With just a morning left in Madrid, we decided to check out one of the museums here. Madrid is famous for its triangle of art museums, including the Prado but we knew that what that holds is not really for us. Therefore, we decided to visit the Reina Sofia, the museum of contemporary art, particularly as we enjoyed the offshoot gallery we visited in the park yesterday.
We arrived at opening time to find a queue of people waiting to buy tickets so I quickly purchased tickets on my phone and then we switched to another slightly shorter queue. We had read online that two of the five floors were currently shut while they rehung some of the works. Unsurprisingly we weren’t asked to only pay 3/5th of the usual entrance fee!
We found the layout of the place as confusing as some of the works of art on display there and we spent some time wandering back and forwards trying to orient ourselves and our hunt for a coffee proved just too difficult.
Guernica
Probably the most famous work in the Reina Sofia is Picasso’s Guernica. On arriving in the hall where it is hung I was surprised as just how big it is. The picture’s apparently an anti-war piece but you can only really appreciate that if you know the back story. Guernica is a town in Northern Spain that was bombed by the Germans & Italians at the request of the Spanish Nationalists.
It certainly makes more sense with that knowledge and is a fascinating piece.
Before seeing the painting in the flesh the only thing I knew about it was the oft trotted out quote about the Nazi’s visiting Picasso at his studio in Paris and asking “Did you do this?” and Picasso responded “No, you did”.
What is that?
Art is a very subjective thing and I know what I like which is paintings as opposed to photography, sculptures and video, although I can do the latter in moderation. Unfortunately the rooms that we found were heavy on photography in the main although there were some interesting pieces by Miro and Dali. There was quite a lot of black and white video films which, without much context, seemed quite frankly a bit dull.
All this reminded me of the time, many years ago, when I was contacted by an artist who wanted to use a photograph of mine (of Bruges) in one of his works. He was going to take the photo and paint a version of it and then use it in a video. In return for accepting we could have the painted picture after he was finished. I accepted and asked him what the final piece of work was going to be and he explain to me and said “you probably won’t like it”. When he was done he sent me a link to the video and it was basically him throwing the painted pictures onto a pile. I didn’t like it. We did, however, like the painted picture and it is still hung in our house.