Antoni Gaudi Cornet was, arguably, the greatest European architect of his time and possibly the greatest anywhere. The only real challenger was Edward Lutyens, at least in terms of energy and breadth of ideas, but Lutyens was basically an Edwardian eclectic whose style looked backwards rather than forwards. Gaudi, by contrast, was futuristic and hugely original, and it is not always realised that fellow-Catalans, such as Picasso and Miro, owed him a considerable debt. (For proof of this, you need only examine the wiry black lines which abound in both these painters, and then go back to Gaudi's black ironwork with its tortuous, quasi-Baroque vitality.)
Yet Gaudi can only be appreciated by visiting Barcelona, where his main works are and where he toiled and died - run down by one of the city's swiftly-running tramcars. (I can sympathise with this, since at the age of 25 I was nearly run down by one too, while sightseeing on one of the city's capacious Ramblas.) He was then in his 70s, a recluse and an eccentric, estranged from most of the world around him and hostile or indifferent to the young artists who hailed him as a master. In any case, Gaudi was an unbending, authoritarian, old-style Catholic as probably only Spaniards can be, and he regarded the Leftist, sexually emancipated generation of Picasso and his peers as decadent or depraved.
Art Nouveau, as the French and Belgians call it, until recently had a bad passage with modernist critics and the public. One of the great European movements in architecture and crafts, it flourished chiefly in a few cities - Vienna, Brussels, Munich, to some extent Edinburgh - and contained within itself many of the seeds of Modernism. The paintings of Kandinsky are a case in point, but Picasso too went through an Art Nouveau stage, though while Kandinsky would have called the style Jugendstil, Picasso would have known it as Modernismo - or in his native Catalan, Modernisme. It opened the way for many innovations, but, by the time of Gaudi's death, the Bauhaus style had begun to dominate internationally and did so for nearly two generations. And ornament, curves, aestheticism, and other essential features of the older style were anathema to the new cult of functionalism and glass or concrete cubes.
Gaudi himself detested straight lines, which he declared did not exist in nature; and as with Frank Lloyd Wright a little later, nature was always his master. Perhaps this was partly the result of his birth in an obscure Catalan village in 1852, the child of a family of hereditary coopers. As an architectural student he was undistinguished, and all his life he was unsociable and uncompromising, with a notably sharp tongue, which made him enemies. His religion was equally unbending and a surviving photograph shows him, in old age, taking part in a religious procession in Barcelona, bareheaded and grey-bearded.
He never married, and after the death of his father and niece he was looked after by nuns until he moved to the site of his still-unfinished Sagrada Familia church. Here he secluded himself in his workshop until his death.
In the following decade, in the years of the doomed Spanish Republic, anti-clerical hysteria led to his workshop being gutted and torched, so that his drawings and other mememtoes went up in flames. There had been a foretaste of this in the infamous Setmana tragica in Barcelona in 1909, when a mob from the slums terrorised the city, burnt churches and schools, and dug up the decaying corpses of nuns - a regular feature of Anarcho-syndicalist behaviour in the Civil War a quarter of a century later.
Arrests and death sentences followed, including that on the anarchist Francisco Ferrer who, almost certainly, was not in the city at the time of the rioting. It was only too prophetic of the national schizophrenia which was later to split Spain into two irreconcilable camps and ravage it with three years of destructive, vicious, internecine fighting.
Gaudi's buildings suffered from posthumous neglect as well as mob hostility, since for decades he was widely regarded as a relic of an uncherished past. Under the Republic, he was remembered as a political reactionary, while under Franco the Catalan Renaissance, which he had typified, was suppressed and officially buried. However, the revival of his reputation has swelled recently to a flood tide, and it has gone beyond mere theory to an actual restoration of his buildings, which were threatened by deterioration and even vandalism. In particular, the recent restoration of the Casa Mila, known popularly as La Pedrera (The Quarry), has been a model of its kind.
This study is timely and easily readable, though not outstanding; I felt on occasion that Gijs van Hensbergen, while obviously immersed in his subject, was falling backwards a little to make his subject accessible and attractive. That is admittedly difficult, since Gaudi was awkward, intolerant and autocratic, a notoriously difficult man to work with and equally difficult to please. The photographs, too, could in several instances have been more inspiring. However, the book nevertheless makes a useful introduction to the work and life of one of the greatest geniuses ever to come out of Spain.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic
