On view through 14 September at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) in Barcelona is an exhibition on Francesc d’Assís Galí (1880–1965), a key figure in Catalan art of the first half of the 20th century.

Trained alongside Pompeu Fabra, he played an important role in modernizing art pedagogy during the Noucentisme movement, becoming the teacher of the likes of Joan Miró and Llorens Artigas. Galí also had his own prolific career as a painter, draftsman, muralist, poster artist, and illustrator. His most notable work is the large mural on the central dome of the Palau Nacional, the MNAC’s current home, built for the 1929 International Exhibition. On it are 35 allegorical figures representing the Fine Arts, Science, Religion, and the Earth. To paint it, Galí spent more than half a year perched thirty meters high on a precarious scaffold.

The Spanish Civil War interrupted his career. As Director General of Fine Arts of the Spanish Republic, in 1938 he participated in the moving of works from the Prado Museum to the border. He too went into exile, and spent a decade in London.

Expressly for this exhibition, the MNAC commissioned Anna & Eugeni Bach to create Crown of Eyes, a tribute to one of Galí’s pedagogical principles. For excursions to the Montseny Mountains with his students, he would tell them not to bring tools, but to go only “armed with a crown of eyes on their heads.” With this exercise he encouraged them to observe nature attentively.

Installed under the dome of the Palau Nacional, Crown of Eyes consists of a ring (12 meters in diameter) incorporating sixteen eye-shaped medallions, in allusion to the sixteen columns that hold up the dome. Set six meters high, it symbolically refers to the scaffold from which Galí painted his mural.

Fotos: Eugeni Bach