Today we ride the funicular
up to the top of Montjuic, or mountain of the Jews. “Why is it the mountain of
the Jews?” asks the Bear. (Per later internet research, the Jewish community
once lived there.) Bear also asks me the time repeatedly. I have no watch and
no idea whatsoever. I do however have a cellphone which takes five minutes at
least to remove from my money belt, by which time he no longer cares what time
it is or was.
We take the purple Metro line
down to Paral-lel and then the funicular up to the top of the mountain, really
a hill overlooking Barcelona. The Metro system includes the funicular in the
cost of one ride. Unfortunately, at the base of the hill, neither of us sees
the clearly marked handicap sign pointing to the top funicular car. We enter
the bottom car. The funicular comes to a halt at the top of the mountain, where
we discover our mistake. Twenty steps lie between us and the exit. Had we taken
the correct top car, we would exit above the stairs. After some debate, we
decide to try the stairs, about four feet wide each. Keith grabs me and Bird
and bounces us up twenty long steps slamming us with down a hard bang after
each step. Looking back, hindsight being 20-20, we should’ve ridden the
funicular down, entered the correct car, and ridden back up. Poor Bird! Poor
Bear!! Poor me! I think this marks the beginning of our problems with Bird (the
strange noises emanating from her left wheel) although Keith insists her
problems stem from being stuffed into the minute elevator in the apartment
building. We hope she survives until we can repair her in the States (two more
weeks!).
Bear working hard and me
grasping Bird for dear life, we achieve the summit. After breathing heavily,
recovering from the stairs, we give a cheer as we enter the Miró Museum,
earning the second stamp in our Articket BCN books. I like the first part of
this museum because in his youth, Miró paints with colors and I like color.
Miró fills the second part of the museum with his dull grey statues, bearing no
color whatsoever, over and over and over again. I once again see Miró repeating
himself, just as in the horrid exhibit we saw at the DAM (Denver Art Museum).
Ugh! The more Miró I see, the less I like him.
I point at the endless
identical attempts at art, note that we have much to see today, and subtly
hint, doing my best to avoid being too passive aggressive, that I think we
should move on. I fail as Bear derisively ignores my suggestion. “Bad wife!” he
hisses. Thankfully, surrounded by an endless sea of boring, repetitive, cement
colored objets d’art, Bear soon
reaches the same conclusion allowing us to we escape.
On to the Catalan Art Museum
and our third Articket BCN stamp! This museum displays tons of art created by
various Catalans through the centuries. On the ground floor, we find wonderful
frescoes from local churches that otherwise would have been stolen. The museum
carefully re-creates the arches of the original churches and reinstalls the
frescoes exactly in the same places they would have held in their long
dismantled churches. The frescos depict medieval white people looking much the
same as us, with large expressive faces. Keith likes this, enjoying the
paintings with gold clothing and gold-leaf on the wood panels, calling him with
their luminous three-dimensional flair. The gold on the panels and also the
gold thread in the saints’ clothing, halos and crowns lights them with an
otherworldly glow. We think about how precious gold would have been eight
hundred years ago and how the common people gave the most precious thing they
had to the church to decorate Jesus and the saints. As much we intensely
dislike religious art, we have to admit that we enjoyed this, mostly because it
was different. For my part I liked that they saved old churches from art
collectors and other scalawags and put the unique frescoes in a museum where we
all can see them.
Venturing upstairs, we find
the most charming restaurant, empty at 13:30, far too early for lunch. Real
people don’t eat lunch this close to noon! Our amazing food will grace my life
forever. I eat a beet salad with pine nuts, while Keith slowly devours a
pumpkin soup with veal gnocchis. Outside, a band plays Catalan music,
completing our stellar dining experience, the only time in Barcelona that we
hear Catalan music. The restaurant’s open windows allow a great view of the
city as we perch up on the hill.
Sated with our wonderful
lunch, we explore the second floor of the museum. We march through Catalan
modernism. We see rooms of Impressionism by Catalan artists, people I’ve never
heard of. I so enjoy breaking out of the Monet, Sisley, Manet, Degas, Renoir
circle. And joy of joys, the museum has couches! We indulge in a lovely twenty
minute nap. We see one famous painting, a Picasso or a Miró, followed by ten
unknown Catalans. We thoroughly enjoy stepping through modern Catalan history,
again because we’re seeing things we’ve never seen before.
Late afternoon, we walk down
the hill choosing the road that avoids the “fucking steps” which seem to be
chasing us. I have nightmares about stairs and broken ascensores. Passing the magic fountains, we visit the Mies van der
Rohe pavilion. In 1929, Barcelona hosted the world expo, including a modernism
exhibit, later torn down. In the 1980s, realizing what a gem they had destroyed,
Barcelona painstakingly reconstructed the entire Mies van der Rohe pavilion
from glass, steel and marble, replicating the original. A reconstructed
sculpture defies the pavilion’s rigid geometric angles, reflected a million
times in the glass, marble and water.
Some of the men in my life (Bear and Dave the architect) consider van
der Rohe to be the father of architectural modernism. After paying due homage
to one of the gods of architecture (I still love the Scottish Rennie
Mackintosh) we note the pavilion’s iconic furniture, still manufactured today.
We finish walking down the
mountain of the Jews in the dark. We reenter the Metro at Espanya, riding home
on the red line to Navas.
No comments:
Post a Comment