Word: catalans
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...history of art has Pablo Picasso to thank for René Magritte. "You see, like many young painters in the 1920s I wanted to live in Paris," Magritte once told a pair of journalists visiting his picket-fence cottage in suburban Brussels. "And in Paris, there was this wild Catalan who was doing all there was to be done with technique. I could tell there wasn't going to be any technique left for the rest of us to invent. So that's when I decided I was going to paint ideas...
...latest guesstimated finishing date is 2030.) "Today Gaudí is more popular than known, and we want to change that," says Giralt-Miracle. "He had his feet on the ground, but his imagination in the infinite, arriving at a time - the turn of the 19th century - when the Catalan bourgeoisie had lots of money and there was an atmosphere of ostentation, creating the need for an exuberant and emblematic architect...
...ornate decoration of many Gaudí buildings can be seen as at best superfluous, at worst kitsch. In his excellent biography Gaudí, published by HarperCollins last year, U.K.-based Dutch architect Gijs van Hensbergen says of the Catalan's first private commission, a house in Barcelona for the wealthy tilemaker Manuel Vicens, "ornamentation is everywhere in riotous and tasteless profusion...
...whom he surrounded himself. He found patrons, particularly businessman Eusebi Güell, who rarely interfered with his vision. Given that Gaudí was given to changing his designs over and over during the building process, they needed to have bottomless pockets. Gaudí was also backed by superb Catalan craftsmen, particularly in stone and iron, and his studio included men both loyal and brilliant in their own right. One, the largely unrecognized Josep Jujol, is described by Van Hensbergen as one of architecture's "greatest creative geniuses...
...will visit the various celebrations during 2002 (see the International Gaudí Year site at www.gaudi2002.bcn.es) much of that legacy is intact. This is despite the view sometimes held at the time of their construction that his buildings, with their weirdly angled columns and arches, would fall down. A Catalan construction worker once dared to tell Gaudí that the galleries he designed for the house of Manuel...