Plate 6 from Joan Miro's "Black and Red Series."

By Mary Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

CLEVELAND -- "Barcelona & Modernity: Picasso, Gaudi, Miro, Dali" is a visually and intellectually captivating exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, now partly reopened after having been closed most of the year for building renovation and expansion.

		If you go ... "Barcelona & Modernity: Picasso, Gaudi, Miro, Dali" Where: Cleveland Museum of Art. When: through Jan. 7. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays (not Saturdays), until 9 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays. Closed Thanksgiving. Admission: Weekdays $12, seniors $10, children 6-18 $7; Saturdays and Sundays $15, seniors $13, children 6-18 $10. Children under 5 years and members, free. An audio guide that addresses highlights is free with ticket purchase. A critic's dozen: Exhibition highlights Catalog: The stellar, fully illustrated, 524-page book is $40 paper, $65 cloth. Visiting: The exhibition galleries are the only ones open. Gift shops and a cafe are also open, and parking is available in the structure behind the museum and at other facilities nearby. The museum expansion project continues through 2011. Galleries are scheduled to open between now and then as wings are completed. Information: 1-888-262-0033 or www.ClevelandArt.org.

An opulent and layered exploration of Catalan culture between 1868 and 1939, the final year of the Spanish Civil War, the exhibition comprises more than 350 artworks, including painting, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, architectural models, photographs and posters.

At the entry, a fiery iron "Rooster Greeting the Dawn," created for the Cafe-Restaurant of Barcelona's Universal Exposition, is symbolic of the 19th-century rebirth of interest by its citizens in Catalonian language, literature and other arts. Maps show proposals for tearing down the city's medieval walls to allow for the expansion that would accommodate Barcelona's transformation into an industrial, economic and artistic center.

In the final rooms, works imbued with empathy and outrage encapsulate artists' responses to the war's brutality and to the overthrow of the Spanish Republic by fascist Gen. Francisco Franco. Notable among these are Dali's horrific "Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)," Miro's eight "Black and Red Series" engravings that parallel civilization's denouement into chaos; and preparatory works by Picasso for his now iconic "Guernica."

The exhibition was co-organized by the CMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. It will open at the Met, its only other venue, in March.

Although it will not travel to Spain, two Spanish television networks came to film the exhibition's opening night, and it was given a three-page spread in the country's major newspaper, El Pais, according to William Robinson, CMA curator of Modern European art, who initiated the exhibition and was its co-director.

"Culture is a really important part of life in Europe," Robinson notes. "People [there] understand the relationship between politics and culture."

The show would be a major draw if only for the works, both master and lesser known, by the four principals of the title.

Picasso, in fact, may be seen as one leitmotif -- appearing early with Parisian club scenes in Impressionist mode; followed by intimate ink and watercolor portraits of fellow artists at the Barcelona gathering place for progressives and intellectuals, Quatre Gats cafe; to his first sculpture, of 1902; through the towering presence of the incomparable "La Vie" and other works of his Blue Period; on to paintings inspired by a revival of classicism; and finally his cubist work.

But it is the cultural context to which Robinson alludes, revealing itself subtly through a wealth of objects and juxtapositions, that makes the exhibition edifying.

Jewelry, for example, is decorative and precious, as in Lluis Masriera's early 20th-century gem-studded pendants, as well as geometric and political, as in Manuel Capdevila's 1937 brooch "Spain Withdrawn," the abstracted Iberian Peninsula inlaid with a spiral of cracked eggshell, an apparent reference to the country's turmoil.

Architecture is as sensual as Lluis Domenech's Palace of Catalan Music or as pragmatic as the projects of the internationally respected group GATCPAC, an association of architects and engineers who supported functional design as a way to address social problems. And then there is Gaudi, in a category of his own, misunderstood as a madman by those who couldn't grasp the totality of his vision.

Another intent of the exhibition is to draw attention to artists not commonly known in the United States who the curators believe deserve recognition.

Robinson gives as example furniture makers Gaspar Homar and Joan Busquets, whose elaborate, curvaceous and intensely crafted designs are surprisingly "missing from most great collections of decorative arts."

Also noteworthy are Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusinol, key figures of the Modernisme movement (roughly 1880s to 1910s) in painting and co-founders of the Quatre Gats. Their potent images of Parisian nightlife feature alienated figures and blue-gray tones more reminiscent of 20th-century American Edward Hopper than their French Impressionist contemporaries. Subjects like Casas' "The Bohemian (Erik Satie in Montmartre)" and Rusinol's agonized "Morphine" addict peer into the period's soul.

Although the permanent collection is in storage or traveling during renovations, a visitor to Cleveland could easily spend a day thoroughly exploring this exhibition.

"It's a history that's been lost and that we're trying to recover," Robinson says, adding that under Franco's dictatorship Spain fell off the map of the contemporary art world. Today Spain is one of the fastest rising economies and art markets in Europe, he says.

Understanding the richness and complexity of the art of Barcelona, Robinson argues, "is crucial to understanding modern art." But it's not appreciated in the United States, he says, and because people don't know that history, they don't actually understand the artists they are familiar with.

"Barcelona & Modernity" will go a long way toward broadening the parameters of this particular national conversation.