The City Homage To BARCELONA

By ROBERT HUGHES BARCELONA

"You can fall in love, or at least into some kind of infatuation, with Barcelona. But not everyone finds the course of the affair smooth, for as the Spanish historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto recently wrote in his short history ; of the city, "like one of those tryingly beautiful and energetic women whom all men are able to identify among their acquaintances, she can excite passion only for short periods." It can be a confusing place for those who expect the stereotype of tourist Spain -- flamenco, bullfights, serenades under the moonlit balcony. It is a gritty city, crowded, with brusque street manners, a high crime rate, a seemingly ineradicable drug problem and some of the worst traffic in Europe. Romantic Spain it is not. But it evokes an extreme, sometimes even delirious, attachment.

Barcelona is and always has been a place of industry. In fact, for most of the 19th century it was the only industrial city in Spain, a sort of Mediterranean Manchester raised to wealth on cotton, silk and metal, presided over by a triumphant bourgeoisie and racked by working-class (especially anarchist) rebellion. Catalans are archetypally producers rather than dreamers, and they tend to pride themselves on what they call seny, common sense raised almost to the level of a theological virtue. They like you to know they have molta feina, a work overload. They do not see themselves or their capital as picturesque; that they leave to the Andalusians. Barcelona is no more like Seville or Granada than Milan is like Naples.

How is one to approach this teeming, impacted port that Joan Maragall, Barcelona's greatest turn-of-the-century poet and grandfather of the city's present mayor, Pasqual Maragall, called la gran encisera -- the great enchantress? Only in terms of its own history -- one not always shared with the rest of Spain, and often in opposition to it. Barcelona is a very old city, founded by the Romans late in the 1st century B.C.; their massive walls, topped by medieval additions, still encircle its core.

It was not, to begin with, an important town; the Roman capital of what is now Catalunya was farther south, at Tarragona. But Barcelona began to gain significance after the Roman Empire collapsed and the invading Visigoths took over, and it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman, Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan state.

From then on, Catalans ran Catalunya, and Barcelona, for themselves. They were jealous of their independence and determined to sustain their own laws ; and language. From the 13th century through the 15th, their outward thrust created a Mediterranean trading empire that stretched from the coast of North Africa to the gates of Byzantium. With the money this brought home, a city grew: the greatest Spanish city of the Middle Ages. Even today the Barri Gotic, or Old City, of Barcelona, facing the port, contains in its winding alleys more functioning Gothic structures than any other such enclave in Europe.

Catalan Gothic is austere, primal, bony architecture, nowhere near as decorated as French or English. Its grandeur is all in the structure, and no building displays this more piercingly than the 14th century church of Santa Maria del Mar, the "workers' church" of Barcelona, with its sublimely plain interior, a solemn Sequoia grove of stone hewed from the quarries of Montjuic, the mountain that guards the port.

Barcelona's democratic traditions and sense of independence go back to the Middle Ages. There were menestrals -- shopkeepers and artisans -- on the Consell de Cent, or Council of One Hundred, the governing body of the city, in the 13th century. The city's charter of citizens' rights, the Usatges, or Usages, predates the Magna Carta by a century. And the Catalans' sense of otherness -- the separation, cultural and institutional, from the rest of Spain -- comes through loud and clear in the oath of allegiance their leaders swore to the Aragonese kings in the 15th century: "We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided that you observe all our liberties and laws -- but if not, not." Catalans have always waxed lyrical over their medieval defiance of kingship and railed against "centralism" -- rule by Madrid. Their political history is one long rebuke to the dominant ideology of Europe: that of the nation-state that subsumes and represses cultural differences within it.

Traditionally, the rallying point of the Catalans is their language -- "our ancient, melodious and abundant tongue," as the 19th century poet Joaquim Rubio i Ors put it -- spoken by about 6 million people today and matrix of an important national literature that goes back to the days of the troubadours. (Catalan and Provencal were sister languages, and poets writing in both moved among the courts of France and Catalunya.)

