Look no further
In his chronicle of Antoni Gaudí, Michael Eaude pieces together architecture, patron records and eyewitness accounts to shed new light on the great architect’s life
As Michael Eaude makes clear from the start, writing about Catalonia’s most universally known architect is no pushover, given that Gaudí wrote next to nothing about himself or his work or indeed about anything else. Any biographer is therefore dependent on the evidence of his buildings (and their finishings) themselves, certain agreements Gaudí had with his often long-suffering patrons, and the hearsay of people who knew him and who left written accounts of their conversations with him, which, inevitably, are almost never verbatim.
Eaude’s way of coping with this is to stay on solid ground wherever it presents itself and to draw the most likely conclusions when he runs out of it. For instance, he deals with the decades-old debate about whether Gaudí was born in Reus or the nearby village of Riudoms, by pointing out that he was probably born in his mother’s home in Riudoms and baptised in the nearby town of Reus which, as Catalonia’s second city after Barcelona (in the second half of the 19th century) boasted a more than suitable church (Sant Pere). While we’re on the subject of Reus, Eaude also points out its importance throughout Gaudí’s life, not only because of the town’s proud Catalanism – which rubbed off on the architect in no uncertain terms – but also because of the disproportionate number of reusencs who would later become Gaudí’s friends and business partners.
Eaude’s book takes us step by step both through Gaudí’s early – and often enduring – architectural influences (Catalan Gothic, William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, Moorish and mudéjar architecture…) and then joins up the dots between said influences and Gaudí’s buildings and structures, from a couple of lampposts in Barcelona’s Plaça Reial, a cabinet for a fashionable glove maker and a lavatory for the (anarchist) Mataró Workers’ Cooperative, all the way through to the splendours of the Park Güell, the Milà and Batlló houses, and of course the Sagrada Família, which occupied over two decades of Gaudí’s life. Neither does Eaude forget the lesser known buildings that came in between: the Torre Bellesguard, the Casa Calvet, the Casa Botines in León and the almost completely ignored Casa Clapés in Barcelona’s Gràcia district, among others. Every single building and monument is illustrated with clear black and white photos, conveniently placed right next to the texts about them.
Given that Eaude is the author of what is surely the best cultural introduction to Catalonia in English (‘Catalonia. A Cultural History’. Signal Books, Oxford, 2007) it isn’t surprising that he manages to place Gaudí firmly in the cultural context of his time, which consisted, among other things, of an up-and-coming anarcho-syndicalist movement (which the young Gaudí felt comfortable with and the older Gaudí abhorred); the Catalan ‘Renaixença’ (cultural rebirth, in all artistic fields); the great Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer; the burgeoning Rambling Movement through which many young and not so young Catalans discovered the highlights of Catalonia’s long forgotten historical past by taking long rural hikes to its equally long forgotten abbeys, churches and castles; the conservative regionalist movement spearheaded by the writer (and priest) Josep Torras i Bages; and, it goes without saying, the modernista or Art Deco movement in painting and architecture (there is a fascinating section on modernista architects like Puig i Cadafalch and Domènech i Muntaner, contemporaries of Gaudí, who, nonetheless, never identified himself as a modernista).
Perhaps surprising for those who still believe the lingering cliché that Gaudí lived and worked in a hermit-like isolation, are Eaude’s descriptions of how he loved to work with large teams of builders and artisans, many of whose skills Gaudí himself possessed and put to use on site, shoulder to shoulder with his employees, some of whom became close friends.
It is widely known that Gaudí was something of a Catholic mystic (his greatest buildings are famously riddled with Christian symbols and slogans), but less well known – given the colourful playfulness of his best-known buildings – is his gradual descent into a religious fanaticism so great that at one point he nearly fasted himself to death. (Even after he’d been brought back from the brink of starvation thanks to a personal visit from the above-mentioned Torras i Bages, he continued to eschew formal meals, opting instead for a skimpy diet of bread, honey, chards and biscuits).
Despite his increasing Catholic conservatism, Gaudí was not beyond openly defying the Spanish police: arrested in 1924 on September 11th (the Catalan National Day, when the Spanish forces of law and order intensified their stopping and searching of random citizens) he was hauled off to a police station where he was berated for speaking in Catalan, given that according to the arresting officers, an architect, being a member of the professional class, was obliged to use Spanish. Gaudí replied: ‘My profession obliges me to pay my taxes and I pay them, but not to stop speaking my own language’. He had, in fact, refused to speak in Spanish since around 1900: quite a feat in the heavily centralised – and heavily policed – Spain of his day.
Not only has Michael Eaude crammed all this information and a great deal more into just under 190 pages, he has done so with an elegant and sometimes discreetly humorous style which will come as no surprise to readers of his previous books. (By way of example, there are not many writers who could light-heartedly compare the Palau Güell to Trump Tower and get away with it).
Finally, the extensive bibliography at the end of the book, which includes dozens upon dozens of books and articles which are about Gaudí or are Gaudí-adjacent, is proof enough that the author as done his homework and then some. I couldn’t help noticing that one book was missing: ‘La visió artística i religiosa d’En Gaudí’ (Quaderns Crema, Barcelona, 1996) by the surrealistic philosopher Francesc Pujols, a wonderful stream of consciousness text about Gaudí’s life, work and thoughts, packed with anecdotes, insights and the occasional gleeful overstatement (‘we are talking about the great architect of Catalonia, who we call the great architect of the universe’). But that is beside the point: anybody who would like to get a detailed, complete idea of who Antoni Gaudí really was and what he really achieved, need look no further than Eaude’s short but sweet biography.
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