Barcelona

by Robert Hughes

  Cec d’amor per un llenguatge,

  que no tinc prou dominat

  emprenc el pelerinatge

  pel fossar del temps passat.

  Blind with love for a language,

  All too powerless today,

  I set out on a pilgrimage

  Through the graveyard of olden times.

  The first poet to set out through the “graveyard” actually worked in a finance house in Madrid and, though unquestionably Catalan and much given to boasting piteously about the enyoranca (nostalgic longing) he felt for his native soil, did not actually go so far as to live on it. His name was Bonaventura Carles Aribau i Farriols (1798-1862). He had dreams of becoming a Chateaubriand, a Byron, exhorting his fellow Catalans to regain their ancient liberties and, especially, the right to use their native tongue. To this end he wrote an ode, “La Pàtria—The Fatherland.” It proved to be the work of art with which the Catalan Renaixenca began. For there he was, supposedly pining away in Madrid, and realizing that his native language—la llengua llemosina, the Catalan tongue—lay at the heart of belonging. It contains all his recognizable images from birth onward. Only in Catalan can he think straight. “Let me speak again,” he cries, in a transport of loss:

  The tongue of those wise men

  who filled the world with their customs and laws,

  the tongue of the strong men who served the kings,

  defended their rights, avenged their insults.

  Beware, beware the ungrateful man whose lips utter

  his native accent in a far country and does not weep,

  who thinks of his origins without pangs of yearning,

  nor takes his fathers’ lyre from the holy wall!

  For literate Catalans, resentful of the political dominance of Madrid, this was venturesome stuff. And even as a twentieth-century Australian, I found its moping and somewhat defensive tone—for the Catalans are quite capable of feeling those pangs of enyoranca without actually leaving their native soil—quite comprehensible, even familiar. Neither culture was fully self-sustaining: Aribau freely chose to work in Madrid, after all, whilst bemoaning his “exile,” and continued to do so long after publishing “La Pàtria,” even though he could presumably have worked in one of the other banks that flourished in Barcelona’s energetic mercantile economy—and he felt a tad guilty about it, which led to poses of exaggerated independence and virtue. But despite his expatriate status, or perhaps even partly because of it, Aribau came to be seen as the founder of literary Catalanism, and his array of patriotic images would dominate the discourse of Catalan independence for the next half century, combining to form an idealized feudal past.

  So every year, from 1859 on, a little elite of Catalans would gather in Barcelona to recite praises of Catalan virtue and Catalan history in terms so precious, stilted, and old-fashioned that few other people could understand them, even if they were Catalan. But their feelings about the need for Catalan as common speech as well as a literary medium were widely shared, for, as the arch-conservative bishop of Vic, Josep Torras i Bagès, wrote in The Catalan Tradition, “The word or the tongue of a people is the manifestation and glow of its substance, the image of its figure, and he who knows the language knows the people who speak it; once the tongue disappears, so do the people.”

  Until well into the 1880s the Jocs Florals were considered the “spinal column,” as one writer put it, of the Renaixenca; they were taken as the annual proof that the Catalan language was the main conduit of elevated national feeling. They were, in a sense, a medieval revival, though the original Jocs Florals—a troubadour’s competition, in which poets competed for prizes from the court—do not seem to have been held often. They began, supposedly, in 1324, when seven young nobles met in Toulouse and decided to invite poets and troubadours from all over the paisos catalans to take part in a poetry competition, an eisteddfod, the next year.

  By the early 1400s, the Jocs Florals were almost a tradition in Barcelona and they offered three trophies. The third prize was a violet made of silver. The second prize was a golden rose. But the first prize was a flor natural, a real rose. It would wither and die, of course, but it was a reminder that no work of art could rival nature. The prize would fade; the poem would last in the hearts of readers.

  The Jocs Florals died in the Middle Ages and were soon a memory, not a living tradition. They were not revived until nearly 1860, by which time the practice of writing Catalan verse began to consolidate again.

  But one should take care not to put the cart before the horse. Catalan was not preserved as a language by the mere fact that some poets wished to write in it, and made big efforts to do so. What guaranteed the integrity and continuity of Catalan was, quite simply, common speech. People just kept speaking it, despite the ridiculous and, finally, unpoliceable edicts against it from Madrid, whose purpose in forbidding the language was to destroy the sense of self that a bludgeoned people retained. People do not speak a language because patriotic poems are written in it, and they do not give up speaking it because those same poems are censored. They speak it, and keep speaking it, because they learned it long before they could read. In Aribau’s words, “My first infant wail was in Catalan / when I sucked the sweet milk from my mother’s nipple.” If Catalan had not been spoken as the vernacular of the people of Barcelona and the rest of Catalunya, it would have perished, just as Latin usage perished, withering on the social vine. But it did not.

  Catalan is a moderately difficult language for a foreigner to learn, but certainly no harder than Spanish or Italian, both of which, being descended from Latin, it closely resembles. Certainly it is not difficult in the acute way that Basque is. Nobody, including the Basques themselves, seems to have the foggiest notion where Basque comes from. It resembles no other tongue spoken on Earth; whereas Catalan’s relation to Latin is clear and straightforward. It is the fruit of the Roman occupation, more than two thousand years ago.

  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, c
omplex, and rich tongue of Catalunya to make any conversation in it worthwhile. Either way, one tended to be shut out.

  THREE

  IT 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 t
he 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.