Böcker av Juan Jose Lahuerta

A richly illustrated catalog, with biography, of artist Julio González. The sculptures of Julio González (1876-1942) were shown at MoMA in 1956, and our understanding of his influence on modern art has grown steadily since. This lavishly illustrated book offers a new, highly nuanced account of González's life, work, and legacy. Beginning with González's complex family relationships, Juan José Lahuerta explores the tensions involved as González sought to combine his craft with efforts to become a painter, as the Romantic, bohemian mentality of the late nineteenth century had idealized. Lahuerta also explores the importance of González's relationships with Picasso and other contemporaries, which helps us understand how, in the 1930s, his naïve artist's urge was replaced by a radical urge to make art that would break every taboo related to tradition, craft, and material. The second section of the book offers a stunning presentation of the new exhibition of the Julio González collection at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern. The book will serve as a milestone in our understanding of González's work and influence.

The Spanish Civil War caused a considerable revival of certain themes of religious art. 1938, one year after Picasso painted Guernica the Swiss surrealist painter Max von Moos published an essay, that addresses some of the issues then confronted by church art. This book focuses on some of these issues.

When the Corbusian International Modern style, with its contempt for ornament, imposed itself on architecture, figures like Gaudi (1852-1926) were relegated to the sidelines. In this volume, Lahuerta situates Gaudi in his context and vindicates his fin-de-siecle bohemian modernity. Embodied in such powerful images as the equation of the spires of the Sagrada Familia with the flames rising from burning churches during the Tragic Week (1909), the story takes us to the Barcelona of the early twentieth century, when class struggle threatened to topple the prevailing capitalist model. Drawing on valuable first-hand documents collected over several decades, the author shows that Gaudi was not an isolated eccentric but an architect who was keenly aware of the major theories and outstanding works of his time and the creator of revolutionary technical innovations. His analyses of Gaudi's writings reveals a pioneer in the use of industrial processes to produce ornamental details that may seem handmade today. Equally novel was the way that Gaudi made use of his fame as a public figure, a 'media personality', thanks to the cartoons of the architect and his buildings in the popular press. His influence on avant-garde artists like Dali, who admired the edible appearance of the Casa Mila, or Picasso, fascinated by the eroticism of the Casa Batllo attest to the importance of his contribution to culture. This entertaining volume is part of Columns of Smoke, a series of publications in which Professor Lahuerta turns his perceptive eye on the official narrative of modernity and its protagonists and the relationship between architecture, decoration and the print media.