The Best of Both Worlds

Barcelona is a city that I think anyone would find interesting.  It is extremely colorful, beautifully located, and has a unique feel that I think owes a lot to its supremely high minded citizens.  When I was living in Madrid, I knew that I would visit it sometime, but it wasn’t high on my priority list.  I was more interested in Castile and the romantic image of pure Spain that I carried with me after reading Michener and Hemmingway.  Just from everything I had read and seen on TV, it seemed like a place apart, and didn’t have much of a role to play in the Spain I had come to see. 

When I finally went to visit it, I found out that I was pretty much right all along!  It didn’t feel at all like the rest of Spain.  First of all, it was obviously much more affluent: the streets were cleaner, the people dressed more stylish, and the whole place just felt kind of slick.  Madrid was kind of rough around the edges, perched up high on a cold plateau in the middle of Castile, whereas Barcelona was warm and Mediterranean, and everything seemed to run so smooth and businesslike. 

Of course, this didn’t stop me at all from loving the place.  Yesterday, while viewing the new exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Barcelona, all of those feelings came rushing back.  

It was a like a splash of cold water, waking me up and reminding me what it was that made me love that town…and what it is I miss living here in Cleveland.  Barcelona is so vibrant, its almost as if it cant hold in all that energy and so expresses it through all the great art. 

In addition to the famous names– Picasso, Gaudi, Miro— there were a number of painters that I had never heard of, of whom a guy name Ramon Casas was for me the impressive.  He has a Manet-like style, and just like that  French impressionist, his paintings gave a vivid depiction of life as it was at the end of the 19th century in Catalonia.  You could just look at one of those paintings for an hour, exploring all the little details that don’t come out at first glance.  This was the first major exhibition that the Cleveland Art Museum has given since it closed for renovation, and hopefully there will be more exhibitions as great as this one in the next four years.