the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt fourteen)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Art is one of those things Barcelona and Madrid like to squabble over. In the first half of the twentieth century Barcelona produced some of the most remarkable artists of the time. The modernismo of Gaudí and his fellow architects was accompanied by that of artists like Santago Rusiñol and Ramón Casas.They looked to Europe and loved all things modern. Like Gaudí, however, they also looked back at the Romanesque, at the twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries of the Catalan countryside and at Barcelona’s own, unique, Gothic architecture. Their headquarters, in true Spanish style, was a bar – Els Quartre Gats, The Four Cats. A teenage Pablo Picasso who, although born in Málaga, spent his formative years in Barcelona – was welcomed here. One of his first exhibitions sat on the café’s walls.

Picasso had been studying – and his father teaching – at the fine-art school lodged in the top floor of the fourteenth-century Llotja, the old stock exchange. Another pupil there was Joan Miró, who started off painting the countryside and farms of his father’s native Tarragona before moving on to Paris and surrealism.

The mad, mustachioed, paranoid surrealist Salvador Dalí was a notary’s son from that most conservative of Catalan place, Figueres. When Dalí died it was found that he had recently changed his will. Instead of giving his work to the Generalitat, he donated it to the Spanish state. Catalans cried foul, claiming Dalí had been manipulated into changing the will at the last moment. The inventor of the so-called paranoid critical method left behind him a museum installed alongside his old Torre Galatea house. He had topped it with giant eggs and encrusted, on the outside, plaster imitations of Catalan bread rolls. It is now one of the most visted museums in Spain. Dalí is perhaps the last person to have willingly sported a barretina, the sock-length, floppy red beret of the Catalan peasant. Some catalanistas prefer to forget his enthusiasm for Spain. This included highly formative years in the company of the poet Lorca and film-maker Buñuel as a Madrid student. It also included a fawning reverence for Franco.