Ask anyone to name Spanish painters from this century, and the odds are that Picasso, Dali and Miro will all get a mention - and probably Tapies as well. All from Barcelona, or nearby. Try architects, and Gaudi will be at the top of most lists, the only name on many. He shared the same home base, which he marked indelibly with his rampant imagination. Opera singers? Jose Carreras, Montserrat Caballe, Victoria de Los Angeles, would all figure. All Catalans, with Barcelona's fabled Liceu opera house and exquisite Palau de la Musica Catalana as their natural environments. Of this century's classical soloists, the Catalan Pablo Casals is undoubtedly the best-known. Likewise, two of the three best-known Spanish composers, Granados and Albeniz, both grew up musically in Barcelona. Contemporary theatre companies? Els Comediants, La Fura dels Baus, Els Joglars and La Claca all made their name in the Catalan capital. Just one street in Spain? Barcelona's Ramblas complex would surely top the poll. You might begin to think that, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers, every significant Spanish artist goes around compulsively repeating "I am from Barcelona". (Let's leave aside for a moment the complicating factor that many artists from Barcelona would not consider themselves Spanish at all, but Catalan.)
Ask the same person to name similar groups of artists and cultural entities, restricting themselves to Madrid, and they would probably have some difficulty in filling any of the lists, and in starting some of them. It is not that Madrid does not have its cultural glories, it is more that they are richer, relatively speaking, in earlier centuries than in this one. azquez, of Goya, but then remember that both these great artists were adopted, not native, sons of the city. The key to understanding Madrid is that it was created as an artificial, administrative capital, which has drawn in people from everywhere, and in some ways has remained nowhere in particular.
"Madrid, a city full of skyscrapers, full of functionaries of the former regime, full of former functionaries of the current regime," rants Carvalho, the popular detective created by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, a writer who is, of course - like his hero - a native of Barcelona. Substitute "palaces" for "skyscrapers", and the same complaint might have made by any unwilling visitor from the regions to this jumped-up metropolis over the last four centuries. (Philip II made the small town of Madrid his capital in 1561, when it still had neither a cathedral nor a printing press.)
The key to understanding Barcelona, on the other hand, lies in its long history as a cosmopolitan port, and its strategic position on the main land route to (and from) the rest of Europe. That history began under the Romans, flourished briefly but spectacularly around the 14th century, and boomed again in the feverish mercantile expansion of the 1800s. Barcelona expressed itself through a distinct language, Catalan. Its culture, over the past century, could support rich avant-garde branches (beginning with the influential triumph of Modernism at the turn of the century) partly because it had such deep roots. The heady mix of entrepreneurial productivity, regional nationalism, and proximity to both France and the Mediterranean, produced a city which constantly fizzes and spills over with cultural interaction. This volatile brew has been further enriched (and brilliantly marketed) under the inspired mayorship of Pasqual Maragall over the last 15 years.
Meanwhile, you might think, Madrid simmers away in relative isolation in the heart of the Castillian meseta. True and false. Massive generalisations breed massive exceptions. Madrid has also had a great mayor since Francoism, Tierno Galvan, "the old professor", who returned Madrid to its people, refurbishing great parks like the Buen Retiro and revitalising popular traditions. Madrid's 1980s movida was an explosion of youth culture as "international" (and as flashy and shallow) as "Swinging London" was in the 1960s. Almodovar's movies have projected contemporary Madrid's artistic energy, amoral hedonism and obsession with camp style on to the screens of the world. The Reina Sofia Museum, with its marvellous exposition of the development of 20th-century Spanish art, and the nearby housing of part of the ThyssenBornemisza collection, tracing western painting from the 13th century to the present day, have formed an unparallelled "golden triangle" of museums with the Prado since they opened early in this decade.
Madrid has always been a centre of Spanish intellectual and literary life, attracting writers and polemicists such as Miguel de Unamuno and Ortegay Gasset to its passionate and learned tertuliaz - groups who met to converse in atmospheric cafes like the Gijon. The accumulated wealth and prestige of a national capital has naturally also made Madrid a focal point of the art market, and a centre for cultural and media industries, though Barcelona can often compete with it on equal terms in the latter.
