WEEKEND UPDATE
by Walter Robinson



Art and barbarism, is that a theme? Up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the new esthetic blockbuster "Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí," Mar. 7-June 3, 2007, begins with Belle Epoque café society and ends with Fascism, literally moving from Pablo Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette (made in 1890, when the artist was 19) to a large final gallery containing studies for Guernica (1937), a model of Josep Lluís Sert’s Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the 1937 Paris International Exposition -- mounted during the tragic Spanish Civil War -- and several red-and-black anti-Fascist posters featuring huge swastikas.

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