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Few cities have taken more beatings than Barcelona. In 1650, it was ravaged by the plague. Half a century later, its native language, Catalan, was declared illegal by the Spanish monarchy. After another century, it lost tens of thousands of lives to Napoleon’s troops. In the 1930s, it fought against the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco and lost—and Catalan was banned once again. But within a few decades of Franco’s death, Barcelona was hosting the Summer Olympics (1992), and Catalan was one of the fastest-growing languages in the world. If cities were boxers, Barcelona would be Rocky Balboa.

Even today, when Barcelona is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, some of its greatest artists are unknown outside of Spain. That’s a shame, because Barcelona is indisputably one of the world’s artistic capitals. Earthy, downtrodden, untamable—the city boasts an unbeatable roster of idiosyncratic geniuses, making it something like the eccentric uncle of Western art.

19th century: A struggle for recognition

It’s hard to know when to begin telling Barcelona’s art history. A thriving port since before the birth of Christ, the city boasts some of the finest medieval and Baroque paintings in Europe. Nevertheless, it’s more convenient to kick things off in the middle of the 19th century, when a perfect storm of industrialization, nationalism, and urban renewal transformed Barcelona into an avant-garde paradise.

The paradox of modernisme, as this cultural transformation was known, is that it aimed to reinvent Barcelona as a unique artistic superpower, and yet it borrowed many of its innovations from other European cities. You can see this paradox in the changes the city itself underwent. Beginning in the 1850s, the great urban planner Ildefons Cerdà spearheaded a plan to replace a huge chunk of Barcelona with grand avenues and towers. The plan was at once ambitiously original and clearly inspired by Paris’s own urban transformation at the time. Barcelona even built its own Arc de Triomf—just like the one Paris had had since the 1830s.

What was true of Barcelona went double for its modernistas. Like many Barcelona innovators of the era, such as the color-inclined Joaquin Mir Trinxet, the painter Ramon Casas lived in the sprawling neighborhood of Eixample. His work from the 1890s still feels gleefully and giddily new—take, for example, Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu on a Tandem (1897), which shows the artist and his friend, Romeu, a prominent patron of the avant-garde, pedaling away. Some have interpreted this painting as a metaphor for Barcelona’s avant-garde itself: forging ahead with a combination of new technology and old-fashioned hard work. Yet Casas’ later paintings are surprisingly derivative and conventional; it would be easy to mistake them for French portraiture from a century earlier.

Early 20th century: The laboratory of the avant-garde

One reason Barcelona’s greatest artists aren’t more strongly associated with their city is that many of them abandoned it. Joan Miró, born in Barcelona in 1893, is at or near the top of many art historians’ lists of the 20th century’s greatest painters, but he left Spain for the bohemian boroughs of Paris while still a young man. Salvador Dalí, who was born an hour outside of Barcelona in Figueres, spent his early twenties painting and exhibiting in the city. But it was Paris where he perfected the Surrealist style that became his trademark.

That was Barcelona in the early 20th century: a cultural whirligig, tossing great painters all over the world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Pablo Picasso. Born in Málaga in 1881, Picasso spent most of his teens in Barcelona, and it was there that he first developed the glittering, expressive style that characterized the first decade of his long career. Many of the figures that Picasso painted during his Blue Period were based on beggars and urchins he’d encountered in the alleyways of Barcelona. And so, years later, when Picasso was looking for a city in which to found a museum in his honor, he didn’t choose New York or Madrid. He chose Barcelona.

General Franco and beyond

It’s hard to make great art when a Fascist dictator is trying to wipe your culture off the face of the earth, but for the bulk of the 20th century, that’s precisely what Antoni Tàpies did. Born in Barcelona in 1923, Tàpies spent his first 50 years under Franco’s rule in a part of Spain that Franco treated like dirt. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that many of his masterpieces (1955’s Pintura, for instance) are composed largely of dirt, along with straw, newspaper, thread, and other bits of detritus. Study Tàpies’s paintings closely and you’ll begin to see the same shape over and over again: a cross. This shape has special significance for any citizen of Barcelona since it evokes the flaming red cross of the city’s flag, which was banned by Franco for decades.

A cross, crude but sacred, scratched in dirt but still there—all in all, it’s not a bad metaphor for the city itself. Barcelona’s fortunes have improved since Franco’s death, but when it comes to art, it still has the rough charm of an underdog.