The Expressive Genius of Antoni Gaudí and Henri Matisse
Casa Milà (La Pedrera) 1906-1910, Barcelona. Antoni Gaudí
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Modernism emerged as a movement aiming for a total renovation of the arts. Its influence extended to painting, sculpture, and, above all, architecture, design, and printing (crucial in developing posters and publicity). This spiritually bourgeois style served this class, appealing to their taste for the decorative, often used profusely and randomly. One could say that Modernism is inherently a decorative style.
Modernist Architecture
Modernist architecture is notable for its decorative style. It utilized all materials, including iron. However, instead of radically exploiting these materials to solve new social needs, it employed them traditionally, focusing on their aesthetic possibilities. The movement had different names depending on the country: Art Nouveau in France and Belgium, Modernism in Spain, Modern Style in England, and Sezessionsstil or Jugendstil in Austria. In the first three countries, the style is characterized by curved lines, creating swirling, plant-inspired, flat, and curved spaces, sometimes developing almost organically. In England and Austria, it is characterized by greater formal purity, more geometric, using flat planes and rationalism in designing volumes and spaces.
Modernism in Catalonia
While Modernism can be found throughout Spain, Catalonia, particularly Barcelona, saw its most significant development. This is logical considering Modernism’s link to the industrial bourgeoisie, a class much more developed in Barcelona than in the rest of the state.
Antoni Gaudí
The most important architects of this style are Puig i Cadafalch, Domènech i Muntaner (architect of the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona), and, above all, Antoni Gaudí. Born in Reus (Tarragona), Gaudí’s early works reflected the period’s eclecticism, with shapes inspired by Gothic, Moorish, and Islamic architecture. Notable examples from this period include Casa Vicens in Barcelona and the Episcopal Palace of Astorga.
Later, his style evolved into more imaginative, creative, and personal proposals, fully embracing Modernism. Besides decorative and construction procedures where craftsmanship was essential (carved stone slabs, etc.), he developed entirely new, technically sophisticated structures and load-bearing systems (aided by ingenious models). Works from this period include the renovation of Casa Batlló, Park Güell, Casa Milà, and his most famous, albeit unfinished, work: the Sagrada Família, all in Barcelona.
Casa Milà: A Modernist Masterpiece
Casa Milà exemplifies the Modernist project, where architecture and decorative arts converge. Gaudí designed and oversaw everything, including doors, wrought iron balconies, concierge booths, window and door joinery, furniture, and lamps. When Barcelona industrialist Mr. Milà commissioned Gaudí to build an apartment building, Gaudí saw an opportunity to develop an ambitious project on a vast 1000 m2 plot. Located on a corner where Passeig de Gràcia meets Carrer de Provença, in an area inhabited by Barcelona’s bourgeoisie.
Gaudí decided to create a chamfered corner for the building, instead of obliquely cutting the façades of Passeig de Gràcia and Carrer de Provença, creating a logical and smooth transition. Typically, residential building courtyards were large, elongated spaces. In Casa Milà, however, the courtyards have rounded contours and widen as they rise, like a large funnel absorbing light and improving the natural ventilation of the apartments opening onto them. The floor plans of the house are all different. The walls shy away from right angles, the forms are fluid, and the interiors are functional. The rooms have different heights, giving the impression that the house was designed from the inside out, with the façade as an undulating surface reflecting the interior.
To achieve this, Gaudí implemented an innovative structure of columns, beams, and girders, allowing for free manipulation of the building’s interior space and eliminating the façade’s load-bearing function. The façade, made of stone, was carved in situ based on models that dictated the exact shape of each stone block. This created the ripples in the viewpoints and balconies, giving the appearance of a stone cliff, earning the building its popular nickname,”La Pedrer” (the quarry in Catalan). The carefully crafted wrought iron balconies mimic plant forms, as if sprouting between the stones. The entire façade, with its fluid and emphatic forms, prefigures Expressionist forms. The thick, inclined columns flanking the portal resemble massive elephant legs striding towards the sidewalk.
In the loft or attic, Gaudí used a beautiful structure of parabolic arches (similar to the catenary arches he had already used at the school and in the Sagrada Família).
