monasteries.

    Its best-known master was, of course, Antonio Gaudi
(1852-1926). A descendant of Catalan metalsmiths, Gaudi
introduced a wholly new idea of built space: an organic kind of
space, not bounded by rigid lines, that undulates, flares,
inflates, twists and contains stunning metaphors and moments of
theater. The basement of the palace he built off the Ramblas for
his main patron, Eusebi Guell, could serve as a set for The Ring
-- not surprisingly, since Catalans in the 1880s were crazy for
Wagner, the newest of new composers. Gaudi's Casa Mila, on
Passeig de Gracia, known to Barce lonans as La Pedrera -- the
Stone Quarry -- was intended to suggest a seaworn cliff, and its
iron balconies fringe it like kelp.

    His architecture is that of a great sculptor -- witness
the totemic chimneys and ventilators on the Casa Mila and the
Palau Guell -- and a remarkable painter too: the facade of Casa
Batllo, on the opposite side of Gracia, is as atmospheric as a
Monet, sparkling with drifts of blue and green mosaic. Nor
should one miss the iron dragon gate of the Finca Guell, or the
crypt of the Colonia Guell -- the chapel of an industrial
community for weavers at Santa Coloma de Cervello, half an
hour's drive from Barcelona -- or the Parc Guell, with its
ravishing Hansel-and-Gretel pavilions and its undulating benches
covered in their mosaic of broken tiles; or, of course, the
Sagrada Familia.

    The Sagrada Familia (which is not a cathedral but an
"expiatory temple" dedicated to the cult of the Holy Family) is
Gaudi's best-known building, the logo of Barcelona as the Statue
of Liberty is of New York City. Unfortunately, because most of
its designs were lost in the Spanish Civil War, nobody knows how
Gaudi would have finished it, and the newly completed sections
look dead compared with the parts Gaudi supervised. The facade
sculptures by Josep Subirachs are particularly inert and
vulgar. They seem to epitomize the moment when the religious art
of Catholic Europe died for want of anything better to do,
almost exactly 2,000 years after it began.

    Tradition -- and tourism -- insists the Sagrada Familia is
Gaudi's masterpiece. It is not. The Casa Mila and the crypt of
the Colonia Guell, among others, are superior. But in any case,
not all the best modernista building and decor are by Gaudi.
Other and hardly lesser Catalan architects await discovery by
the visitor. Two names in particular stand out: Lluis Domenech
i Montaner (1850-1923) and Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867-1957).

    Puig, a brilliant eclectic, produced some of the signature
buildings of Barcelona. One is the Casa Amatller, next to Gaudi's
Casa Batllo, a fecund parody of a Dutch burgher's
housefront, with mock-medieval sculptures by the gifted Eusebi
Arnau -- including animals blowing glass and taking photos,
these having been the owner's hobbies. Another is Puig's
exquisitely decorated house for the Baron Quadras, now a museum
of musical instruments; a third, the Venetian-Gothic Casa Marti,
housed the center of Barcelona's artistic bohemia, the Four Cats
cafe, where established artists like Ramon Casas hobnobbed with
younger ones like Picasso.

    But it fell to Domenech, a man obsessed with the history
of Catalunya, to design what may be the most extreme Art
Nouveau building in Europe. This is the Palau de la Musica
Catalana (1905-08). It was built for the Orfeo Catala, a
choral-music society. Pablo Casals and Montserrat Caballe, both
Catalans, began their careers here. From the mosaic-sheathed
ticket office to the stupendous inverted bell of a stained-glass
skylight in the auditorium, from the sculpted Valkyries riding
across the proscenium arch to the encrustations of ceramic roses
(each the size of a cabbage) on the ceiling, it takes decor
beyond congestion; and yet, because it is also one of Europe's
earliest curtain-wall buildings, framed in a steel grid, Catalan
historians are fond of praising its "rationalism" -- which was
also real.

    One gets a gradual sense of the aspirations of the Catalan
Renaixenca by walking the streets of Barcelona, noticing things,
but the grid of the Eixample is vast and hard on the feet. Here
in Domenech's choral theater, it is baptism by total immersion.
The "new Barcelona" may not, in the end, produce any buildings
that rival those of the late 19th century. But the fact of
bringing the old ones back to civic life, in all their splendor,
would be achievement enough for any city administration, Games
or no Games.