French connection | 30 April 2005

When I started visiting Barcelona in 1961, its museums were both thin on the ground and impoverished, and the lingua franca between the Catalans and the British was French, without which it was, if one had neither Spanish nor Catalan, hard to survive. Today the city is awash with fine, well-funded museums and, for anyone under 40, English has replaced French as the second language. So it’s good to see that the links with French culture have not been severed and that the spring has brought two major French exhibitions to this intellectually vital city.

The Picasso Museum, in addition to its unparalleled collection of his early work, has a wonderful series of galleries for temporary, non-Picasso exhibitions and now has a large retrospective of Jean Hélion (1904–87). The son of a taxi-driver, Hélion’s principal quality as a painter, when his work is seen chronologically en masse, is eclecticism, so that this engaging exhibition is almost an anthology of Modernism.