Context brings the brightest minds to your living room with perspective-shifting online lectures.
Barcelona's Park Güell: Salvador Dali's Obsession with Gaudi with Mark Planellas Witzsch
No events are scheduled at this time. Want to be notified when it’s back? Click the blue button to the right and we’ll notify you.
Arguably, surrealist painter Salvador Dalí is one of the most creative minds of the twentieth century. The same can be said about the architect Antoni Gaudí, whose buildings broke so many existing conventions at the start of the twentieth century, but who was largely dismissed by the following generation of architects. This conversation will look at the connection between these two artists as we analyze the factors that triggered Dalí’s fascination for Gaudí’s architecture in one of his most enigmatic creations, the garden city “Park Güell” in Barcelona. This is a fitting seminar for anyone with an interest in either of these creative masterminds and an interest in, or a desire to visit, Park Güell in Barcelona.
These artistic minds were similar in many ways. They both shared the capacity to innovate and break away from many of the old assumptions. They also both came from Catalonia, in the North-Eastern area of the Spanish state: Dalí was born in Catalonia’s Northern province of Girona, and Gaudí, in Catalonia’s Southern province of Tarragona. They grew up along the Mediterranean coast, a landscape that is heavily reflected in their art and architecture. But, beyond this bond, Dalí was an early advocate of Gaudí’s architecture. This can be seen in the way Gaudí recognized, understood, and promoted Gaudís legacy, from the 1930s to his death in 1989.
This conversation analyzes the factors that triggered Dalí’s fascination for Gaudí’s architecture in one of his most enigmatic creations: the garden city “Park Güell” in Barcelona. A few years after joining the surrealist movement, in 1933 Dalí published an article in the famous magazine “Minotaure”, with pictures of Man Ray, in which he speculated on Gaudí’s architecture, its properties, and its “hidden meaning”. This speculation would go on intermittently until its culminating moment in 1956 when Dalí organized a “happening” in Gaudí’s most perplexing work: the garden city “Park Güell”. This seminar will allow the participant to understand Dalí’s unique theories and views on Gaudí’s architecture, all the meanwhile developing an understanding of one of Barcelona’s finest architectural spaces.
Mark Planellas Witzsch is active in several areas in the cultural field and taught philosophy of art and avant-gardes of the twentieth century at university, focusing on universally well-known Catalan artists such as Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. Catalonia being a part of Spain that has historically defended democracy and the ideals of the republic, the vast majority of its artists were committed to those Civil values and reflected it in their art. This led Mark Planellas to dive into some related topics, such as propaganda in the twentieth century, thus publishing books on the subject, such as “Jaume Miravitlles. El somriure de Catalunya”, which explains the history of the first modern propaganda ministry ever created, in the context of the Spanish Civil War.
This conversation is suitable for all ages.
90 minutes, including a 30 minute Q&A.
Guest did not leave comment
Dali and Gaudi: an explosive cocktail of meanings that you never thought about
Guest did not leave comment
Excellent discussion on Dali and Gaudi and the Parkway. A very informative point of view.
What I learned fired me up. I had been to the Gaudi park as a young person and though I was gobsmacked by it, I didn't know the deep thought behind it.