Today (Saturday) was a different story when it came to wandering the streets of Barcelona. There was breathing room to the boulevards and back alleys. It was like a stadium full of people had been dispersed through a multiplicity of exits and spread out.
We paused at a building designed by Gaudi where a crowd was waiting to take a tour.
And passed another influenced by Gaudi. Barcelona was settled over two-thousand years ago, but for most visitors these days it’s a Gaudi Town.
It’s also a city, like Paris, famous for romance. Ella zeroed in on the Wall of Kisses.
For lunch, we sampled the seafood at a market.
Then we went down a welter of narrow lanes to the Picasso Museum. What, another Picasso museum? Well the one in Antibes collected work he had done in the 1950s when he was living in the area. This museum, which had a large collection, covered the time the young genius was growing up in Spain and the later periods when he returned to Barcelona from Paris. I remembered his “First Communion” painting from the Picasso retrospective at MOMA in the early 80s. He painted it when he was 15.
I can just imagine being a student in art class measuring the size of the head I’m drawing with my thumb and then looking over at Pablo’s easel. It’s like Salieri’s reaction to young Mozart in “Amadeus”. It ain’t fair! This work got Picasso accepted into an art academy in Barcelona. He went through a phase where he painted portraits of his family and friends.
Then he went to another academy in Madrid, dropped out, and went to Paris. He doodled in bars.
He went through a blue phase, and then a red phase, and Gertrude Stein became his patron. The rest is history. The Barcelona exhibit of his early work is very thorough. Keeping up with Picasso before he became Picasso is as exhausting as it is exhilarating.
“First Communion”, as classic as it comes.