“This is the first major investment made in Scandinavia in an exhibition about Antonio Gaudí.” writes Lunds Konsthall Ingvar Svensson in the catalog. “Due to the nature of the material, it can hardly be anything other than a cross-section, but we hope it will prove representative and lead to further studies in this strange artist’s world,” he writes further. Starting at Lunds Konsthall, the exhibition goes on tour to a number of art galleries in Sweden and northern Europe. Many had already at an early stage registered interest to show the exhibition. One is forced to say no partly, as the content of the exhibition would largely be permanently housed in a newly built museum in Madrid at a certain time.

To compile the exhibition, there have been a large number of assisting researchers, and agencies in Barcelona (such as the Museo Gaudí) as well as in Madrid. “The head of the Museo Español de Arte Contemporaneo in Madrid, Luis Gonzalez-Robles, suggested during my visit there that with this exhibition by Antonio Gaudí we should seek to start a livelier cultural exchange between our two countries.” Certainly an idea that Södertälje konsthall with its early international character is attracted to. Södertälje konsthall is the second exhibition-space a to show the exhibition.

In the archive you can read some letters from Ingvar Svensson to Södertälje konsthalls Eje Högestedt. He enthusiastically describes from a trip to Barcelona how he got over the negatives of the construction of Gaudí’s famous Casa Milá through a nearly hundred-year-old builder’s private documentation.

Antonio Gaudí was a Catalan architect born in Riudoms (Taragona) on June 25, 1852. “Modernism is the Catalan expression of the style that in Northern Europe was called Art Nouveau.”

“Gaudí was one of the first architects to embark on a modernist architecture.” His great most famous work is the Sagrada Familia temple. He invested all his money in this life’s work that was still going on at his death. He was buried in its crypt after dying in a tram accident on June 10, 1926.

Sources: exhibition catalog, art gallery’s archive folder, compiled by Anneli Karlsson.