Picasso has a gallery in the old town, the line was huge for tickets, but it was worth the wait. Second gallery was the Miró foundation, back up on the hill, this time it was less of a climb as I found the funicular train to go up it this time, far quicker and easier on the calves :)
Miró if you don't know is even further detached from reality than Picasso or Dali... So make of that what you will. Realism at tmes can be very harsh on the sensitive souls of this world (look how you all destroyed my heart) - but the Spanish have some tough times in history, including the present day. It does seem quite often that harsh surroundings inspire creative escapes though...
Those Mediaeval alleys of Barri Gotico are quite fascinating, winding in all different directions.
La Rambla is the defacto shopping street, no big malls, old mansions converted to stores coming out of your ears however and part of no doubt a result of the insane spending spree on real estate that recently destroyed the economy and has youth unemployment up to 50%.
There is certainly a lot of tourists here, and still plenty Louis Vuitton and Rolex customers as well as McDonalds.... The Euro isn't really cheap :(
Hordes of tourists...ugh!
The funicular is like a cable car, but the cables are on the ground. The rails keep it attached to the ground, which is much nicer than dagling in the atmosphere in my book, somehow that feeling is just not right...
These galleries don't allow pictures inside, sadly.
This is outside so it's fair game. Space alien?
Since all these artists lived in Barcelona, and since their lives overlapped in some years, you can see a fluid roundness to a lot of what they created.... Interesting enough. Dali was more influenced by the salt pans of Bolivia, but the three here were all trying to express their own disenchantments... Miró was hopelessly depressed over the civil war, Picasso much the same over the indiscriminate German bombing of a town called Guernica. Gaudi was probably insane. Picasso and Miró however started with boring regular landscape and portrait paintings, it was much later in their lives they defined categories of their own.
I bought a book in the Picasso gallery, adds to the bag weight :(
This is a Gaudi House:
Anyway, the round edged fluid moving shape to everything seems to be common across artists in Barcelona, no sharp angles.
Interesting mix of the Baroque, Gothic, even Classsicism in this look that is sometimes more sci-fi or horror movie...
But so many buildings, so much work making them look so intricate... Imagine how much it would cost to build like this today...amazing.
And that was it for Barcelona.
I panicked a bit in the morning, as I told myself the flight was 7:30am, it was actually 6:30am. I only realized this because the flight app on the iPad went ding to alert me the plane was leaving in 2 hrs... I had just fallen out bed at 4:30am, the taxi ride at 5:15am was 45 Euro (!) and I had to wait 15 mins for a cab!
Just like 007 the taxi drove me the 25 mins out there at incredible speed, and we did make it. Sadly for 1 person though, the official Barcelona Futbol team store in the airport did not open like all the other stores at 6am as was advertised. I had to run to the gate at 6:10am as they were final boarding the plane.
Oh well, I am not so clever sometimes :( Time though to eat my free Austrian Airlines "Fluffy Muffin" in a box before we land now in Vienna... Which would go down far easier if he took these sharp corners a bit more gently... Smooth them out like they do in Barcelona please....
-
- BlogPressed from my iPad. Click on pictures for larger version and gallery. Copyright 2012 TinyFrontalLobeWerke AG., Zurich.
Location:Barcelona, Spain
No comments:
Post a Comment