Julia's Trip Part 1: Art Museums

As I noted last week, I’ve been very busy with my life; let me bring you up to speed on a few observations and adventures from the last few weeks. My wonderful friend Julia visited me from Washington, DC; the visit was her first time in Spain. It was also my first time playing tour guide in the country, which provided an excellent cover to visit various sites and cities in and around Madrid.

In particular, Julia and I visited the city’s “art walk,” El Paseo de Prado, which features three world renown museums: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Museo Nacional Del Prado, and the Museo-Thyssen Bornemisza. Although we did not visit the Thyssen, we did tour the Prado and the Reina Sofia on two separate occasions.

The Prado’s collections feature some of the most important works by Spanish and European artists from the 12th to the 18th century. Among the artists, one will find works such as el Greco’s “El Caballero de la Mano en El Pecho” and “La Adoracion de Los Pastores,” Velazquez’s “Las Menaninas,” and Goya’s La Maja Desnuda,” “El 3 de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid” and “Las Pinturas Negras,” a series of dark, existential paintings which the artist painted after he went deaf.

While Julia and I toured the room containing ‘Las Pinturas Negras,” an art professor was giving a lecture on the importance of these paintings in the development of modern art. As she noted, Goya’s paintings reflected individual’s desperate efforts to find spiritual, intellectual, and emotional meaning in a development. In this manner, the artist’s work was a harbinger of the existentialist and postmodern philosophies that would dominate the works of artists, authors, musicians, and philosophers in post World War II Europe. Although I am certainly not an art critic, the artist’s emphasis on the alienation and isolation of its subjects coupled with the use of dark hues created a set of images that viciously disrupted the Museum’s emphasis on historical and religious works of other European artists.

Interesting note: Goya kept the series in the basement of his house; the Prado’s artistic directors followed suit and made the collection the centerpiece of Planta -1, the Museum’s subterranean floor. Given the series’ subject matter, the Museum’s logistical decision seems appropriate.

We also had an opportunity to visit the Reina Sofia, which focuses on 20th century artists. The Museum, which was an 18th century hospital, splits the century into two floors. The Reina Sofia’s second floor focuses on Spanish artists such Picasso, Dali, and Miro while the museum’s fourth floor features work of artists from the latter half of the century such as Rothko, Tapies, Bacon, and Antonio Lopez’s “A Man and a Woman,” which features a spectacular panoramic view of Madrid. The third floor functions as a storage space for the museum’s permanent collection.

The Museum’s centerpiece is Picasso’s iconic “Guernica,” which violently condemns the city’s bombing at the hand of Franco’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War; more generally, the piece protests the violence and indiscriminate suffering that mark war itself. As the story goes, A Nazi officer walked up to Picasso during the painting’s initial showing at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris and asked him, “did you make this?” Dali replied, “No, you did.”

The Reina Sofia also featured a temporary exhibit of the works of Nancy Spero, an American artist and feminist who used savagely abstract images of bombs and distorted faces of the dead to protest the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The exhibit also featured recent work such as “The First Language” and “Let the Priests Tremble” uses icons of women dancing and the testimonials of women who survived torture at the hand of right wing and military dictatorships in Central and South America to reflect the violent limitations and ecstatic possibilities that exist in the lives of women. The exhibit’s title, “Disidanzas,” is a playful reference to the socio-political subtext and images of women in these paintings.