Barcelona Snapshots 2

MACBA & MnAC

It’s Wednesday, there is the smell of bad drains and the screech of green parakeets in the air so it must be Barcelona. We stand in the square outside the great white building that is MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, watching skateboarders jump the black stone steps.

Yesterday we visited its sister museum, the Museu d’Art modern, which despite its name, has a collection of Catalan Art spanning the last thousand years. There is a collection of Romanesque Church Art from the 11th and 12th Centuries, including original murals, many from half domed ceilings. The technique for transferring them to display in the gallery is as remarkable as the images themselves. The paintings were removed by coating them with a soluble adhesive stronger than the grip of the paint to the wall. This was covered with a backing material so that the pictures could be peeled off and stuck to canvas specially prepared for them. The canvas had been cut, stitched and stretched over complex wooden frames so that the resulting shape exactly replicated the walls and ceilings the murals had been removed from. This is stunning and painstaking work that allows us to compare and understand the development of this branch of art in one space rather than travelling all over North East Spain.

Upstairs is a collection of paintings from the baroque to the twentieth century, including works by Picasso and Miro. There are also some applied arts, including reconstructions, using the original panelling and furniture, of Art Nouveau rooms. The piece that made the most profound impression on me, in a selection of very fine works, was a cubist sculpture called ‘Ballerina’ by the artist Pablo Gargallo. It’s a superb example of sheet metal sculpture, beautifully constructed and wonderfully three dimensional despite being constructed in flat planes.
Halfway through the rooms we come out in to a huge open space under the main dome of the roof. Scattered in this large area are groups of extremely comfortable armchairs on which people are dozing. There is plenty of room so we copy them. ‘J’ thinks it an idea that every gallery and museum should copy. It allows you to recharge your visual batteries so to speak.

Back in the here and now we are on the top floor of MACBA wandering through Be-Bomb, art from France and the US 1946 – 1956, Picasso the great innovator to Pollock the great dribbler. We watch film of the Bikini Island Atomic bomb. The fleet of boats anchored round it to test its destructive force look like toys floating in a very big bathtub. After the speed of the initial flash the rolling clouds seem to move in slow motion they are so vast. Beautiful and chilling.
On to the abstract expressionists. Much of this work leaves me cold, so many of the paintings look as though the artists played with their own poo when they were small and never really got beyond that experience. Nevertheless the exhibition is a fascinating journey through the art being made in the earliest years of my life.

MnAC

MACBA