Other notable elements include the roof and chimneys with their whimsical shapes and coverings of tiles and even broken glass, creating a mysterious and evocative, almost surreal landscape. Another innovation was the underground area, a precursor to the garages built in later housing estates.
Gaudí abandoned the Casa Milà project shortly before completion. He had envisioned decorating the building with sculptures dedicated to the Virgin and Archangels, but Mr. Milà, after whom the building was named, disliked the proposed model.
Despite initial misunderstandings, Casa Milà has been admired as a project showcasing Gaudí’s creative genius in innovative structures and forms, foreshadowing subsequent architectural and artistic styles.
Expressionism in the Early Twentieth Century
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Expressionist movements emerged in Europe. The term”expressio” designates art forms where the image sacrifices verisimilitude to prioritize conveying the artist’s feelings through artistic resources like brushstroke gesture, pictorial surface texture, expressive line use, and formal simplification.
Origins and Influences
Expressionism did not appear out of nowhere. As early as 1861, Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé proposed that the artist should focus not on representing the object but on the”effect produced” Van Gogh, Gauguin, Redon, and the Symbolists can be considered predecessors of these trends. Additionally, influences from so-called primitive arts, brought to the metropolis from colonies in Africa and Oceania, and the interest in High Middle Ages painting were instrumental in the style’s development.
Although expressing an intense emotional state does not necessarily require abandoning objective representation, by 1909, the desire for such expression and the pursuit of a spiritual state led Expressionist Wassily Kandinsky to eliminate all vestiges of the natural world. Thus, Expressionism contained the seeds of abstract art.
Fauvism
Henri Matisse
who is stressed along with Picasso, one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. His contribution to art has been fundamental, not only for their own work but the influence it has had on many later artists.
In his early works as “luxury, calm and pleasure”, combined an invoice thicker pointillist brush strokes of color with a freer interpretation. Gradually, this, the color, will be distributed on the surface in planes larger playing with violent contrasts of complementary colors, the thick impasto of paint, and the absence of precise contours. Later, his work evolved to acquire a subtlety and elegance unmatched in images that tell us of some joy of living, a pleasant world, tidy, quiet (and, why not? Bourgeois), where the forms will be denuded of all accessories, playing with the elegance of line and the masses of flat colors arranged according to a rate about “musical”.
In his work we can highlight pictures like “The green line (Portrait of Mme. Matisse)”, “The Joy of Living”, “La Musique”, “Dance” which we will discuss below, “The Piano Lesson” “Door Window at Collioure”, “The Romanian blouse” or the extraordinary collage end of the series “Jazz”.
The danza.1909-1910. From this table, Matisse made two versions. This is a large oil on canvas 260x 391cm. The large format used by Matisse seeks to create a monumental image that endows it represented an almost sacred.
Matisse It uses only four colors: green and blue background and the color brown meat and contouring of the figures.
Matisse seems to solve this and other works on the question of the primacy of drawing over color or vice versa. Here it seems to reconcile the dilemma between the line (to which he is associated with more rationalistic tendencies of art) and color (which usually emparienta the more “emotional”) is an image that reason and emotion, line and color at a time.
In the image Matisse seems to get rid of anything superfluous. If the theme is classic and more common in academic painting of the nineteenth century, the treatment is not at all.
Disappear anatomical correction, the conventional representation of the volume through the twilight like the space by means of perspective.
Matisse, guided by an extraordinary sense of rhythm and lyrical as well as an infallible instinct for color harmonies converts the movement of dance in an elegant and expressive pace of wavy lines where all the superfluous: shades of color, and lifelike anatomical correction is sacrificed for evoked by the painting that musical rhythm and sensual dance.The total success of Matisse is never a painting with such economy of pictorial means had evoked so powerfully sensuous rhythm, seductive and almost sacred dance. The figures are converted into and roll gesture, the movement of the line is paramount. The painting evokes all the dances, the most significant and those that emerge in the memory of Matisse as the festivals of his youth and who saw sardanas stays in Collioure.
Matisse made this picture for a Russian aristocrat who was one of the great collectors of his art. After the revolution of this wonderful collection was requisitioned and noble would go to the Soviet state that would expose it to the Hermitage museum. Matisse’s work, already known before the expropriation, would thus have a huge influence on Malevich Russian artists as they would have learned from Matisse that color line and should be released around naturalist mimicry.