Catalan Painting Volume 3

Revealing the astonishing richness and diversity of Catalan art, this lavish volume lives up to its subtitle. It begins with emotive neoclassical portraits and Romantic landscapes that parallel the poetic vistas of 19th-century American luminists. Marian Fortuny's exotic orientalist studies, Joan Colom's impressionist railway yards, Aleix Clapes's hovering symbolist figures and Ramon Casas's flat, linear cafe-goers and cyclists serve as bridges to the 20th century. In a dry text, the author, former director of the Art Museums of Barcelona, traces a line that runs from Cubism to Dada, Surrealism and Conceptual art. Notable among the 101 tipped-in color plates are Salvador Dali's horrific prefiguration of the Spanish Civil War, Joan Miro's The Farm , a moonlit landscape of pure magic realism, Antoni Tapies's hypnotic Imaginary Garden and the abstractions of Joan-Josep Tharrat, who evokes cosmic worlds exploding with black, white and pink bursts of energy. (Sept.)