We did our usual mile walk to the blue line, this time Dressanes, and took the Metro to Parallel, where we caught the funicular halfway up Montjuic. One of the two cool things about the funicular is, if you arrived by Metro, you don’t have to pay a second time to transfer to it – the cost is covered by your initial Metro. The other cool thing is, well, it’s a funicular! Of course it is cool. . .break the word down in Latin. “Fun” as in, you know, “fun.” Lower case “I” as in “and.” “Cular” as in “cooler.” “Fun and cool” – could not be plainer!
(Editor’s Note: Now you are just making things up! Blogger: It wouldn’t be the first time!).
Anyhow, I had it in my head to go to the Joan Miro museum, which, for some reason, won’t become clear the more you read. Another famous Catalan artist (Picasso, Dali, and of course, Gaudi), everything I had seen related to Miro showed vibrant colors.
And it’s partially true. Some of his work IS in vibrant colors, as you will see in some of the photos below. However, more of his modern art is on display, and it, like much modern art, is over-rated.
The vibrant colors is one aspect of the interesting part of Miro. The other is that he painted from 1907 (born in 1893) till his death in 1983 – so he lived through the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s repressive regime, and other terrors.
The dull part about Miro is that a bunch of his work represents the worst of modern art. Some of his art is just squiggly lines, or a dot of blue on a huge canvas. Couple that with the most pretentious audioguide EVER! After a bit we stopped listening to the audioguide. I would put the viewable aspect of his work around 15% of what we saw.
The pictures below don’t do justice to just how spectacularly pointless much of his art is, and they don’t come close to communicating that the audioguide talks were insipid to the fifth dimension. And no, I did not take pictures of the bad stuff. . .I’m sorry, I should have one example just so my readers could understand how bad the bad is.
Go ahead and call me a philistine if you wish, but if art is supposed to be accessible, I shouldn’t need some Englishman who graduated from Eton telling me in as snooty and snotty a voice as possible what I’m looking at.
The building itself was pretty cool, there was a beautiful back terrace with views of a chunk of the city. We went up on the roof to see a succession of goofy sculptures (the best one is shown below, the rest were even more pointless than that one), but the roof was enjoyable. Then, we got a snack of tasty croissants, with a sparkling water for me and a coffee for Carol.
(By the way, if you ever get a text from that I’m really craving coffee, call Liam Neeson, because that’s my signal that I’ve been taken.)
Look, I liked some of it immensely. But immense chunks of his work was drivel.
Phone home!
This was one of his early
paintings, and I like it.
This is also an early painting, of
the village of Siurana, which
Carol and I visited on our
wine tour day.
It might be drivel, but at least it is colorful.
And please, don't lecture me about how
this captures man's inhumanity to man, or
other such nonsense.
Cool sculpture on a terrace.
On top of the mountain to the
right, you can make out the
Sacred Heart of Jesus Church.
So I do like this.
Not sure I'm a fan of this,
but at least it is colorful.
This is one of his I like -- represents day.
There's a similar one for night, but my
photo didn't turn out that well.
One example from the crappy
sculpture garden on the roof.
And, of course, being on Montjuic means
a photo of Sagrada Familia is a must.
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