Homage to Gauei's Catalonia: Just Four Years after Antoni Gaudi's Death, the English Author Evelyn Waugh Wrote at Length about His Surprising Discovery of the Catalan Master's Work in the June 1930 Issue of the AR

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But the glory and delight of Barcelona, which no other town in the world can offer, is the architecture of Gaudi. In England we scarcely know the meaning of Art Nouveau. Mr John Betjeman, the chief living authority on the subject, traces it chiefly in the decorative motive of the roots of the water-lily which became prominent in this country at about the time of William Morris's death. I have seen pewter work, too, of about 1900 in which tulips and dock leaves have been very happily rendered; there are stencil designs in some early numbers of the Studio in which one can discern the repressed but resilient aspirations of the movement, but with us, as with the Parisians, Decadence proved the more vital force. The peacock's feather and the green carnation outshine the tulip and the water-lily root. Then after a warm but inconclusive flirtation with Holland - when painters made heavily patterned pictures of windmills and umber sails, and put tiles round their hearths and pot-bellied jugs of burnished copper in their windows - English decorative fancy went whirling off among timber and thatch and black old oak. But this was not the case with the Catalans, who responded to the movement with all the zeal of their exuberant but wholly undiscriminating nature. They never concerned themselves with the Decadence or with archaism. Art Nouveau came to them at a time of commercial expansion and political unrest, and they took it to themselves and made it their own, even christening it and importing it into Florida under their own name as the Neo-Catalan style. In its new guise it has even, in recent years, come back to England. Near to where I am writing this, on the south coast, there is a small colony of villas and bungalows extending from Bognor Regis for about a mile along the edge of the beach. They are mostly empty during the winter months, so that I can lean on their gates and study them without causing annoyance or suspicion, and in their very new and, I trust, impermanent structure I have been able to discern many features that are fundamentally Neo-Catalan. There is the same eagerness to attract attention, though this, I think, may be more a commercial than an artistic impulse. They are built, not as homes, but as holiday pavilions to be let on short leases at extravagant rents during the bathing season; their aim is to catch the eye with a prominent exterior and leave the interior to chance, in the confidence that the tenants wall spend most of the day sprawling on the sand. They exhibit the same irresponsible confusion of architectural styles, here Gothic, here Tudor, here Classical. …