The Scottish photographer Michael Thomas Jones portrays Modernisme in Barcelona just as it is, without concealing its contradictions or making any concessions to artiness. He depicts Modernisme as it has never before been seen in an exhibition, peopled by those who are today living or working in the architectural masterpieces designed by Gaudí and other Catalan architects.
"Gaudí and His Contemporaries in Modern Day Barcelona" is a joint exhibition by Barcelona City Council´s Institute for Urban Landscape and the Scottish Executive´s Architecture+Design Scotland. After having been on show in Glasgow until February 2010, it has finally arrived in Barcelona and can be visited in the Sant Salvador pavilion at the Hospital de Sant Pau from 24 April onwards throughout the summer.

Picasso expert Pierre Daix has written that the Catalan artist Santiago Rusiñol exercised a crucial influence on the young Picasso. This exhibition aims to explore this claim in depth and establish the elements of influence and confluence between the two artists by way of a comparative reading, both biographical and iconographic.

Organized jointly by the Museu Picasso and Cau Ferrat in Sitges, Rusiñol-Picasso will put on show for the first time the strong links between the two artists on the basis of the thesis developed by its curator, Eduard Vallès, in his recent book Picasso i Rusiñol. La cruïlla de la modernitat (Consorci del Patrimoni de Sitges, Barcelona 2008).

The paths of the two artists crossed at a time when their respective careers were in transition: Picasso was emerging from the academic tutelage of his father and the art schools he had attended and Rusiñol, though a highly acclaimed artist, was no longer the paradigm of modernity he had once been.

When Picasso first arrived in Barcelona Rusiñol was one of the city's most renowned artists. It is worth noting that a number of the themes the young Picasso tackled had their origin in pioneering works by Rusiñol. Picasso even painted his own versions of some of Rusiñol's pictures, an indication the works that made of how closely he followed the older man's work.

The great attraction that Picasso was to feel for the work of El Greco throughout his life first manifested itself precisely at the time when Rusiñol was championing him.

Rusiñol was also one of the first collectors of Picasso's work and thus one of the first to perceive their value. A number of these Rusiñol Picassos are in Cau Ferrat in Sitges, the private museum founded by Rusiñol which Picasso visited on several occasions, both as a young man and in his mature years. In fact, during the 1960s Picasso made some little-known illustrations based on Rusiñol's most famous work, L'auca del Senyor Esteve; these are also part of this exhibition, and show that the connection between the two artists still endured long beyond Picasso's Barcelona years.

The members of the group of artists, founded in 1848, in London called the Pre-Raphaelites were most consistent in pursuing or renewing the arts compared with official Victorian art. At the tail end of the 19th century their art ended up in international symbolism and Art Nouveau amid the increasing symbolism of the collection of pictures.

The exhibition presents major works of the Pre-Raphaelite masters Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and Sir John Everett Millais.
Frederic Leighton's Flaming June, one of the most well-known paintings in art history, and five, in part, monumental, major works by Edward Burne-Jones, are the highlight of this exhibition.
With the support of the young Rossetti, William Morris, Walter Crane and Burne-Jones created a picture sequence after Thomas Malory's Arthur legend. Three works created in this connection by Burne-Jones - one of which is more than six metres wide - can be seen at the  Belvedere Show as well as his picture sequence Sleeping Beauty, which was completed in 1873.

The exhibition contains a collection of pictures of the start of the modern trend which, to date, has attracted little attention in Austria, and allows visual scouting trips through the presentation worlds of individual major proponents of the Pre-Raphaelites and the major topics at the tail end of the 19th century.