‘Barcelona: The Great Enchantress’: A Love Letter to a City
A review of ‘Barcelona: The Great Enchantress’, by Robert Hughes; Directions, 2007.
George Orwell found the Sagrada Familia hideous. He found it so hideous that he believed the anarchists with whom he fought during the Spanish Civil War ‘showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance’. As ambivalent as I am about Antoni Gaudí, I disagree. So does the art critic Robert Hughes. Hughes says his single greatest influence was Orwell, whose no-nonsense prose style and clear, everyday language was an antidote to the ‘airy-fairy, metaphor-ridden kind of pseudo-poetry’ that marked the art magazines of the 1960s. Still, we can be sure that Orwell would never have penned such a soppy title as Barcelona: The Great Enchantress.
Hughes has the sculptor Xavier Corberó, considered the most important Catalan artist since Gaudí and one of Spain’s most celebrated sculptors, to thank for his romance with Barcelona. Under the influence of various stimulants, Hughes was holding forth on Gaudí at a party in London in 1966 when a shabby Corberó approached. It was good to meet a fan of Gaudí in England, Corberó said, ‘even if you know so little about him.’ They struck up a friendship; Hughes went to visit him at his palatial house complex in Esplugues de Llobregat; they drank wine together; and the rest is history.
Hughes has the sculptor Xavier Corberó to thank for his romance with Barcelona.
Barcelona emerged in the Bronze Age. It was inhabited by Celtic tribesman. It was not till the arrival of the Romans, however, who needed a base during one of their many wars with Carthage, that it began to look less like a seaside settlement and more like a city. Barcino (‘welcoming port’) was a glorified military camp, and almost as soon as it started to grow and take on a character of its own the Roman empire started to decline, and its inhabitants withdrew to the safety of the Italian peninsula.
Waves of invading barbarians, ending with the Visigoths, came upon Barcelona while heading south from France. Reccared I, who renounced Arianism in favour of Roman Christianity, made Catholicism its state religion. In the middle of the ninth century, the brilliantly named Guifré el Pelos (‘Wilfried the Hairy’) became Count of Barcelona, allied himself with the religious authorities, and embarked on a project of energetic church-building.
In the middle of the ninth century, the brilliantly named Guifré el Pelos (‘Wilfried the Hairy’) became Count of Barcelona.
Barcelona would subsequently undergo population explosions and plague (the Black Death nearly killed the entire local government), occupation and independence, rapid cultural development and decline, and the gain and loss of vast economic power. Hughes writes that the city has a ‘propensity for committing itself to the flames and then rising from them like some clumsily singed phoenix’. In the fourteenth century, it had its own empire and Europe’s first stock exchange. It has also gone through a number of building booms, coinciding with periods of plenty, the last of which took place around the time of the 1992 Olympic Games. But Hughes is not a fan of these. He laments the flattening of the city’s Carolingian buildings by over zealous ‘developers’ in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and describes their project as united in their ‘defiance of common sense’.
Being an art critic, his chief interest is how things look. At intervals he departs from the historical narrative to rhapsodise about the Gothic architecture or something Gaudí did. He talks a great deal about the mythology, cuisine, literature, art and politics of Barcelona, suggesting (which ought to be bloody obvious to everyone) that the city is constantly trying to show it is more than just part of Spain. Hughes likes an anecdote, too, though I must say that these aren’t particularly thrilling. He and Corberó once ate rap al all cremat and green peas and mint in the Club del Liceu. Well, good for you. He is more compelling when he does what he does best and talks about art. The the mosaic wrapping of the Casa Batlló resembles Claude Monet’s ‘Nymphéas’, he tells us, making what is tough to image rich and vivid—and then showing us a photo on the following page.
At intervals he departs from the historical narrative to rhapsodise about the Gothic architecture or something Gaudí did.
The book is self-consciously self-indulgent. It is a love-letter, really: Hughes is fond of Barcelona and had the clout to write about it in a way that someone who did not have his reputation couldn’t. There is an emotional atmosphere of melancholy, rooted in his concern that modernisation is undercutting what makes Barcelona distinctive; and he loathes the tendency of the city to show itself off, becoming a ‘theme park of itself’ for tourists who would and could not perceive its raw beauty. His fear is that the Barcelona he knows and loves is losing its soul. There is an idea of Barcelona, he seems to suggest; and it is fading.
I used to live in Barcelona, and still I have fond memories of the city. But this book, emotionally speaking, is less about Barcelona and more about a love for a place. You, reader, may at some point in your life gone somewhere you felt inexplicably at home: somewhere that just felt you. And that sensation of home-coming, and the peace and certainty mixed up with it—what Hölderlin called heimkehr—can be powerful. Hughes might be Australian, but his heart belongs to Barcelona. And in this book — a book he said he liked writing more than any other — he tries to explain why that is.
