11/17: Madrid: Stories Behind the Art at the Reina Sofia

It was fun strolling down one of the many pedestrian streets in Madrid and seeing all the Christmas decorations out even though it was a full five weeks before Santa was coming!

A few blocks away was a branch, or possibly the flagship store, of the national department store chain called El Corte Ingles that had one of the best holiday displays I'd ever seen. Steven and I happily watched all the moving animals and cars for several minutes along with a good sized crowd of Madrilenos.

We tore ourselves away to walk to the Descalzas Royal Monastery, founded in the 16th century by Juana, the sister of King Philip II. As this was a working monastery, or convent to North Americans, tourists were only able to enter at either 10 or 4 when the nuns weren't present.

I was only able to take this single picture unfortunately as they were strictly prohibited. I would have loved to show you the monastery's chapels as they were decorated with fine art and Rubens-designed tapestries, and the heirlooms of the wealthy women who joined the order and were required to give a dowry. 

We made our way next to Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain's national museum for modern art, and the last of the big three art museums in Madrid after the Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza. Funnily enough, the museum was located in the city's first public hospital. The museum's focus was on 20th century Spanish artists - Picasso, Dali, Miro, etc - but, as you'll see, there were plenty of works by modern art greats from elsewhere in the world. 

It was fun entering the Reina Sofia, as it's normally called, by the tall, exterior glass elevators as we had great views over the huge square in front of the museum.

We began in the Proto-Modern Gallery looking at paintings done by artists "with a social conscience to show inner feelings and to deal with social reality. These artists painted because they had something to say, not to just get a paycheck." Pablo Picasso painted Dead Birds in 1912.

I really liked seeing this painting, Chimney, by Diego Rivera, one of Mexico's foremost muralists, as we'd seen his work and those of other muralists a year ago in Mexico City, on our way back from our extended trip to South America.

I was pretty familiar with paintings by the French artist, Georges Braque, but would have had a hard time knowing this was of Cards and Dice, without reading the title.

Umpteen years ago when I was living in my native Canada, I used to love drinking Dubonnet, the French aperitif, while playing bridge with friends. I think the quality of my bridge game went down as I drank more Dubonnet, however! This was painted by a Russian artist in 1914 I'd not heard of before.

I don't recall seeing films in an art gallery before but, at the Reina Sofia, the curator had a passion with cinema so he paired films, playing continuously in nearby rooms, from the same decade as the paintings. The films provided a fascinating insight into the social context that inspired the art of Spain's turbulent 20th century. This film, called The Extraordinary Dislocation, was made by Georges Melies in France in 1901.

The sculpture of a Woman's Head was done by Picasso as were the paintings behind it.

The next film we watched for a while was The Heroes of the Somme from 1916.

The 20th century began with great strides in technological modernization and the emergence of the new urban social classes. As tensions arose, photography and cinema were the media that represented the changes. In Spain, the difficulty was to try and solve the eternal conflict between tradition and progress. I read that the 1894 Garrotte by Ramon Casas depicted the social conflicts and police repression from a Bourgeois moralist tradition.

I was flabbergasted to learn that Picasso had painted Bust of Smiling Woman when he was merely 20 years old! The theme was typical of the era.

I was amused to read that the transition from the 19th to the 20th century produced all kinds of end of the century predictions of catastrophe, as that sounded so reminiscent of the gloom and doom we all heard at the end of the 20th century. The works produced in that period in Spain were subsequently called Black Spain and expressed a specific vision of their country that consisted of austerity and gravity.

In 1914 many artists embraced the fight in the First World War, known as 'the war to end to end all wars' but many of those who survived turned their backs on society when they realized the war brought no lasting change. In the postwar years, some artists abandoned the outer world, according to travel writer Rick Steves, and began painting mindscapes instead of landscapes. They'd learned that reality was deeper than what is first 'seen.' These were the artists known as Surrealists.

I hadn't known the birth of Surrealism was closely linked to literature. For many surrealist artists, painting and sculpture shared the same nature as prose and poetry as they both revealed the deepest emotions and psychological processes. One of the major artists was Joan Miro whose works in the 1920s exemplified the blurring of the boundaries between the visual and the poetic. Miros's Man with a Pipe was painted in 1925.

Miro simply called this, also from 1925, Painting.

