Museu Tàpies

This guide to Museu Tàpies in Barcelona opens with the artist Antoni Tàpies at seventeen, flat on his back with a near-fatal heart attack brought on by tuberculosis, sent up into the mountains for two years with nothing to do but sit, read, and think. It follows how that forced stillness shaped his art, and the building itself, designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner in the early 1880s as the print works of the Montaner i Simon publishing house, the first in the Eixample district to fuse exposed brick and iron the way a factory would.