The love-hate relationship between the two cities is fierce and, both Madrilenos and Barceloneses seem to believe, unique. "Since the beginning of the 20th century," the historian Javier Tusell wrote recently:, "Spain has had two cultural capitals, each with its own rhythm of life, and each capable, independently, of linking into the great creative centres abroad - first Paris and Brussells (sic), later New York - at the same time maintaining a most peculiar relationship with each other. You could not say that the same sense of `dual capitality' exists elsewhere, at least in similar terms. Paris, for example, has no such antagonist in France, and in Italy the `capitality' of culture is much more dispersed."
Tusell is one of the curators of a major exhibition on the theme Madrid-Barcelona 1898-1998: Resonances and Distances. The show is currently running at the spacious Centre de Cultura Contemporania
in Barcelona, and will transfer to Madrid in the Spring. It is a co-production between the Centre and the Provincial Government of Madrid, and promises to bring to life the rich tapestry which the tensions between the two capitals might be expected to have created. However, like some contemporary art shows, the exhibition catalogue is much more substantial than what is actually being exhibited. The year 1898 is critical in Spanish history. It was the moment in which a nation which still thought of itself, rather grandiosely, as imperial, lost most of its last significant colonies, Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rica, and saw its fleet destroyed by the US navy.
IN Madrid, the literary "generation of 98" mourned lost greatness and called for national regeneration, a mindset which prefigured both the left-wing Republic and Franco's dictatorship. In Barcelona, they marvelled at Madrid's lack of statesmanship and lamented the lost markets for their textiles. They also began to wonder if there was any point in remaining hooked up to a backward and declining power. Catalan nationalism, still a dominant force today, came of age with the rhetorical conclusion to a poem by Joan Maragall: "Adeu, Espanya! (Goodbye, Spain!).
In this context, it is not surprising that the exhibition begins under the rubric Spain as a problem and moves on to the question Europe as a solution? Largely through painting and sculpture, but also through media, especially literature and the press, we are led through the processes of divergence and convergence which the two cities underwent. The initial contrast between the academicism of turn-of-the-century Madrid painting (all oxtail-soup tones and classical subjects) and the modernism of Barcelona (impressionist Mediterranean light and everyday scenes) is a kind of signature for much of what follows.
Madrid "caught up", of course, though it had the good taste to return to figurative painting in the 1970s when Barcelona was busy keeping up with the international Joneses in giving birth to conceptualism. Not many of the works selected to illustrate these trends are first-class, though a number of the names are top-drawer. This creates an overall impression of dullness rather than excitement, especially when you know you could nip off to see some of the best of Picasso, Miro and Tapies only a few minutes away in the same city.
Then there are shamefully big gaps. Theatre, so vibrant and adventurous in Barcelona at least, merits only a single textual panel, with no photographs. (The incoherent multi-media extravaganza with which the show concludes reflects some of its excitement in video-clips.) As for architecture, there is a dearth of three-dimensional models, and the poor illustrations and plans give very little sense of the heroic expansion and radical innovation which characterise both cityscapes. Cinema gets a rather better deal, with a witty juxtaposition of different styles on adjacent screens.
The intellectual and literary clashes between Spanish centralism and Catalan quasi-separatism get more comprehensive treatment in audio-visual displays, but this topic probably is more appropriately dealt with in the catalogue's heavyweight essays. Above all, there is little to surprise or delight anyone with a minimal knowledge of either city, which is presumably precisely the main public at which the show is aimed. Nor is there any sense of the real pride of Madrid or Barcelona, which is probably why there is very little which could give anyone great offence, or great stimulation. Perhaps the compromises demanded by working for both cities at once were overwhelming. That is a great pity, because a great opportunity has been lost.
The exhibition runs in Barcelona until February 22nd and will transfer to Madrid's Circula de Bellas Artes from March 10th until May 3rd.