During the mid-1920s, there was a noticeable feeling of artistic renewal in Spain, as a response to greater communication with avante-garde artists in Paris. This new surrealist sensibility, together with a revival of interest in popular indigenous culture, came to be known as the Generation of '27.

Salvador Dali, whose home and museum we'd been lucky enough to see near Barcelona a few weeks previously, placed familiar items in a stark landscape which created an eerie effect. As Steves described, his figures morphed into misplaced faces and body parts. When we looked one way, we saw an animal; looking at it from another angle, a man's face. 

The original 1923 work by American Man Ray, formerly known as Emmanuel Radnitzky, was titled Object to Be Destroyed but when his lover abandoned him in 1932, the artist replaced the photo of an anonymous eye with one of hers and renamed it Object of Destruction. A group of students destroyed the metronome in 1957 in Paris. The following year, Man Ray renamed the new piece Indestructible Object which "alluded to the pulse of sexual desire" according to the museum's literature.

Sorry but I don't have an interesting story to tell you about the Belgian artist Rene Magritte and his Pink Bells, Tattered Skies from 1967! I just liked the simple composition after the other thought-provoking pieces we'd just seen.

Another monumental work by Dali was his The Architectural Angelus of Millet from 1933.

Dali painted The Enigma of Hitler in 1939.

Dali's 1929 Face of the Great Masturbator was an autobiographical work that "reflected the fervent emotional and erotic transformation that the artist experienced after meeting Gala," a Russian then married to a French poet. She later became Dali's companion, wife and muse for the rest of his life. The painting showed "his sexual obsessions, phobias and fantasies and highlighted the surrealist artist's interest in the subconscious and theories of psychoanalysis."

Perhaps the single most impressive piece of art in the country was Picasso's Guernica painted in 1937 in response to the world's first saturation bombing on civilians of the Basque market town of the same name in northern Spain. The fascist general Francisco Franco gave permission to his fascist confederate Adolf Hitler to use the town as a guinea pig to try out Germany's new air force. As I mentioned in my earlier post after visiting Guernica, the raid leveled the town and caused destruction that was unheard of then, though it sadly became commonplace just a few years later.

Picasso, then living in Paris, set to work drawing scenes of the destruction as he imagined it. Those disparate pieces came together into a massive mural that measured 286 square feet. The monumental canvas wasn't just a piece of art but has been described as a piece of history and captured the horrors of modern war in his own modern style.

As Franco cemented his grip on power, Guernica toured internationally as part of a fundraiser for the anti-Franco cause. In 1939, Picasso decided to place the work in New York's Museum of Modern Art. It wasn't until 1975 when Franco died that the painting arrived in Spain for the first time. Even though photos were again forbidden, I took this image from an adjoining room to forever remember Picasso's genius and his timeless classic symbolizing all wars. I had seen other pictures of it, including one in tile near Guernica's Peace Museum, but being just a few feet from Guernica was reason alone to visit the Reina Sofia.

In the museum's Cubism Gallery, I learned that the art movement developed after the turn of the century when there were just two ways to express art: linear as in Picasso and color as in Matisse, both two-dimensional. With cubism, three dimensions are shown in two, so that each person sees things differently. Spain was at the forefront of the cubism movement with later works by Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris. The first painting below was by Dali.

The Singer by Juan Gris was painted in 1927. He also painted the next painting.

Another iconic Picasso painting but I didn't write down the title.

The museum also had a substantial collection of post WWII art when the center of the art world moved from Paris to New York City. Included was one of Picasso's works painted before the outbreak of the war called Seated Woman Resting on Elbows.

Also painted in 1939 was his disturbing Three Lambs' Heads.

Miro's The Smile of the Flamboyant Wings was completed in 1953, so it was the first of the paintings I'd seen in the post WW II gallery.

No modern art gallery would be complete without works by Vassily Kandinsky, the Russian-born painter, who created Centre Circles. 

There were so many other works in that gallery and in the Nouvel Wing which featured art from the 1960s through the 1980s but our eyes had begun to glaze over having spent so much time enjoying the earlier pieces that captivated us. I hope some of the preceding works caught your fancy or piqued your interest.

Next post: Adios Madrid and Ole to Cordoba, Spain - you'll soon see why!

Posted on January 23rd, 2019, from our home in Littleton, in Denver's foothills.