At various times since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Castile has tried to take Catalunya over and suppress its speech. Francisco Franco banned all publishing and teaching in Catalan, hoping to prevent his subjects from thinking separatist thoughts. But obdurately, Catalan survives, and now that separatist dreams have faded -- Jordi Pujol, the president of the autonomous region of Catalunya, dropped the separatist plank from his party's platform last October -- it is the language that remains the focus of Catalunya's enthusiasm for cultural distinction.

Barcelona did not develop smoothly. It has had three convulsive spasms of rebuilding and self-renewal, with long stretches of inertia in between. The most recent one began in the late 1970s and has been going on for the past 10 years under Barcelona's socialist Mayor Maragall: the refashioning and sprucing up of the city, from its infrastructure -- sewers, ring roads -- to the restoration of its huge deposit of historic buildings, most of which had decayed badly during the Franco years, through to new works such as the refurbished waterfront, the Olympic Village and the magnificent covered stadium on Montjuic by Arata Isozaki.

The first spurt of renewal was in the Middle Ages, creating the Gothic city. Then came a slump, as the ascendancy of Castile and the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic thrust Barcelona into a 200-year depression, from which it began to recover by industrializing only at the end of the 18th century.

The second boom occurred at the height of Barcelona's industrial prosperity and misery, between 1860 and 1910. Its main frame, the huge grid of chocolate- square blocks that stretches from the Barri Gotic up the slope toward the Collserola hills, was designed in 1859 by a socialist engineer named Ildefons Cerda. It is known as the Eixample, or Enlargement, and is the ancestor of all the Utopian schemes of 20th century architecture. The cultural contents of this grid, as it developed, proved no less remarkable. The trade-obsessed city of powerful clerics and stuffy businessmen was the closest place to northern Europe in Spain. It received the ideas of the French Enlightenment, and later those of socialists and anarchists; its music, literature and painting were permeated by French Symbolism, by Wagner and Nietzsche, by Impressionism.

Barcelona was the place where Picasso studied, where Salvador Dali grew up, and out of whose deeply conservative traditions of family and rural life Joan Miro, Catalunya's greatest painter since the 14th century, was able to fashion an art of the most radical poetry. And the best buildings constructed anywhere in Spain between 1860 and the outbreak of World War I were all in Catalunya, and mostly in Barcelona. The combined talents of its turn-of-the-century architects made it La Ciudad de los Prodigios, or the City of Marvels, as the Catalan writer Eduardo Mendoza titled his savagely ironic, picaresque novel of fin-de-siecle Barcelona.

The civic style, if one can so compress it, was more than just a Spanish mutation of Art Nouveau, which the Catalans called modernisme. It was obsessed with the meaning of local nationality and the eternal pressure of the past. It was full of myth, decoration, narrative, metaphor: a speaking architecture, overrich for some purist tastes but of interest to anyone today who wants to see how social and historical meanings are embodied in new building.

Gradually it filled Cerda's grid, which is now the world's greatest museum of 1900s architecture. The big Catalan mercantile families who made their piles after 1850 and ran the city tended to preen themselves on being modern versions of Renaissance princes -- all the more so since most of their grandfathers had been artisans or colonial hustlers. There was a lot of pent- up vigor and ambition itching to glorify itself.

So they built copiously through the three decades of what Catalans still call their Renaissance. La Renaixenca was a powerful, diffuse movement. It revolved obsessively around the issue of Catalan independence. It embraced politics, social theory, poetry, architecture. It was both progressive and intensely nostalgic. It believed in the future; it also drew its confidence from invoking the vanished era of the Catalan counts, the troubadours, the Cistercian monasteries.

