Modernisme and the avant-garde
Gaudí’s Barcelona, Sorolla’s sunlight and three Spaniards in Paris – Picasso, Miró and Dalí – who changed the art of the 20th century.
Around 1900 Barcelona became one of the most exciting artistic centres in Europe. Catalan Modernisme, related to Jugendstil and Art Nouveau, gave the city buildings with undulating façades, mosaics and wrought iron. Antoni Gaudí is its best-known architect, with the Sagrada Família, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà. At the café Els Quatre Gats painters such as Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol met, and it was there that a young Pablo Picasso exhibited for the first time.
In Madrid and Valencia, Joaquín Sorolla painted beaches and fishermen in dazzling sunlight and became an international star. Other painters, such as Ignacio Zuloaga, showed a darker Spain of peasants, priests and bullfighters, at a time when the country, after losing its last colonies in 1898, was searching for its identity. Many young artists went to Paris, where there was greater freedom and a better market. There the Spaniards became some of the most important names of the avant-garde.
Picasso and Georges Braque created Cubism, and Juan Gris developed it further. Julio González learned to weld iron and transformed sculpture. Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí became leading Surrealists, each in his own way. Under the Second Republic in the 1930s cultural life flourished in Spain too. But the Civil War of 1936–1939 shattered it. Picasso’s Guernica, painted in 1937 after the bombing of a Basque town, became a worldwide symbol of the horrors of war.