Bilbao Guggenheim 2

More of our visit to the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. See the previous post for a little commentary.

Bilbao Guggenheim 1

Gaudi in the morning, the Bilbao Guggenheim in the afternoon. It was a pretty good day of art and architecture. And not unrelated, too. From the organic structures of brick and tile and iron and wood and color of Gaudi, more than a century ago, we pass to the glass, titanium, limestone, colorless, huge, billowing, “organic,” hardly a straight line except for floors and elevator shafts, lines of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. Memories of the Sydney Opera, the Ba'Hai Lotus Temple in New Delhi, both of which I disliked. But the Bilbao Guggenheim grows on you, particularly when you consider the contemporary art it is intended to contain. In fact, its major defect is that the “building” itself overshadows anything it could contain. Not a good thing for a museum. Well, almost anything. The Bilbao aire is on a hill overlooking the valley and city from the west. Buses run to the city center and its tram and metro systems every 20 minutes. We checked in in the early afternoon, temperatures already in the 90s, and quickly took the bus down to see the Guggenheim and a bit of the city. The Bilbao Guggenheim is by no means the most wonderful thing we have seen, though it's nothing less than a must-see. It is perhaps the most difficult to render into a post or two or three that tells any sort of coherent story. So I'll just present a number of pix, in two posts, that reflect our experience there. In chronological order, more or less. The David Hockney exhibit is about the largest one-person show I have seen--five or six different halls--and only the last 10 years of his work. Anyhow, if you visit this area, do visit the Guggenheim, and particularly Richard Serra's A Matter of Time exhibit, which required its own very large building. Getting some sense of what the Guggenheim has done for Bilbao--a formerly very gritty industrial city--is worth a visit too.

Capricho de Gaudi

Comillas' main attraction for us, however, was its association with Antonio Gaudi and two specimens of his earliest work. We became acquainted with Gaudi in Barcelona in 2010. In a few moments we went from “oh yeah, we should see one of those weird buildings” to “we'll stay a few extra days so we can see them all, by day and by night, and each more than once, too.” We'll visit Barcelona again next spring, mostly for the Gaudi. Anyhow,imagine our delight in learning that Comillas, far from Barcelona, holds the Capricho de Gaudi, a home Gaudi designed for a wealthy businessman and friend of the king. It was his first design after graduating from architecture school, and, surprisingly, one can see in it already nearly all his characteristic features—the iron grill work, use of tile, bold, organic design, use of natural features, color everywhere, and on and on. All that is missing is the later use of broken ceramic and tile to make curved and rounded features. Of course, it is unlike any other house in Comillas.