Its best-known master was, of course, Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926). A descendant of Catalan metalsmiths, Gaudi introduced a wholly new idea of built space: an organic kind of space, not bounded by rigid lines, that undulates, flares, inflates, twists and contains stunning metaphors and moments of theater. The basement of the palace he built off the Ramblas for his main patron, Eusebi Guell, could serve as a set for The Ring -- not surprisingly, since Catalans in the 1880s were crazy for Wagner, the newest of new composers. Gaudi's Casa Mila, on Passeig de Gracia, known to Barcelonans as La Pedrera -- the Stone Quarry -- was intended to suggest a seaworn cliff, and its iron balconies fringe it like kelp.

+ His architecture is that of a great sculptor -- witness the totemic chimneys and ventilators on the Casa Mila and the Palau Guell -- and a remarkable painter too: the facade of Casa Batllo, on the opposite side of Gracia, is as atmospheric as a Monet, sparkling with drifts of blue and green mosaic. Nor should one miss the iron dragon gate of the Finca Guell, or the crypt of the Colonia Guell -- the chapel of an industrial community for weavers at Santa Coloma de Cervello, half an hour's drive from Barcelona -- or the Parc Guell, with its ravishing Hansel-and-Gretel pavilions and its undulating benches covered in their mosaic of broken tiles; or, of course, the Sagrada Familia.

The Sagrada Familia (which is not a cathedral but an "expiatory temple" dedicated to the cult of the Holy Family) is Gaudi's best-known building, the logo of Barcelona as the Statue of Liberty is of New York City. Unfortunately, because most of its designs were lost in the Spanish Civil War, nobody knows how Gaudi would have finished it, and the newly completed sections look dead compared with the parts Gaudi supervised. The facade sculptures by Josep Subirachs are particularly inert and vulgar. They seem to epitomize the moment when the religious art of Catholic Europe died for want of anything better to do, almost exactly 2,000 years after it began.

Tradition -- and tourism -- insists the Sagrada Familia is Gaudi's masterpiece. It is not. The Casa Mila and the crypt of the Colonia Guell, among others, are superior. But in any case, not all the best modernista building and decor are by Gaudi. Other and hardly lesser Catalan architects await discovery by the visitor. Two names in particular stand out: Lluis Domenech i Montaner (1850-1923) and Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867-1957).

Puig, a brilliant eclectic, produced some of the signature buildings of Barcelona. One is the Casa Amatller, next to Gaudi's Casa Batllo, a fecund parody of a Dutch burgher's housefront, with mock-medieval sculptures by the gifted Eusebi Arnau -- including animals blowing glass and taking photos, these having been the owner's hobbies. Another is Puig's exquisitely decorated house for the Baron Quadras, now a museum of musical instruments; a third, the Venetian-Gothic Casa Marti, housed the center of Barcelona's artistic bohemia, the Four Cats cafe, where established artists like Ramon Casas hobnobbed with younger ones like Picasso.

But it fell to Domenech, a man obsessed with the history of Catalunya, to % design what may be the most extreme Art Nouveau building in Europe. This is the Palau de la Musica Catalana (1905-08). It was built for the Orfeo Catala, a choral-music society. Pablo Casals and Montserrat Caballe, both Catalans, began their careers here. From the mosaic-sheathed ticket office to the stupendous inverted bell of a stained-glass skylight in the auditorium, from the sculpted Valkyries riding across the proscenium arch to the encrustations of ceramic roses (each the size of a cabbage) on the ceiling, it takes decor beyond congestion; and yet, because it is also one of Europe's earliest curtain-wall buildings, framed in a steel grid, Catalan historians are fond of praising its "rationalism" -- which was also real.

One gets a gradual sense of the aspirations of the Catalan Renaixenca by walking the streets of Barcelona, noticing things, but the grid of the Eixample is vast and hard on the feet. Here in Domenech's choral theater, it is baptism by total immersion. The "new Barcelona" may not, in the end, produce any buildings that rival those of the late 19th century. But the fact of bringing the old ones back to civic life, in all their splendor, would be achievement enough for any city administration, Games or no Games.