The monastry and the Mirós

Back to April 15th, not yet described in this blog; this was my last full day in and around Barcelona.

To give ourselves a peaceful start to the day, Sha and I visited the museum at the old Monastir de Sant Cugat in the morning, after browsing through the outdoor market in front of it, afterwards sitting at a café table in the Plaça Augusta drinking coffee and watching the Catalan families interact. All ages were enjoying the spring sunshine, from little babies breastfeeding from their mothers and children playing ball to elderly people with sticks and walkers. It was very agreeable.

Sant Cugat or Saint Cucuphas (Cucufate? Qaqophas?), if he existed at all, which some doubt, was an ancient Christian martyr from Africa, skinned alive and otherwise tortured somewhere around the place where the monastery was built in the 9th century AD. The Benedictine monks of the first millenium revered him. Sha and I went into the cloisters with the inevitable school party (this one speaking Catalan) to read about the monks and their life in the monastery, most of which is 12th century Romanesque. Each of the 144 columns framing the arches of the cloisters has a different capital with a scene from the Bible sculpted on it, but the only one I found easy to explain to my Chinese companion showed the story of Jesus with the loaves and fishes. I have since found this information on the Internet:

...the shafts of the columns are of stone from Girona while the voussoirs of the arches, the capitals and the bases are of stone from Montjuic, more suitable for carving... Arnau Cadell [...] carved his portrait on one of the capitals, showing himself as an sculptor working the stone. You still can read his signature in Latin: HEC EST ARNALLI SCULTORIS FORMA CATELLI QUI CLAUSTRUM TALE CONSTRUXIT PERPETUALE

It was a well presented exhibition, although since much of it was only explained in Catalan Sha and I didn't get the full story! At one point we were able to press a button to hear some plainsong, the screen display lighting up the notes on the medieval stave as the chant progressed. We also watched a video describing the monastery's political history. The religious institutions of Catalonia did not support the Kings of Spain in the wars against the French, were attacked and persecuted by the Spanish authorities. In the nineteenth century the monastic orders were suppressed and so the buildings were plundered and fell into disrepair; only recently have they been restored and the adjacent abbey is still in ruins.

George emerged from his meetings, we lunched at the Café del Carrer and then the three of us decided to make a final excursion into Barcelona to climb the slopes of Montjuic (Mountain of the Jews, where in the twelfth century many Jewish people lived) for the sake of the view and the works of art up there. The museum we visited was the Fundació Joan Miró where it particularly interested me to explore the Joan Miró collection.

We didn't look at the artist's works in chronological order. What sticks in the memory is, for instance, a kinetic structure (similar to mobiles by Calder) entitled Font de Mercuri in which the falling water looks like blobs of mercury. There was also a suggestive hat stand! He experimented with cubism as in his cityscape Carrer de Pedrables (1917, depiction of a street in Barcelona), but from about 1925 onwards Miró's works of art were surrealist, either playful, with shapes of hands, fish and birds incorporated more often than not, or disturbing. To one painting he gave the title: Man and Woman in front of a Pile of Excrement. Rembrandt said that rubies and emeralds are found on heaps of dung. Miró painted his picture at the time of the Civil War. Actually he spent those war years living in France. During the Second World War too his escapism ("retreat from reality") was apparent; he painted a Woman Dreaming of Escape in 1945 and a Woman and Birds at Sunrise the following year, and several of his semi abstract pictures of this stage in his development featured stars: The Morning Star, for instance, in the series Constellations.

Outside the galleries photography was allowed so I snapped a few of the sculptures there.

We had supper at a tapas bar in the old city, ordering plates of cuttlefish with lemon, grilled sardines, a "bomb", potato salad and shrimps, among other things. It was fun and very tasty. Copes de vi (glasses of wine) were on offer but we drank Glops beer with the food instead, a Barcelona brew.