General Mitre: nobody knows who he was, or why he has an avenue in Barcelona. Few people know that it's home to a monument to Winston Churchill, or to a Prat de la Riba square — also with its own monument. It sits at the junction with Numancia and Manuel Girona, right in front of the Cortachan, if that helps place it, in the Espanyol-supporting stretch of Sarrià, on the border with Les Corts: from here you either climb up to the old village or head down to try the escalators at El Corte Inglés. And, since 1999, this monument to one of our most emblematic presidents. Only he and Macià have a proper, dignified square of their own, though it must be said this one is little more than a crossroads. A place you pass through, not stop at. If the aim was for the monument and the name to go unnoticed, mission accomplished.
Physically, the piece is easy to describe and hard to forget: a concrete column from which eight stainless-steel tubes emerge and fan out to either side. They rise straight and parallel, disciplined as a guard of honour, and just when they seem to have done their duty, they rebel and start to ripple. These two groups of steel-turned-rauxa split into two sets of four, opening towards the sky as if trying to escape the column — the ordering seny — that holds them up. The art historian Javier Maderuelo saw in it an impossible synthesis: Mediterranean classical Greece, the zigzag of art nouveau furniture, and the waves of hairstyles from the Prat de la Riba era. Se non è vero, I suppose.
The sculptor is Andreu Alfaro, from Valencia — a self-taught artist (the waves at Plaça del Carbó, down by the port, or the four columns at the UAB) who learned to look at metal within the Grup Parpalló, and who, after a trip to Brussels where he came across the work of Brâncuși, decided that his life's work would be bending iron and aluminium. Alfaro scattered more than a hundred sculptures across public spaces in Europe; this one is, perhaps, among the least remembered, and, at the same time, one of the pieces that best sums up his craft: taking a cold, industrial material and making it speak of things that are anything but cold.
If the intention was for the monument and the name to go unnoticed, mission accomplished.
A solid base, firmly planted in the ground, from which eight separate paths emerge, each opening in its own direction yet never breaking away from the column that holds them up. As we know: Prat de la Riba was no soapbox orator, no barricade hero. He was a jurist by training, a philosopher, a man of the office and the committee. He was the first president of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya (the first institution of Catalan self-government since the Nueva Planta decrees), its principal architect, and the driving force behind the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, the Escola d'Administració Pública and the Escola de Bibliotecàries. His book La nacionalitat catalana (1906) gave theoretical scaffolding to an entire movement, as if it were scripture: you know the sort of thing — the winter and the spring of nations, and so on. That everything will come, inevitably. Within the monument, he would surely identify with the concrete column: dull, unchanging, and necessary. Without it, the eight tubes would have nowhere to grow from.
But this isn't even the first monument Barcelona dedicated to him. Before the Civil War, there was already a bust by Joan Borrell i Nicolau, which today stands in the Prat dels Tarongers at the Palau de la Generalitat and which, before Francoism, stood in some unspecified public space in the city. When he finally returned to public view, Prat de la Riba no longer appeared as a bronze man on a pedestal, but as an abstract, transparent, almost shy form, on a traffic roundabout where nobody ever stops.
Prat de la Riba would surely have wanted exactly that: a monument that doesn't shout, doesn't demand, but simply stands there, day after day. Sensible, planted like a tree, weathering whatever comes. A man who was entirely winter and spring, yet who surely deserves a more visible square for the public to see. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt if the avenue were renamed after some more recognisable figure or idea. I don't know — perhaps there's a former president who lives around there. Not far from here, I'd wager.