Barcelona'sculture stems from the city's 2000 years of history. Barcelona has historically been a cultural center of reference in the world. To a greater extent than the rest of Catalonia, where Catalonia's native language Catalan is more dominant, Barcelona is a bilingual city: Catalan and Spanish are both official and widely spoken. Since the arrival of democracy, the Catalan culture (very much repressed during the dictatorship) has experienced a rebirth, both by recovering works from the past and by stimulating the creation of new works. Barcelona is an international hub of highly active and diverse cultural life with theatres, concert halls, cinemas, museums, and high-value architectural heritage.
Barcelona houses a great number of museums, which cover different areas and eras. The City History Museum, situated in a medieval building that used to be a royal residence, explains the story of the city, and includes a visit to the Roman ruins in the museum's basement. It also comprises the Museum-Monastery of Pedralbes, one of the best examples of Catalan Gothic architecture, the Museum-House Verdaguer, dedicated to poet Jacint Verdaguer, the Park Güell Interpretation Centre and several other minor sites.[1]
The Museum of the History of Catalonia, opened in 1996, covers the story of Catalonia since prehistoric times and administers the monuments that belong to the Generalitat de Catalunya.[2] The Archaeology Museum of Catalonia covers the story of Catalonia up to the Middle Ages, and of the cultures it came into contact with, and also runs several other archaeological sites in Catalonia.[3]
The National Museum of Art of Catalonia possesses a well-known collection of Romanesque art, including wall-paintings from Romanesque churches and chapels around Catalonia that have been transferred to the museum, Gothic art from the 13th–15th centuries, Renaissance and Baroque art from the 16th-18th centuries, Modern art from the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, as well as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.
The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, usually known as MACBA (acronym of Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona), focuses on post-1945 Catalan and Spanish art, though it also includes foreign works. Adjacent to the MACBA, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, or CCCB, hosts temporary exhibitions, a cinema, concerts and acts as a key cultural hub for the city.
CaixaForum Barcelona is an important art complex focused on temporary exhibitions and a wide array of cultural activities. The museum complex, once a factory designed by modernist architect Josep Puig i Cadalfalch, was renovated by Arata Isozaki to include 3 exhibition rooms and an auditorium. Despite its focus on temporary exhibitions, CaixaForum also houses permanent interventions by Sol Le Witt, Lucio Fontana and Joseph Beuys.
The Erotic Museum of Barcelona[4] is the first museum of erotic art and culture where the visitor can contemplate the development of eroticism through the various artistic and cultural facets of the human being. The Museum's assets consist of more than 800pieces of great historical value, spanning various cultures' erotic manifestations of both a ritual/religious as well as recreational nature.
The Barri Gòtic ("Gothic Quarter" in Catalan) is the centre of the old city of Barcelona. Many of the buildings date from medieval times, some from as far back as the Roman settlement of Barcelona.[6] Other historical areas include El Raval and El Born.
Catalan Modernisme architecture (often known as Art Nouveau in the rest of Europe), developed between 1885 and 1950 and left an important legacy in Barcelona. A great number of these buildings are World Heritage Sites. Especially remarkable is the work of architect Antoni Gaudí, which can be seen throughout the city. His best known work is the immense but still unfinished church of the Sagrada Família, which has been under construction since 1882, and is still financed by private donations: as of 2007, completion is planned for 2026. Other examples of his work are the Palau Güell, the Park Güell, the Casa Milà (La Pedrera) and the Casa Batlló. Many turn-of-the-century buildings were constructed in the context of the huge widening of the city which came with the construction of Eixample and the incorporation of other municipalities into a larger Barcelona. This was based on Ildefons Cerdà's linear mid-19th century urban plan, which was revolutionary at the time and which is still notable for allowing new architecture to be built on unused ground.
The 1929 world exposition also brought to Barcelona the work of german architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe who designed the German pavilion of the exhibition, reconstructed in 1986, an important building in the history of modern architecture, known for its simple form and its spectacular use of extravagant materials.
