Gaudí and Catalan Modernism

There's a lazy way to introduce Gaudí, and that's as an isolated genius who did things that no one understood. This is false on both sides. He worked within a named movement, with magazines, a school, and a clientele, and competitively: on the same street, in the same years, two other architects were creating equally extraordinary buildings for the same industrialists.

That movement was called Catalan Modernism, and the term first appeared in the magazine L'Avenç in January 1884, in an article by Ramon D. Perés. Understanding what it was, and especially how it differed from what was being done in the rest of Europe, significantly changes how one views a facade.

Across Europe, between 1890 and 1910, something similar happened with different names: Art Nouveau in France and Belgium, due to the gallery that Siegfried Bing opened in Paris in 1895; Jugendstil in Germany, due to the magazine Jugend in Munich; Sezession in Vienna; Liberty in Italy, due to a department store in London. Curves, iron, glass, and plant motifs.

But there is a structural difference that almost no one explains, and which sets it apart from all of them. International Art Nouveau rejected historicism: it defined itself in opposition to the past, against the styles found in manuals. Catalan Modernism did the opposite. It combined modernity with the evocation of the past, and always in a neo-medieval style. Puig i Cadafalch said it in 1902 with a phrase that summarizes the entire program: they had achieved a modern art based on our traditional art.

The second difference lies in scope. While in other countries it was primarily an artistic movement, in Catalonia, it permeated the entire culture: literature, music, painting, applied arts, and politics. It emerged from the Renaixença, the movement that had restored Catalan to the status of a language of culture, and the relationship between the two is one of rupture within continuity: the Renaixença recovered, while Modernism transformed.

It's one of those questions that seem to have a definitive answer, but they don't. Every historian proposes their own, and the differences aren's minor: they range from 1870 to 1930. It's worth examining them together, because each one reveals what its author is trying to measure.

There is a testimony from that era that is more valuable than any periodization. In 1912, Lluís Masriera said in his speech upon joining the Academy of Fine Arts that the art that had been labeled as Modernism was in full decline, or, to put it bluntly, had gone out of fashion. Four years after the Casa Milà.

His most important works are the Palau de la Música Catalana (1905-1908) and the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, built in two phases between 1902 and 1930, the second phase being completed by his son. The hospital occupies nine blocks of the Eixample district, a square of three hundred meters on each side with twenty-seven pavilions, and it functioned as a hospital until 2009: it is not a converted monument; it is a building that performed its function for almost eighty years.

It's important to be precise, because a common misconception is: Domènech i Montaner was not the president of the Lliga Regionalista. He presided over the Lliga de Catalunya in 1888, was the first president of the Unió Catalanista in 1892, and presided over the assembly of the Bases of Manresa that same year; he was a member of parliament between 1901 and 1905, and in 1904 he left the Lliga due to disagreements with Cambó and Prat de la Riba.

The third is Josep Puig i Cadafalch, and his biography is the most unusual of the three: an architect, art historian specializing in Romanesque art, promoter of the excavations at Empúries, and president of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya between 1917 and 1924. His work is divided into three stages that the critic Alexandre Cirici named after colors: the pink period, Gothic and Nordic, exemplified by the Casa Amatller and the Casa de les Punxes; the white period, Mediterranean; and the yellow period, already classical.

There's an irony in his ending that tells the story of the entire movement: he was the one who conceived and organized the International Exhibition of 1929, which publicly established Noucentisme as the successor to Modernism. And his own project for the National Palace was rejected.

Almost all the guides mention three, but there are actually five, and one of them isn't even modernist.

The wordplay works in Spanish because manzana is both the fruit from the Greek myth and the building block. It is often said that it is lost in Catalan, because a block is an illa, and this is not entirely true: historically, it was said mansana de la Discòrdia, using a colloquial Castilianism, and the double meaning was maintained. Modern language standardization killed it, not the language itself.

Nobody knows who coined the expression. What is documented is how it spread: through satirical press. In 1905, L'Esquella de la Torratxa published a cartoon in which a bourgeois is asked who is building his house, Domènech, Gaudí, or Puig i Cadafalch, and he replies that he hasn't decided yet, that it will be seen who wins the competition. In 1906, El Diluvio drew the buildings with facial features. And the first written record of the expression is a postcard from 1910, on the back of which it reads that that block of houses was remarkable, and that during its construction, it was commonly called the block of discord.

The "discord" was not a dispute between property owners, nor a personal animosity between architects. It was professional competition, and it had a very specific institutional mechanism behind it: the Annual Competition for Artistic Buildings that the City Council established on June 23, 1899, and maintained until 1930. The vignette from 1905 was making fun of exactly that.

