At the beginning there is a plan. This massively inflated Barcelona, which was growing rapidly due to the boom in textile factories, from the 1860s onwards. Just as in Paris the more famous Baron Haussmann presented a master plan to make the French metropolis, which still partly seemed medieval, structurally fit for the future, the architectural gridwork of the engineer Ildefons Cerdà also stretched out its tentacles block by block and place by place.
In the end, this beautiful new living space for an up-and-coming bourgeoisie was ten times larger than the cramped Barri Gòtic, the nucleus of the Catalan capital in Prussian Spain. Today, of course, Barcelona has long been surrounded by the not always beautiful city, which has continued to grow since the renewed impetus of the 1992 Olympic Games.
And the still largely empty surroundings of the Sagrada Família, which was begun in 1882 and was soon completed after well over a hundred years, can be seen in a drawn veduta in the Munich exhibition “Barcelona Moderna”, and has long since been transformed into the tourist problem of an entire, gentrified district.
In its exhibition history, the Hypo Bank art gallery has repeatedly dealt with Spain at the turn of the century, be it in retrospectives with Joaquín Sorolla (2016) or Ignacio Zuloaga (2023). Now the focus is on the artistic departure of an entire city, namely Barcelona, into modernity.
Which makes sense especially in Munich. This proud city of art, which sometimes, as Thomas Mann mocked, “shined” more than created radiantly, also scored extraordinarily well in art history at the turn of the century. Not only with Art Nouveau, named after the Munich magazine of the same name, but also with the artist group “Blauer Reiter”.
The artistic desire in Barcelona at the beginning of the 20th century was not so unusually extreme, but it was still fascinating in its breadth and on a specific and special level. It was already bizarre, as it becomes clear in the first rooms of “Barcelona moderna” (the term “modernisme” is avoided), how much the ornamentation, be it in graphics or decorative arts, even in architecture, was still inspired by the Middle Ages. Often paired with floral beautification.
This applies, for example, to the young Gaudì, but also to the organically ornamental architects Lluís Domènech i Montaner (culminating in his enchantingly graceful Palau de la Música Catalana) and Josep Puig i Cadafalch. The same applies to the interior of the popular artists' bar “Zu den Vier Katzen” (“Els Quatre Gats”), which looked like a knight's drinking room designed for drugs.
Cultural constellations became visible in such places, as was the case in the legendary Cau Ferrat by the painter Santiago Rusiñol (whose El Greco “Penitent Magdalene” also came to Munich) in Sitges. All of these places were not just picturesque meeting places for an art-loving society, but rather laboratories for a new cultural identity.
Barcelona around 1900. This is the city as a place where the future had already begun, while the present was still busy managing its social dislocations. There was construction, speculation, production, celebration and protest everywhere. The bourgeoisie had magnificent facades built, but the working class lived on the dark side of industrial expansion.
A new generation of artists had decided that the world no longer had to look the way it had previously been painted. A time of nervousness, of elegance, decadence and forward thinking. “From Gaudí to Picasso”, 160 paintings, graphics, sculptures, furniture and architectural models are gathered in the Kunsthalle and curated by Carlos Alonso Pérez-Fajardo, Nerina Santiorius and Franziska Stöhr as an encounter with Catalan Modernism, which developed between 1880 and 1914.
Between these two names, which are ideal for tourism and museums, there are far less well-known artists who are well worth seeing. Anyone who particularly looks at the pictures shown will notice that there are three painters in particular who give the Catalan awakening a face: Ramon Casas, Hermen Anglada Camarasa and Isidre Nonell.
Ramon Casas is the man of urban modernity. He observes, registers, dissects - with the naturalness of someone who is well versed in the society he portrays. His images are elegant sociological diagnoses. Casas is the chronicler of a bourgeoisie that has just invented itself and attaches great importance to looking as natural as possible. Also because it is currently in the process of leaving the rest of Spain behind, which has lost its last colony, Cuba.
This attitude to life is evident in his famous picture “Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu on a tandem” from 1897. Two men on a bicycle, in an odd balance between belief in progress, virile camaraderie and artistic self-dramatization. The tandem becomes the cipher of a new time.
Of course, Casas was not only a gifted observer of urban life, but also a master of psychological distance. His portraits and interiors show people who are aware of their social position without having to demonstrate it. In particular, his “Moulin de la Galette” from 1901/02, which was often shown by the Impressionists, takes us into the international world of entertainment in which Barcelona and Paris, Catalan ambitions and French way of life come together. Casas' people are players in a social game whose rules he knows exactly. And yet one of his posters also advertises a clinic for the treatment of syphilis.
Where Casas is watching, Hermen Anglada Camarasa is getting drunk. Where the former measures the social surface with cool precision, the latter lets the color off the leash. His painting is a celebration of sensuality, an Iberian triumph of the decorative, an almost intoxicating transformation of reality into a visual event. His pictures of women no longer seem to be composed of objects and figures, but rather of light, materiality, color surfaces and rhythmic movements. Reality is not depicted, it is orchestrated.
With Isidre Nonell the temperature of the exhibition changes. Suddenly the social amusement, the decorative frenzy and the elegant play of colors are over. Nonell leads us into a world that is not envisioned in the modern metropolis's brilliant self-image. Just then Casas was celebrating the expensive but limitless, even emancipated technology in the “Motorist” from the Liceu Club, which luckily survived the fire in the adjacent opera house (where Richard Wagner also became one of the heroes of modernism).
And suddenly we look into the streaky gray-green of Nonelle's “Gitana”. Its characters are poor, marginalized, social outsiders, often women from the Roma community. He paints people who are not part of the decorative inventory of the up-and-coming city, but whose existence makes the downside of its progress visible. Their faces appear closed, the bodies seem to sink back into themselves, the colors are muted, sometimes downright earthy and gloomy. Here man remains a vulnerable, contradictory existence.
And from Nonell it is only a small step to one who rightly completed the course, as a 13-year-old from Málaga who discovered himself as an artist in Barcelona and nine years later in Paris as a cubist who became a revolutionary: Pablo Picasso.
"Barcelona moderna. From Gaudí to Picasso", until February 21, 2027, Kunsthalle Munich; Catalog 45 euros
