Culture Pays!

Set on a block of polished wood and slightly off-centre a partially drunk glass of light beer with the foam gently settling down the fluted sides of the glass was the painting which I would most liked to have stolen from the exhibition “El Arte del Comer”, translated into English as “Eating Art” in the gallery of Catalunya Caixa housed in the Gaudí masterpiece of Le Pedrera in Barcelona.  

http://blogs.elpais.com/el-comidista/2011/03/el-arte-de-comer-naturaleza-muerta-ferran-adria-pedrera-barcelona.html

I had arranged to see this with Suzanne as she is “doing” still life with one of her classes.

The Exhibition was a revelation with an astonishing range of art from the seventeenth century to the present day: from my favourite of “Still life with glass of beer and bread rolls” (1665) by Johan George Hinz to Catalonia’s favourite chef Ferran Adrià whose photograph (sic) of Richard Hamilton (sic) who has been a customer of his for the last twenty years formed part of the last stage of the exhibition.

Along the way paintings by the inevitable Dutch still life artists augmented by Picasso, Barceló, Zubarán, Nonell, Oudry, Soutine, Gris, Nicholson, Wols, Magritte, Dalí, Hamilton, Manzoni, Broodthaers, Beuys and others.  A feast in more ways than one.

What it was supposed to be “saying” is more difficult to be enthusiastic about, and I am not sure that I know what (or indeed if) there was a coherent raison d’etre behind it, but I do know it was full of interesting things both installations and more ordinary paintings and photographs.

And it was free. 

So I felt duty bound to buy the catalogue and I will try and work my way through some of the Spanish to delve a little deeper into the “why” of the exhibition.

It was perhaps fortuitous that our next port of call was a shop.  For food of a sort.

If all coffee disappeared from the face of the earth I would not be over-worried.  If tea followed it, that would be a disaster.  I have therefore been able to watch the growth of capsule coffee with a certain disdainful aloofness.

We do have a capsule coffee machine of course, not to have such a gadget would have been petty minded spitefulness, but I refuse to buy the capsules.  Which is not to say that I am not speechless with admiration for the mind that thought of this way of making customers pay much, much more for much, much less.  As a marketing tool I think capsules are little short of genius!

Suzanne wanted to replenish her supplies of Nespresso capsules and so we went to the High Temple of such things on one of Barcelona’s most prestigious streets, Passeig de Gràcia.

Through the glass electric doors which whispered open for us our first sight was a be-suited greeter who politely, graciously and obsequiously wished us welcome and gave us a printed ticket with the number we needed to get served. 

Past this elegant gentleman a flight of marble steps descended into the nave of this edifice where immaculately uniformed acolytes ushered customers to their appropriate altars where the officiating ministers distributed the sacred capsules on their own particular altars of commerce while behind them the panelled reredos gleamed, each of its niches filled by the ends of the slim stacked tubes of coffee.

Beyond the reredos the marble wall stretched up to the high vaulted roof giving a sense of ecclesiastical calm to the uncluttered displays of chalices and sacred spoons all devoted to the mysteries of coffee making.  It was all overwhelming in its restrained orderliness.

And money flowed.

By the time we got out (after being ushered to a circular enclosed bar to sample the “limited edition” coffee being sold) I was a gibbering maniac.  So much effort, so many people, such a prime site all devoted to a fairly simple and inexpensive drink elevated to “life style” with a commensurate price tag.  You were not merely drinking coffee you were buying into a concept.  And buying and buying!  Crisis?  What Crisis!

After the emotional drain of seeing money sucked out of suckers hands so efficiently and elegantly I was in no mood to idle our time away on a succession of buses and tubes to get to our next destination so I stopped a taxi and we arrived at MNAC in style.

As an official Friend of MNAC (the art gallery) on Montjuic I waltzed in and we (she used her teachers’ card to do the same) were soon seated in the dining room in the museum.

The restaurant has one of the finest crappy views in the world.  Through the floor to ceiling windows you look down on the city and over to the surrounding hills: it is panoramic and breath-taking, until you realize that it is simply not very interesting.  The important bits in Barcelona are 90° to the right: that’s where you can see the impressive buildings and out towards the sea, not what we were looking at.  But most people don’t see it like that and gawp at nothing very much.  As we did.

The food was superb: a sea food risotto, followed by seared tuna and the meal was completed by lime sorbet with mango and coconut soup – all washed down with an aromatic Rioja.  Although Suzanne had coffee I decided to try the tea and was presented with a case of sachets from which I selected two, Darjeeling and Red Chinese and had a reasonable cuppa for once in this country!

By the time we had finished our meal and had a “rest” on the low sofas in the high domed area outside the restaurant we found that we had only 15 minutes to see the exhibition of the paintings of Courbet and others scrabbled together under the general heading of Realism.  This, rather than the meal, was the ostensible reason that we had come there in the first place.

Although there were some very nice things in this exhibition including a small Velázquez portrait of a haughty gentleman called Franciso Pacheco whose lace ruff was a delicious swirl of glacially applied manically flowing paint, the main thrust of the exhibition seemed to me to try and equate the significance of Gustav Courbet with Ramon Marti Alsina a Catalan artist perhaps best known for his painting La Siesta of a sleeping bearded man on a striped sofa.  

Alsina did not gain by the juxtaposition of his paintings next to Courbet’s and I think that those individuals who loaned work from their Coleccións Particulars are not going to see a marked increase in the value of their object d’art because of this showing!

There were however three Alsina drawings called “Sexo feminino” “Dibujo Erótico” and “Mujer tendida de espaldas” whose subject matter you can guess, which I thought were splendid and compensated for some of his decidedly uninspired work on display.

Still it was good to get to see some of the early self-portraits of Courbet including the startling one of him looking demented, hands twisted in his hair and staring wide eyed at the viewer.  An exhibition, like the other, worthy of a return visit.

And so home by train and subsiding into post-Cultural collapse.