“Barcelona 1900”, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is an ambitious and exhilarating sprawl of an exhibition, a brave attempt to recreate – in, of all places, grey and wintry Holland – some sense of what it was like to be alive in Spain’s most vibrant city more than a hundred years ago.

Ramon de Banos’s short black-and-white film of 1909, Barcelona by Tram, makes for a vivid introduction to the show. With inventive abandon, the film-maker strapped his camera to the front of one of the city’s trams and simply let it run, drawing curious stares from top-hatted Catalunyan bankers and industrialists, capturing horse-drawn hansoms moving sedately along the Rambla, and preserving forever the ungainly movements of a wide-eyed, ill-shod boy scampering out of the vehicle’s way. The film establishes the momentum of the exhibition – a headlong rush through painting, sculpture, architecture, design, photography and decorative arts in the heyday of the modernista movement – and conveys an appropriate sense of Barcelona itself as a city which, despite its deep class divisions, was most definitely on the move.

Barcelona liked to think of itself as “the Paris of the South”; and like Paris, it was architecturally reinvented during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1859, the engineer Ildefons Cerda was hired by the central government in Madrid to enlarge the Catalunyan capital. Thanks to its great harbour and its prominent place in Spain’s new railway network, Barcelona had become an industrial dynamo, with a rapidly increasing population that it could barely accommodate. Responding to the city’s acute housing shortage, and to the slum conditions in which many of its new urban workforce were condemned to live, Cerda designed the so-called Eixemple, or extension. His elegant plans, displayed at the start...