...and Salvador Dali, among many others
Many visitors to Madrid only pick one museum to visit -- and when they do, it invariably will be the very large artistic treasure house that is the Museo Nacional del Prado.
It seems that there also visitors to the Spanish capital who leave
without setting foot in a single museum there. I, on the other hand,
spent time in four of Madrid's museums: the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Borenemisza on my first full day in the country; the Museo Arqueológico Nacional
on the day that I returned to the city from an Andalucian sojourn; the
Prado (where photographs are not allowed to be taken, like with the Palacio Real and El Escorial); and, on my final day in Spain, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Located
in the museum neighborhood where the Prado and the Museo Nacional
Thyssen-Borenemisza are to be found, Spain's national museum of 20th
century art is quite the attraction itself; thanks in no small part to
it being the home of Pablo Picasso's iconic Guernica.
And the historical as well as artistic significance of this mural-sized
oil painting created in reaction to the bombing of a Basque village by
warplanes from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the
Spanish Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War should be clear to
visitors to the museum which has devoted eight rooms (by my count) to
showcasing the work and providing information as to the
politico-historical context in which it was created.
No
photography of any sort is allowed in that suite of rooms, and I find
it understandable because the mood in there is much more like that found
at war monuments rather than conventional art museums. But contrary to
the insistence of one over-zealous museum guard that I had the bad
fortune to encounter, it's actually allowed in the rest of the public
galleries of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Among
the other works that caught my eye in this museological institution are
very dark works by Goya (some of which really graphically document
human atrocities), and those by Miro and Dali that were rendered in a
very different style from that which has come to be associated with them
along with others that are far more recognizably works by those two
artists. If truth be told though, fewer art works really impressed me
at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía than I thought would be
the case for an art museum that does have a number of works by famous
non-Spanish artists (e.g., Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder and Rene
Magritte) as well as Spanish ones.
Something
else I found rather troubling was that even while the exterior of the
museum's buildings looked pretty stunning, there were literally were
cracks in the floor tiles and some of the tiles even had come loose.
Put another way: I came away from my visit to the Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía with a sense that Spain's decade-long economic woes
have affected its artistic legacy as well as the individuals out
begging and turning to crimes such as pickpocketing on the streets in
the neighborhood in which it's located; and, almost needless to say, I
found this more troubling than some of the frankly pretty disquieting
art on display in the museum.
All in all, my visit to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía didn't leave me feeling as good as I expected and would have liked. Having said that, when its main treasure is a work that is effectively a primal cry of anguish, I guess it stands to reason that this is a museum where beauty is secondary to expression and emotion, negative as well as positive.
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