Since the constructive work done for the 1992 Summer Olympics and with grand-scale urban regeneration taking place in time for the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures, Barcelona has become a center for avant-garde architecture, starting with the Hotel Arts and its twin the Torre Mapfre. Among those works, the Torre Agbar is one of the ones that has caused more disparaging opinions. As a result of its unusual shape, the building is known by several nicknames such as "l'obús" (the shell), "el supositori" (the suppository), and some more eschatological ones.[7]
Barcelona won the 1999 RIBARoyal Gold Medal for its architecture,[8] the first (and as of 2011, only) time that the winner has been a city, and not an individual architect.
Barcelona is home to the Sónar Music Festival[9] as well as the Primavera Sound Festival which both take place around May and June every year. Sónar is an electronica music festival split into three days with two main events on each day (Sónar By Night and Sónar by Day). Sónar by day is held close to Les Rambles, whereas Sonar by night takes place in a complex just outside the main city. Primavera Sound is more focused on a broader programming with also guitar rock and indie rock related music. This festival is held in Parc del Fòrum and the black/blue triangled building of the Auditorium straight across where Sónar is held.
The Barcelona Symphony and Catalonia National Orchestra (Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya, usually known as OBC) is the largest symphonic orchestra in Catalonia. Founded by the violinist and conductor Eduard Toldrà in 1944 as Barcelona's Municipal Orchestra, it became the OBC in the 1994-95 season after the Generalitat de Catalunya and Barcelona's City Council constituted the OBC consortium. In 1999, the OBC inaugurated its new venue in the brand-new L'Auditori). It performs around 75 concerts per season and its current director is Eiji Oue.[10]
Other cultural centres
In addition to museums and galleries, the Barcelona city council runs a scheme involving converted factories, warehouses and other industrial buildings. They have been turned recently into cultural centres named "Art Factories". Among others, they include the former textile factories Fabra i Coats, Hangar (part of former Can Ricart industrial estate) and La Escocesa, the paint factory Nau Ivanow, Hangar, and the medieval mint of the crown of Aragon, La Seca.[11]
The National Library of Catalonia is the central library in the city,[12][13] but there's a large network of public services and cultural centres scattered around the city which is owned by the Diputació de Barcelona, as well as many private libraries and libraries belonging to institutions such as universities.
Ciutat Vella is a district of Barcelona, numbered District 1. The name means "old city" in Catalan and refers to the oldest neighborhoods in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Ciutat Vella is nestled between the Mediterranean Sea and the neighborhood called l'Eixample.
Modernisme, also known as Catalan modernism, is the historiographic denomination given to an art and literature movement associated with the search of a new entitlement of Catalan culture, one of the most predominant cultures within Spain. Nowadays, it is considered a movement based on the cultural revindication of a Catalan identity. Its main form of expression was in architecture, but many other arts were involved, and especially the design and the decorative arts, which were particularly important, especially in their role as support to architecture. Modernisme was also a literary movement.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner was a Spanish architect who was highly influential on Modernisme català, the Catalan Art Nouveau/Jugendstil movement. He was also a Catalan politician.
The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, abbreviated as MNAC, is a museum of Catalan visual art located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Situated on Montjuïc hill at the end of Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, near Pl Espanya, the museum is especially notable for its outstanding collection of romanesque church paintings, and for Catalan art and design from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including modernisme and noucentisme. The museum is housed in the Palau Nacional, a huge, Italian-style building dating to 1929. The Palau Nacional, which has housed the Museu d'Art de Catalunya since 1934, was declared a national museum in 1990 under the Museums Law passed by the Catalan Government. That same year, a thorough renovation process was launched to refurbish the site, based on plans drawn up by the architects Gae Aulenti and Enric Steegmann, who were later joined in the undertaking by Josep Benedito. The Oval Hall was reopened in 1992 on the occasion of the Olympic Games, and the various collections were installed and opened over the period from 1995 to 2004. The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya was officially inaugurated on 16 December 2004. It is one of the largest museums in Spain.
