Dan Perez Photography | Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (Barcelona) | 1000 Years of Catalan Art

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Continuing with my series of photographs (finally!) from the most epic European dad-daughter trip of (probably?) our lifetime –
29 days from December 2023 to January 2024 via planes, trains and automobiles.

After stops in Paris, Brussels, Prague, Vienna and Milan, our final days in Barcelona were our most enjoyable (can you really go wrong anywhere in Spain?) despite the city’s most visited attraction, the Basílica de la Sagrada Família being sold out(!). We did enjoy several wonderful art museums, however, starting with the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya

The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (abbreviated as MNAC) is located in the Palau Nacional de Montjuïc, built for the 1929 International Exhibition. It opened its doors in 1934 as the Catalan Art Museum, housing the medieval collection. Later, in 1995, as the National Art Museum of Catalonia, the new Romanesque art galleries were inaugurated, and the public exhibition of the collection was successively expanded, culminating in the new presentation of modern art in 2004.

The Palau Nacional is a huge building (over 540,000 sq ft) which embodies the academic classical style that predominated in constructions for all the universal exhibitions of the period. Its façade is crowned by a great dome inspired by St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City in Rome.

The museum is especially notable for its outstanding collection of Romanesque church paintings, which is unmatched by any other museum in the world. Dating to the 11th to 13th centuries, many of the works originally adorned rural churches in the Pyrenees and other sites in Old Catalonia, or Catalunya Vella in Catalan.

Unlike the collections at other great national museums in Europe, which were generally built up from royal and aristocratic collections, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya’s Renaissance and baroque art collection comprises pieces of priceless cultural heritage that were established in Catalonia through the acquisition of local pieces and later complemented by donations and acquisitions from private galleries. The collection features art produced not only in Catalonia, but also in the rest of Spain, Italy and Flanders, providing an overview of the development of European art during this period.

In 2004, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya reached an agreement under which the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection of Barcelona (72 paintings and 8 sculptures which were dispatched on permanent loan to Barcelona in 1993 and exhibited in a wing of Pedralbes Monastery) was to be exhibited permanently at the Museu Nacional, with the dual purpose of complementing the content in the Catalan museum and making the works more widely known and appreciated.

The modern art collection at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya owes its origins to the 1888 Universal Exhibition, when Barcelona City Council installed what was then a modest collection of contemporary modern art in the Palau de Belles Arts. This original core of the collection was considerably expanded by acquisitions made by the Council at art exhibitions. As it stands at present, the modern art collection contains a selection of the finest Catalan art from the early 19th century until the 1940s.

The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 10am to 6pm; Sundays and holidays, from 10am to 3pm (from October to April). Summer hours, from May to September, are Tuesday to Saturday, from 10am to 8pm; Sundays and holidays, from 10am to 3pm.

General admission will set you back a very well spent €12. Every Saturday from 3pm and every first Sunday of the month, entry to the museum is free, but it is necessary to reserve advance entry online for better control of capacity and to improve the quality of the visit.