The list of winners of that competition says a lot: Gaudí's Casa Calvet won in 1900, in the first edition; Domènech's Casa Lleó i Morera in 1906; the Palau de la Música in 1909. Neither Casa Batlló nor Casa Milà ever won. The most photographed building in Barcelona did not win Barcelona's prize.

And there's a design detail that disproves the legend of rivalry better than any argument: Gaudí moved the cross tower of Casa Batlló to the center of the roof to avoid damaging the top of Casa Amatller, the one by Puig i Cadafalch, which is adjacent. The two buildings face each other; they don't fight.

The second reason is much less well-known and explains more. In 1891, the City Council approved new municipal ordinances that increased the buildable area and reduced restrictions on the composition and elements of the facade compared to the 1857 regulations. Specifically, they allowed for more elaborate decorative elements and larger projecting sections. And because they increased what could be built, it became profitable to demolish the small single-family houses and replace them with apartment buildings.

The example that sources cite as the most paradigmatic of that effect is, precisely, the "Apple of Discord," where five buildings were renovated. In other words, the elaborate facades of Passeig de Gràcia are, literally, the result of a change in urban planning regulations. Between 1860 and 1890, that area was of low density, with towers and gardens.

Behind it all was who was paying: an industrial bourgeoisie and some wealthy individuals who had made their fortunes in America, using the house as a calling card. Josep Batlló came from the silk and cotton industry; Antoni Amatller, from chocolate; the money for Casa Milà actually came from Roser Segimon, the widow of an individual who had become wealthy from coffee in Guatemala. And competing for the facade was, for them, a cheap way to compete.

Starting in 1906, Modernism began to lose intellectual support in favor of noucentisme, the movement that Eugeni d'Ors theorized through his daily commentaries in La Veu de Catalunya. The name plays on the fact that nou, in Catalan, means both "nine" and "new": it refers to the Italian Quattrocento and to novelty at the same time. D'Ors dismissed the Modernists as outdated and decadent.

The Tragic Week, between July 26th and August 2nd, 1909, shattered the social context that supported it: one hundred and twelve buildings were burned, of which eighty were religious buildings; seventy-eight people died in Barcelona, and there were one thousand seven hundred arrests. It all started with the mobilization of reservists for the Rif War, from which the wealthy could avoid service by paying.

But the reason cited by sources is more objective and definitive: Modernism failed to address either the standardization needs demanded by modern industrial production, nor the problem of social housing. It was a unique, commissioned art form in an era that was beginning to need mass production. And there's a key difference that summarizes it: Modernism was funded by the bourgeoisie; Noucentisme was funded by the institution, the Mancomunitat and its organizations.

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, modernism was not heritage: it was a nuisance. People called the Palau de la Música the palace of Catalan bric-a-brac, and the poet Carles Riba dismissed it as a big fried egg. Josep Pla wrote in 1942 that he wasn't calling for its demolition only because the word was too harsh, but that crazy, delirious shack had to be transformed. In the 1920s, some architects openly called for tearing it down.

Regarding how much was lost, we must be honest: there is no reliable count of modernist buildings demolished in Barcelona, and the round figures that circulate have no source. The only attributed estimate we found is not of buildings but of businesses: according to a calculation by architect David Mackay, in the 1960s there were approximately 800 modernist shops in the city, and today there are only around 50 left.

The specific cases are documented, and they are more painful than the statistics. The Casa Trinxet by Puig i Cadafalch was demolished in March 1967, despite a petition signed by one hundred and thirty-four architects and artists in La Vanguardia; it had been proposed to convert it into a museum of Modernism. The protection law required a building to be one hundred years old, and the building was only sixty-three years old.

And in 1943, the renovation of the ground floor of the Casa Lleó i Morera to install a commercial space destroyed the stained glass windows and, using a hammer, removed the sculptures by Eusebi Arnau. The doorman of the building recovered the heads and sold them to Salvador Dalí. Today, they are in his museum in Figueres.

The rehabilitation started from the outside. It was Dalí who, in 1932, published in the magazine Minotaure what is probably the first written defense of the style. Nikolaus Pevsner mentioned Gaudí in passing in 1936, and in the second edition of his book in 1957, he regretted not having spoken more about him, calling him the most significant architect of Art Nouveau. International recognition came with the MoMA exhibition in New York in 1960.

There is a symmetry that deserves to be pointed out. Gaudí's works were added to the World Heritage List in 1984; the Palau de la Música Catalana and the Hospital de Sant Pau, by Domènech i Montaner, were added in 1997. A difference of thirteen years, two separate files, and the same three criteria applied to both.

The UNESCO text about the Domènech ensemble calls him one of the recognized leaders of the movement, and it describes Gaudí as the most representative and outstanding of the modernist architects. It is worth noting that word: UNESCO itself ended up using modernist and not art nouveau, specifying that it is a parallel movement, not the same.