Word: gaudi
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...Olympic perfection off the open-air platform in Barcelona, their performances will be rivaled by the view -- by cable cars moving past Columbus on his column pointing to the New World; by the crown of thorns of the 13th century cathedral La Seu; by the unfinished confection of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, its eight towers reaching to the sky even as the divers speed downward, trying not to make a splash...
...best-known master was, of course, Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926). A descendant of Catalan metalsmiths, Gaudi introduced a wholly new idea of built space: an organic kind of space, not bounded by rigid lines, that undulates, flares, inflates, twists and contains stunning metaphors and moments of theater. The basement of the palace he built off the Ramblas for his main patron, Eusebi Guell, could serve as a set for The Ring -- not surprisingly, since Catalans in the 1880s were crazy for Wagner, the newest of new composers. Gaudi's Casa Mila, on Passeig de Gracia, known to Barcelonans...
...Sagrada Familia (which is not a cathedral but an "expiatory temple" dedicated to the cult of the Holy Family) is Gaudi's best-known building, the logo of Barcelona as the Statue of Liberty is of New York City. Unfortunately, because most of its designs were lost in the Spanish Civil War, nobody knows how Gaudi would have finished it, and the newly completed sections look dead compared with the parts Gaudi supervised. The facade sculptures by Josep Subirachs are particularly inert and vulgar. They seem to epitomize the moment when the religious art of Catholic Europe died for want...
...sense the cups were Price's bread-and-butter work -- they were popular, and no California collector's knickknack shelf was complete without one -- and yet they were consistently inventive and spry, displaying a constant buzz of fantasy and a growing mastery of color. Sometimes, as in Gaudi Cup, 1972, the intensity of the glazes seems to have literally broken down the form of the ceramic into tiny glowing shards. This sense of color as a veneer on a flat surface gets turned into a form of Cubism, rather as the Dutch Constructivist Gerrit Rietveld in the 1920s abstracted...
...down! Far out!"), the rococo diction ("fribblers" and "cutpurses" abound) and the Augustan bite (asides that wither "the mingy veneering of today's 'lite' architecture"). Beneath the virile lucidity of the prose, however, is a subtle and sensitive mind that can lead the reader, patiently, into complexity: "In Gaudi one sees flourishing the egotism achieved by those who think they have stepped beyond the bounds of the mere ego and identified themselves with nature, becoming God's humble servant but copying their employer...