Barcelona (mostly Gaudí)

It was a grey and gloomy morning - I'm sure that in the sun, Park Güell gleams and sparkles and looks even more extraordinary - Gaudí's great plan to build a park with sixty spectacular villas in it, so that the haute bourgeoisie of Barcelona could live in an architectural dream land.  Unfortunately, only two were interested ... but that leaves a lot of park.  It's hard not to want to take photos of every single bit of crockery mosaic (surely someone's done a PhD on the late C19th ceramic designs here ...) - there are a lot more where these came from, but these give a good sample.

Then a bus down to the sea, at Barceloneta, which had a remarkably laid back and happy feel to it (with more time, I'd have gone to the zoo, or at least the gardens that they're in, which looks as though it has some wonderful buildings that are relics of the 1888 Universal Exposition) - wandered down the front before getting another bus back to the Sagrada Familia.

This, despite being begun in the late C19th, is famously unfinished - and still very much being worked on.  I found it surprisingly repulsive from the outside,

but stunningly beautiful within - though I would take Ely Cathedral over it any day ...  It is, though, remarkable.

And then - the research part of today - I found Gaudí's snail!  I knew it was there, somewhere, but it took some hunting down - it's on the outside of the apse, together with some snakes and lizards and other things that apparently aren't holy enough to be allowed inside a consecrated space.  That seems a bit hard on snails and lizards, although certainly snakes have, in biblical terms, rather a lot to answer for.

 

to Barcelona

It was a very wet train ride down from Lyon to Montpelier, and then along into Spain - once we were past the Pyrenees, it was visibly better weather and beautiful landscape, and by the time I was in Barcelona, had made sense of how to buy a subway ticket and actually find the right train line (Google Maps was for once not helpful), I was delighted to arrive at my hotel and find this out of the window ... I mean, I knew it would be there, but it was great to have a Gaudí in my view!

So off I went into the city for a couple of hours, heading due south ... I'm sure everyone's Barcelona pictures are exactly the same, but there are good reasons for this ...

My goal was the Cathedral - but it was shutting for tourists for Mass, and I had no idea whether that would be lengthy or not, so I shuffled away ...

with more excellent buildings distracting me on the way back.

More obvious sites will follow tomorrow - this is my whistle-stop tour of Northern Spain, where I've never been, unless you count riding through it on a long-distance bus in 1980 from London Victoria to Nerja, on the south coast - an experience that left me so disorientedly travel sick that I blew a whole lot of money that I didn't have on an air ticket back from Granada (after more buses between Nerja, where I have a strong memory of reading Gareth Stedman Jones' Outcast London on the beach), Seville, which smelt of orange blossom, and Cordoba, with its amazing Moorish architecture.  That was even speedier a visit to Spain than this one will be ...

 

Lyon day 6 (a trip to Le Puy)

So why Le Puy, with the cathedral stuck on a volcanic plug, and a huge statue of the Virgin Mary cast from Russian cannons captured in the Crimean War and melted down?  Ummm - because I've never been there?  Because I hoped for lentils for lunch?  Alas, there was a huge back up on the motorway there, and so we were late, and lunch didn't happen as such.  But our morning guide showed us the magnificent cathedral in great detail -

as you can see, plenty of Moorish detail in the stone work.

It was a site of pilgrimage in its own right before it became a jumping off point for pilgrims going to Compostella (and there were lots of those around, in impressive hiking gear and with shells tied to their backpacks) - pilgrimage to the Black Madonna (that's a long story - the original statue may well have been a pagan one, to Isis and Horus; and then the figure was long understood to be Egyptian; and in 1794 taken out of the church and burned on a pyre in the main square in a fit of revolutionary zeal, whilst they yelled Burn the Egyptian, which makes me suspicious of French racism of the time.  This, however, is a replacement - a replica of the old one (and indeed, she does look rather Egyptian), made from drawings executed just before she met her demise, is in the Treasury.

Then there's part of an old Roman Temple (celebrating healing waters) built into the cathedral,

and some really wonderful cloisters.

Outside, in the town, these exceptionally shallow steps are to make it easy for donkeys to climb up.

A surprising mural ... suggesting it may rain ...

and a terrific C19th fountain, at the bottom of the town.  The details about this online are so unlike those that our afternoon guide told us that I won't even start to unravel ...

... but as you can see, we were to be caught in dramatic thunderstorms on the drive home ...

Shame about the lentils, though ...

 

Lyon day 5

Does everyone feel deflated and anti-climactic after giving a paper?  I certainly sunk after mine (it went perfectly fine - it's just the aftermath after the build up) so I went to admire the bees in the park opposite, busy at work pollinating, and then for a walk round the lake, in what was nearly 90 degree heat, and cloudy, so extreme humidity.  Needless to say, that rendered it a lot less idyllic than the other day.

 I came upon two weird and apparently deserted witchy structures - well, a witch's house and a bird house - inexplicably in the middle of a small but dense thicket.

And then, after other talks, parties, etc, time for a reception in the Museum of Modern Art - an impressive and entirely idiosyncratic 140 meter long (that's nearly 460 feet) curving canvas by Sylvie Selig called River of No Return - full of artistic and literary quotations, and a kind of anti-heroic quest.  Some parts were so funny that I laughed aloud (the images carried inscriptions floating along on the surface - often alliterative, certainly allusive, often wry (at men's expense).  But somehow I felt depressed and emptied out at the end: it worked as an anti-quest - or, really, there's just disaster at the end of everything.

That was nothing to the exhibition on the second floor, which contained some of the most macabre, depressing, unsettling sculptures, photos, and mixed-media stuff that I'd seen for a long time.  This was about the only art work that I could bear to look at for long.  It was meant to disturb, but ... (I'm sparing you the images).

So at the end of all of this, I escaped the party with four DJs, etc, after realizing that everyone there seemed to be about 30, and was glad to see the tail end of a sunset from my room ...

 

Lyon Day 4 and some very strange art

It was an afternoon of strange art.  First, why do the horses on the huge Bartholdi fountain seem to have tortoises on their hooves?

Two things stuck with me from my visit to the Musée des Beaux Arts 40+ years ago.  One was the magnificent Puvis de Chavannes frescoes on the stairwell, 

and the other, Louis Janmot's series of 18 paintings, Le poème de l'âme - which he worked on between 1835-1855: a very strange mixture of social realism, allegory, spiritual fantasy, Catholicism, morbidity, and goodness knows what else.  I came away, I remember, wanting to work on it - it was so strange, and to me, deeply embedded (I thought) in C19th French art though I was, very unlike anything else.  Obviously I didn't work on it, at all, but it's stayed with me ...

I never fully took on board how depressed the father was in this picture ...

and it was a few decades before I was looking for lightning flashes everywhere -

... and I'd utterly forgotten both how weird some of the details are -

and also - in very many of the canvases - what a detailed chronicler of biodiversity Janmot was.

Speaking of biodiversity, and moving on to other artists, other rooms, I was delighted to get a snail and a bee in the same image.

But the oddnesses continued ...

and pleased though I was to see for real Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret's 1879 picture of a wedding party being photographed,

I'd never noticed before the small boy being deliberately asphyxiated with pipe smoke.

It was quite a relief to escape into the semi-normality of Lyon streets ...

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