Madrid opens a large exhibition of Gaudí with which Andrea Levy wants to "build bridges"

Gaudí divided the intellectuals of his time – Eugeni d'Ors referred to La Pedrera as “that troglodyte quarry” – but Barcelona-born Andrea Levy, delegate of the Madrid City Council's Department of Culture, hopes that now it will serve to unite cities: yesterday inaugurated in one of the great exhibition spaces of the capital, CentroCentro, in front of the Cibeles, the Gaudí exhibition, 150 pieces including plans, models, paintings, furniture and period photographs that go through the architecture of the Catalan genius from his first project for a worker cooperative in Mataró –although later it would always work for the bourgeoisie and the church– up to the Sagrada Familia.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
13 October 2022 Thursday 23:41
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Madrid opens a large exhibition of Gaudí with which Andrea Levy wants to "build bridges"

Gaudí divided the intellectuals of his time – Eugeni d'Ors referred to La Pedrera as “that troglodyte quarry” – but Barcelona-born Andrea Levy, delegate of the Madrid City Council's Department of Culture, hopes that now it will serve to unite cities: yesterday inaugurated in one of the great exhibition spaces of the capital, CentroCentro, in front of the Cibeles, the Gaudí exhibition, 150 pieces including plans, models, paintings, furniture and period photographs that go through the architecture of the Catalan genius from his first project for a worker cooperative in Mataró –although later it would always work for the bourgeoisie and the church– up to the Sagrada Familia.

“The meaning of this exhibition is to show a great Spanish architect but also, and I thank the Barcelona City Council for having helped us in everything, to unite cities that should not be separated or compete negatively, the better Barcelona does, the better to Madrid”, assured Levy. That he recalled that next week the exhibition on Barcelona's counterculture curated by Pepe Ribas will open in the same building. “It is important that exhibitions like these serve to build bridges, we are not going to take modernism away from Barcelona, ​​nor from one of its illustrious architects, but making these awards will help us to get closer to its history, culture and beauty instead of distance ourselves and want to separate. I wish we were invited to more exhibitions from Madrid to Barcelona”, he stressed.

He had previously assured that "until the MoMA exhibition in 1957, recognizing the figure of Gaudí, modernism was not valued" and that in La Pedrera "there was a bingo and a hippy market". And the curator of the exhibition, Charo Sanjuán, assured that even today there is sometimes a "stereotyped and superficial vision" of Gaudí, and that "beneath the originality of the forms, the ornamentation, the color and the inspiration in nature that result attractive of his works at first, behind the superficial lies a great architect who studies structures in depth, who starts from a knowledge of the past but renews it and creates new forms from what has already been done”.

The exhibition starts with a Gaudí who works as an assistant to other architects to pay for his studies – he draws the project for the façade of the Barcelona cathedral devised by Joan Martorell and collaborates on the monumental fountain in the Ciutadella park – and goes through his homes , casino, gym and school for the Cooperative Society La Obrera Mataronense, of which little would be built. After showing his work systems and his relationship with Eusebi Güell, he goes through his buildings, his furniture and a Holy Family that Joaquim Mir's paintings show under construction in front of beggars in a vacant lot. A Holy Family that, in the video that closes the exhibition, Dalí paints on a large canvas in tar at the conference-happening he gave at Park Güell in 1956, in which he assured that "many centuries will pass before another just like Gaudi.