We are in museum heaven. We did the triad of Madrid museums yesterday and today. We stood in awe for a full 6 1/2 hours in the Prado looking over 1400-1600’s paintings. The audioguide gave fantastic coverage of major paintings. The museum is the best presentation of art that we’ve ever seen. We absolutely loved this museum. I suppose we must have to stay standing for over 6 hours? The Rubens were immense. The Bosch painting of heaven, earth and hell was completely out of place for the century and stunning to contemplate. He had hot pink castles, Dr. Suess creatures and his signature people riding flying fish, a far cry from the serious portraits that were the fashion of the time. (Okay, so he did live in Amsterdam.) The temporary specialty exhibit was Titian (Tiazano). We spent an hour and a half just covering those paintings. Throughout the museum we saw how the masters developed and exchanged techniques, sounded like Italy was a hoppin’ art school. You could see lines of perspective change, texture effects develop, classical features turn into realism and lighting moving from ambient to directional to natural outdoor lighting. Dang! This museum alone makes Madrid a worthy destination.
The other two museums we checked out today:
The Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.. an exercise in understanding why modern art gets a bad rap. The place held many paintings of they style “Black Square on White Background”. The fame of the place goes to the collection of Picasso, Miro and a minor handful of Dali paintings. Yawn. With those you really need to be a fan of squiggles and white canvas. The big attraction is more a political historic center for the museum, Guernica by Picasso. This was Picasso’s rendition of the Nazi bombing on the Basque town agreed to by the evil Franco that sat in the NY Museum of Modern Art until Spain became a democracy, all per Picasso’s request. 5 years after Franco bit the big one, the painting was returned to Spain. You can just feel the Spanish patriotism in the room when you look at the Spainards looking at the black outlined cross-eyed horse looking upside down back at them. It is a cool piece of symbolism. Although, the black squares in the museum are still a big crock of Bauhaus if you ask me. Derrell says that the problem might be that we just didn’t have the word, “compositionally” in our working vocabularies…
The Museo Thytssen-Bornemisza made up for the modern art museum. It has a fanstastic room of 20th century art, including Kandinsky, Leger and Klee. Squiggles that I can appreciate. It had spare glowing Rubens, and a fanstastic overly dramatic Caravaggio. We got more educated with seeing Monet, Van Gough and Renoir… all good when you stand back and squint heavily. And I still don’t like El Greco, no matter how many of his paintings I see.
We are on an art high, but if you offered us tickets to the Louvre tomorrow, we’d probably turn you down… well… maybe.
We are left with the standard modern art reaction. Derrell is convinced he could make a dime selling random street items to the Reina Sofia museum. Hopefully, that idea will quickly pass. I’d have to wax philosophical about the merits of a rusty steel bar leaning against a white wall. I wonder if we will ever get an appreciation for that damn Bauhaus influence?
