Barcelona

"Robert Hughes is probably the best - and certainly the most accessible - art critic in the world . . . in Barcelona his art-historical and his sociological talents converge in what is often a dazzling collage of Catalan peculiarities" FREDERICK RAPHAEL, Sunday TimesA modern homage to a proud, cosmopolitan city where Gaudí, Picasso and Miró learned how to break all the rules.Before Spain there was Catalunya, a thriving maritime empire with its own language and Barcelona as its capital, last bastion of resistance to Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Exploring 2000 of the city's history, Robert Hughes takes us down the Ramblas, through the "intestinal windings" of the ancient Gothic Quarter, past the bountiful Boqueria market to the Eixample, showcase of the daring, mannered architecture of Catalan modernisme, before resting at Gaudí's celebrated Sagrada Familia: crazy, unfinished symbol of this fiercely independent city of extremes."The pace is brisk, the narrative grasp cool, firm and confident . . . Hughes' prose has the 'capriciousness, symbolic precision and stylistic punch' he attributes to Catalan moustaches" HILARY SPURLING, Daily Telegraph"Nobody has ever represented Catalonia's character more powerfully, or illustrated its claims to self-destiny more persuasively, than Robert Hughes in this monumental work" JAN MORRIS

Nobody has ever represented [Barcelona's] character more powerfully, or illustrated its claims to self-destiny more persuasively, than has Robert Hughes in this monumental work, Whether untangling the unlikely legends of Wilfred the Hairy or tangling with the likes of Antoni Gaudi, Hughes has shaped Catalan art, architecture and politics into the ultimate guidebooks, A wonderful book, by far the best yet to have appeared in the current flood of books on Spain - and one that fills a genuine gap, Barcelona is unlikely to be rewarded with a better history than this. Robert Hughes is a master of the big canvas, scooping up the detail of social, economic, political and artistic life and producing images of captivating richness

Robert Hughes, art critic of Time magazine and twice winner of the American College Art Association's F. J. Mather Award for distinguished criticism, is author of The Shock of the New, and of Heaven and Hell in Western Art. He is also author of the acclaimed Nothing if Not Critical, a work on Frank Auerbach; Barcelona, and Culture of Complaint, essays on the fraying of America. Robert Hughes died in August 2012.

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