Books by Juan Jose Lahuerta

The Spanish Civil War caused a considerable revival of certain themes of religious art. 1938, one year after Picasso painted Guernica the Swiss surrealist painter Max von Moos published an essay, that addresses some of the issues then confronted by church art. This book focuses on some of these issues.

This beautifully illustrated book, the catalog for an exhibition on view at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona and coorganized with the Picasso Museum in Paris, explores important affinities between Picasso and Romanesque art. Using two key moments as starting points, Juan José Lahuerta and Emilia Philippot first discuss the summer of 1906, when Picasso stayed in the village of Gòsol in the Catalan Pyrenees, and then turn to 1934, as he visited the Romanesque art collections of what is today the National Museum of Art of Catalonia. Picasso's discovery of the Romanesque nurtured his interest in other "primitive" or ethnographic art, later echoed in such decisive works as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Importantly, while Lahuerta and Philippot avoid any attempt to trace direct Romanesque influences on Picasso--as they note, his work consistently escapes such linear accounts--they do demonstrate that Picasso's interest in the twelfth-century sculpture Virgin from Gósol, his lifelong fascination with the theme of the crucifixion, and his study of the skull all reflect elements that were also of major importance in Romanesque art and architecture. What these shared features allow, Lahuerta and Philippot ultimately argue, is not only a richer understanding of Picasso's work, but also a rediscovering and reinvention of Romanesque art in our contemporary moment, causing the medieval to become refreshingly and paradoxically modern.

When the Corbusian International Modern style, with its contempt for ornament, imposed itself on architecture, figures like Gaudi (1852-1926) were relegated to the sidelines. In this volume, Lahuerta situates Gaudi in his context and vindicates his fin-de-siecle bohemian modernity. Embodied in such powerful images as the equation of the spires of the Sagrada Familia with the flames rising from burning churches during the Tragic Week (1909), the story takes us to the Barcelona of the early twentieth century, when class struggle threatened to topple the prevailing capitalist model. Drawing on valuable first-hand documents collected over several decades, the author shows that Gaudi was not an isolated eccentric but an architect who was keenly aware of the major theories and outstanding works of his time and the creator of revolutionary technical innovations. His analyses of Gaudi's writings reveals a pioneer in the use of industrial processes to produce ornamental details that may seem handmade today. Equally novel was the way that Gaudi made use of his fame as a public figure, a 'media personality', thanks to the cartoons of the architect and his buildings in the popular press. His influence on avant-garde artists like Dali, who admired the edible appearance of the Casa Mila, or Picasso, fascinated by the eroticism of the Casa Batllo attest to the importance of his contribution to culture. This entertaining volume is part of Columns of Smoke, a series of publications in which Professor Lahuerta turns his perceptive eye on the official narrative of modernity and its protagonists and the relationship between architecture, decoration and the print media.

ES

Features overlooked aspects of modern architecture and photography and reveal a more nuanced-and plausible-conception of the world. This volume includes images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures. It will redefine our concept of modernity.