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A Charming Jumble of Art and Artists

IT was a cool spring day at the foot of La Rambla, Barcelona's famous  and famously overrun  main promenade. I had been strolling under the freshly leafed plane trees, but now the sky threatened rain, and the crowds were growing wearisome. It was the perfect time to duck into the darkness of the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica. Inside the museum, a former convent, the bustle of the city falls away.

On the dim, vaulted main floor I found seven large screens that divided the space irregularly. Upon each was projected the video image of a luminous white wall and a barred doorway, through which I glimpsed a walkway and summer foliage.

Entitled Lugar de Silencios, the piece was a collaboration between the Barcelona artist Montserrat Soto and the poet Dionisio Cañas. Portly in a sweater and long gray hair  a portrait of the artist of a certain age  Mr. Cañas appeared in the video doorways from time to time, deep in thought amid crunching footfalls. Breaking the silence, he proffered snippets of poetry: No time, no time, no time./No time for coffee,/no time for donuts,/no time for The New York Times.

Barcelona can be overwhelming for visitors, and the stillness was a welcome break from a forced march of medieval alleyways, tapas and must-see attractions. But as my wife, Nina, and I discovered, Barcelona's art scene, in its breadth, its internationalism and above all its depth, is hardly a respite.

For the visitor, art in Barcelona mirrors the city's charming jumble. It's a place you can walk, a city for flaneurs, said Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, called Macba. You can lose yourself here. Indeed, when we visited, the museum featured installations by the Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The cluttered, moody environments evoke the rooms of the mind, where memory and nostalgia give way to darker dreams.

Installations like The Dark Pool, a chaotic stage set shot through with snippets of sound triggered by visitors' motion, reminded me of an old bar in the surrounding El Raval neighborhood  the kind of place where dark casks of vermouth line the walls, and the air is blue with cigarette smoke and sharp with salty fish. My favorite, which I'm sure I'll never find again: a timeless joint named Montse's, vanished down a narrow street on an exploration measured in wine and olives.

Places like that, where vermouth seeps out of ancient tarnished pipes, are not the reason most come to Barcelona. But if you stumble into them, they're what you remember most vividly.

It's the same with art. Over everything loom the giants: Picasso, Dalí and Miró. Each spent formative years in and around Barcelona, and each has a museum dedicated to his work in the city. Of them the Fundació Joan Miró is the most striking. Not only is its location magnificent  it is set on the leafy slope of Montjuïc, overlooking Barcelona's jumble  but the collection is a comprehensive and definitive look at the artist's work. The airy space is filled with the echoes of laughing students, a rambunctiousness invited by the tense motion in Miró's canvases. (When we visited, the Fundació also featured a show of the bold, bent forms created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, which seemed an ideal pairing with Miró's work.)

The Picasso-Dalí-Miró trinity connects 20th-century Spanish art with its historical antecedents. The Museu Picasso is particularly good at demonstrating this: on 58 canvases, Picasso reinterprets Velázquez' 1656 Meninas, enlivening it with cameos by his dachshund, Lump, and evoking, around Canvas 23, the sinking my-5-year-old-could-do-that philistinism Picasso is famous for.

But it is telling that Picasso's and Dalí's best work is not here. The bulk of their careers were spent elsewhere, and their masterpieces reside in places like Madrid, Paris and New York. In those cities, Mr. Borja-Villel said, art is displayed in a colonial way. But there is no sense of empire here. Barcelona is a capital with no country. It has nationalistic pride but no trophies.

Free from the ponderous shadows of iconic masterpieces, Barcelona's art scene is broad and eclectic. It's a rich cultural space, but fractured, said Josep Ramoneda, the founding director of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. The center opened its doors in 1994 to provide a focal point for creative energy in the city. There were many groups doing things here, Mr. Ramoneda said, but they weren't connected.

During the Franco government, expression was tightly controlled. Spanish art had skipped a generation by the time democracy was restored in 1978. Modernity did not exist here, Mr. Borja-Villel said. We went from Franco straight to postmodernism.

The Macba building is an impressive space that combines well-thought-out exhibition halls with airy public spaces. It is fronted by a courtyard that resembles a skate park: university students gather there amid the clatter of plywood decks and bustling outdoor cafés.

This is quite a change for a neighborhood once synonymous with port city seediness. Twenty years ago, Mr. Borja-Villel said, you could not come here with a clean shirt. Barcelona's revitalization was initiated with the 1992 Olympic Games. The early stages of its makeover, chronicled in dreamlike black-and-white by the photographer Manolo Laguillo and on display at Macba when we visited, bring to mind contemporary Beijing.


assistant: Art has played a key role in the renaissance of Barcelona.