Presented in recent months in Catalonia, drawings, sculptures and other photographs retracing the work of the architect of the Sagrada Família are on display in Paris until July.
The Musée d’Orsay shines its spotlight from Tuesday on the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926), known throughout the world for the Sagrada Família cathedral, which over the years has become one of the inseparable icons of Barcelona. The first large-scale event dedicated to Gaudí in France for fifty years, the monumental exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Museu Nacional d’art de Catalunya, presents more than 200 objects and pieces of furniture, plans, drawings, photographs, stained glass and models to lift the veil on the working methods of this atypical artist.
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Unclassifiable, although historically placed in the current of Catalan modernism and in the broader one of Art Nouveau, Antoni Gaudí Cornet remains fully associated with the history of Catalonia, which he has almost never left. Unable to move Gaudí’s various buildings with lines, pillars, mosaics, often very colorful, outside of Catalan land, the exhibition has taken up the challenge of scenography, rather, the “artistic journey” of the architect.
Innovative and refined
The exhibition thus opens onto a vestibule made up of sculpted oak paneling from Casa Milà, a private mansion in Barcelona reconstructed for the occasion. A film plunges the visitor into the heart of what was the artist’s best-known studio, near the Sagrada Família. And its innovative working methods. The architect thus used a device with mirrors, designed to create the characters of one of the first facades of the cathedral – still under construction since 1882 -, or even a stereostatic model (or polyfunicular), which allowed him, by a game of inverted gravity, to make 3D models of his future achievements.
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Several surviving casts from his workshop burned down during the Spanish Civil War are also on display alongside his library. This contains references to many architects who inspired him, including Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who restored Notre-Dame de Paris and built, in the middle of the 19the century, the spire of the cathedral. Another part of the exhibition is devoted to the training of the artist, of modest origin, and to the urban development of Barcelona from 1859. It also evokes his friendship with Eusebi Guëll, a textile industrialist, with whom he formed an artistic duo.
Along the way, an artist is discovered “embodying the paradoxes”, in the words of Elise Dubreuil, one of the curators of the exhibition. Gaudí was both “much loved and popular in Barcelona during his lifetime then forgotten, refined and austere, proud and humblesummed up the curator in charge of the decorative arts collections at the Musée d’Orsay. The memory of the Catalan architect who was knocked down by a tram in 1926 faded for several years. Before finally being brought back to light by the surrealists, including his compatriot Salvador Dali, and appearing, today, in the pantheon of the most acclaimed Catalan artists.