Barcelona
“Later it did foster two Catalan painters, who went on to make a great impact on world painting after 1920 and without whose work modern art, surrealism especially, would have been much impoverished: Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Joan Miró (1893-1983).
But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the time Catalans always liked to call their Renaixenca, although there was expert, witty, and sometimes moving painting done in Barcelona in the studios of Ramón Casas, Santiago Rusinyol, and oth...ers, it did not add much to the substantial glories of fin-de-siècle European art, and could scarcely be compared to the achievements of the school of Paris. Barcelona fostered Picasso, but Picasso was not a Catalan artist, just passing through. Barcelona had no figure of comparable greatness to Adolf Menzel in Germany or Isaac Levitan in Russia, Frederic Church in the United States, or even (at his best) Arthur Streeton in Australia. In fact one of the things that struck me most forcibly about late nineteenth-century Catalan painting, when I first saw some examples of it in the Museu d’Art Modern in Barcelona back in the late 1960s, was how much it resembled the kind of impressionism that filled the museums of Sydney and Melbourne—the tonal impressionism, descending mainly from James McNeill Whistler, whose influence swept London, Paris, New York, and places as far apart as Melbourne and Mexico City, in the 1890s.MoreLess
But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the time Catalans always liked to call their Renaixenca, although there was expert, witty, and sometimes moving painting done in Barcelona in the studios of Ramón Casas, Santiago Rusinyol, and oth...ers, it did not add much to the substantial glories of fin-de-siècle European art, and could scarcely be compared to the achievements of the school of Paris. Barcelona fostered Picasso, but Picasso was not a Catalan artist, just passing through. Barcelona had no figure of comparable greatness to Adolf Menzel in Germany or Isaac Levitan in Russia, Frederic Church in the United States, or even (at his best) Arthur Streeton in Australia. In fact one of the things that struck me most forcibly about late nineteenth-century Catalan painting, when I first saw some examples of it in the Museu d’Art Modern in Barcelona back in the late 1960s, was how much it resembled the kind of impressionism that filled the museums of Sydney and Melbourne—the tonal impressionism, descending mainly from James McNeill Whistler, whose influence swept London, Paris, New York, and places as far apart as Melbourne and Mexico City, in the 1890s.MoreLess
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