The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art is a contemporary art museum situated in the Plaça dels Àngels, in El Raval, Ciutat Vella, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The museum opened to the public on November 28, 1995. Previous directors include Daniel Giralt-Miracle (1988–1994), Miquel Molins Nubiola (1995–1998), Manuel J. Borja-Villel (1998–2007), Bartomeu Marí (2008-2015), and Ferran Barenblit (2015-2021), while the current director is Elvira Dyangani Ose.
The Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalonia is a symphony orchestra based in Barcelona, Spain. Since April 1999, the Orchestra has had its headquarters at L'Auditori. Prior to that, from its foundation to 1998, the orchestra was resident at the Palau de la Música Catalana.
Josep Guinovart i Bertran was a Spanish painter most famous for his informalist or abstract expressionist work.
Albert Ràfols-Casamada was a Spanish painter, poet and art teacher involved in the vanguard movements of his time. He is considered one of the most important, multifaceted Catalan artists of his time. His artwork began in the post-expressionist, figurative sphere but soon developed into his own abstract style grounded in a poetic rendering of everyday reality.
Eduard Arranz Bravo, stylized Eduard Arranz-Bravo, with a dash, is a Catalan Spanish painter born in Barcelona in 1941.
Catalunya en Miniatura is miniature park inaugurated in 1983 in Torrelles de Llobregat, 17 km from Barcelona. The park is 60,000 square meters, 35,000 of them devoted to the scale models, it is one of the largest miniature parks in the world, and the largest of the 14 miniature building exhibitions present in Europe. It displays 147 models of palaces, churches, bridges and other buildings from Catalonia and Mallorca and it includes all the major works by the renowned architect Antoni Gaudí.
CaixaForum Barcelona is an art gallery in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It is sponsored by Barcelona bank "la Caixa", and opened in 2002 in a former factory. CaixaForum is located in the Montjuïc area, on Avinguda de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia. The museum houses art exhibits.
The Confidant from Casa Batlló, also known as the Double Sofa or Banc de dues places , is a furniture piece designed by Antoni Gaudí. Originally designed for the dining room of Casa Batlló on Barcelona's Passeig de Gràcia, the chair is currently exhibited in the Modern Art collection of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya and at Casa Museu Gaudí in Barcelona. Replicas are displayed at the Gaudí-designed Casa Batlló and Casa Milà.
The Centre de Documentació i Museu de les Arts Escèniques, also known as MAE, is a centre for information and research on the performing arts in Catalonia, Spain. The centre has an extensive library, an archive and collections from the Institut del Teatre, which specializes in theatre, dance, opera, zarzuela, music hall, magic and circus performances. Its major collections encompass Catalonia and the Spanish Golden Age. The centre also has posters, programmes, photographs, pictures, puppet theatres, set designs and costumes which are exhibited in temporary exhibitions and online, since it has no permanent exhibition space. The museum is a member of SIBMAS and ENICPA, and is part of the ECLAP European Project. In Catalonia, it is involved with the Consortium of Academic Libraries of Catalonia.
The Fundació Vila Casas, founded in 1986 by the pharmaceutical entrepreneur Antoni Vila Casas, is a private, non-profit organisation which has the promotion of contemporary Catalan art as its main aim.
Can Framis is the latest Fundació Vila Casas museum, an art center in Barcelona devoted to the promotion of contemporary Catalan painting. Located in the old Can Framis factory complex, the museum displays more than 250 paintings from the sixties to the present made by artists born or currently living in Catalonia. In addition to the permanent collection which is divided in three floors, Can Framis Museum has an area dedicated to temporary exhibitions named Espai Aø. The permanent collection is updated periodically, and two new temporary exhibitions are opened every three months.
Enric Clarasó i Daudí was a modernist Catalan sculptor.
Alex Clapés was a Catalan modernisme artist. He was one of the less known painters in the late 19th century and early 20th century in Catalonia, Spain. He was born in Vilassar de Dalt on September 10, 1850. He died in Barcelona in 1920. He is most known for performing some commissions for the Güell family, thanks to his friend and colleague, Antoni Gaudí.
Barcelona Bús Turístic is a tourist bus service in the city of Barcelona, which in 2012 had 3 routes and a fleet of 74 buses. It is managed by the consortium of Turisme de Barcelona and TMB.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Barcelona:
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