Gaudí was not by any means the isolated, misunderstood genius that many of the books written about him would lead us to believe. On the contrary, his work was done within very concrete political and ideological strategies. This doesn’t mean to say that Gaudí was an ideologist, or that his work was directly determined by the interests of his clients, the high bourgeoisie and the church.
In reality, his particular way of understanding his work often caused Gaudí to confront his clients and society in which he lived. What’s more, Gaudí’s work constitutes the highest moment of the artistic and intellectual production of Catalonia of his lifetime. If today figures such as that of Eusebi Güell seem commonplace, it is basically thanks to the works that Gaudí did for him.
Barcelona, its image and character have an extraordinary and absolute relationship with the work of Gaudí. What would this city be, for better or worse, without those extraordinary buildings that he built and which constitute his deepest and inexhaustible treasure trove?
Gaudí’s importance over his period does not stem from his supposed brilliant isolation or from any sort of inexplicable artistic craziness, but, in fact, from his ability to concentrate that period in his buildings, to contract all of it in such a complex body of work.
Gaudí’s work has transcended far beyond the period in which he lived, those turbulent years around the turn of the 20th century. But if it has done so it is because he was able, like no other, to interpret his time, and to come up with some of the most powerful images. This is why it has lived on.
So one could continue talking about Gaudí in excessively praising, formalistic, folkloric or esoteric terms, there are so many: they are all useful terms to forget him, to convert him into this comfortable and gigantic tourist “icon” into which he is inevitably becoming more and more.
But if we want to understand his work in all its profound intensity, we cannot forget his era. We have to understand the way in which his buildings were interwoven with the political and ideological strategies of his time, that is, with the desires and needs of his prestigious clientèle.
Gaudí’s architecture isn’t formalist but symbolic. It is not architecture wrapped up in its own ideas, but on the contrary, absolutely committed to the life of a Barcelona torn by class struggle.
And he is no mystic absent from the world, but a political figure, present like few others on the stage of this struggle. Or, quite literally, Gaudí was the builder of some the most important symbolic backdrops to this class struggle, of the architecture of modernity.
Leaflet (pdf - 1.68 Mb)
