Named for Spanish royalty, 'Queen Sofia' is Spain's national collection of modern art. Like the Thyssen-Bornemisza, it has been open for only a couple of decades, yet attracts millions of people each year to see world-famous paintings by Picasso and Dali (and the countless artists who have attempted to copy their ideas).
Housed in an old covent and hospital, the museum has a mind-boggling array of rooms which require comfy shoes and a trail of breadcrumbs to fully explore. The only way to describe the layout is 'labryinthine' which means lots of backtracking and aimless wanderings. Awkward extensions make for a confusing layout and on numerous occasions we were asked to fish out our tickets to enter the next set of rooms. The permanent collection is not that large so there are several short-tem exhibitions running at the same time. This means the people running the museum cannot keep up with the pace of changes and do not print a floorplan for visitors.
All this can make for a maddening experience, but then there is the thematic approach to the layout with the art grouped together by the way it feels, instead of how it was made or when. The curators justify their approach on the museum's website in this manner:
'We are aware that, traditionally, museums have been trapped within a canonical view of history that seeks to establish sequential order between time periods. This traditional approach aims to explain works of art with documents and testimonies from an era without understanding that the images and objects far surpass the circumstances from which they were born. In this light, this approach fails to understand that time is not a past time, but the time of memory, which the historian interpellates insofar as this memory contains heterogeneous times. Just checking if have you lost interest yet which we hope not because we're just warming up. This history materializes in a web of open-ended, fragmentary narratives that speak to us of hands, gazes and minds, all of them synchronized at one moment, crystallizing into an image, an object or a document. Still reading? Haven't you got better things to do with your time? Above all else, this narrative involves conveying and activating experiences—experiences that refer to a past time and yet remain in the present, ones that can only be perceived from the present. Its end is not to find an escape route, but to enrich reflecting on experience, a kind of learning that does not stem from indoctrination, but from activating the ability to respond critically to the world and, of course, to the museum itself. This position implicitly entails the need to create a new vocabulary, a new nomenclature. Goodness are you still reading this, because I think we lost most folks at heterogeneous.'
And so on. Now, one thing I believe about art is if it can't catch my attention on its own merits, why should I have to read a book of obtuse drivel to understand it?
I find much modern art to be a classic case of the Emperor's new clothes: all syncophantic hype glossing over the fact there is no content. Which is why Picasso's Guernica is the star attraction.
Unlike most of the other artworks on view in the museum, this painting demands your attention and not simply because of its mammoth size (25 feet long and 11 feet tall).
Drained of colour, the overlapping figures occupy a shattered landscape. The painting is not detailed and in fact is almost cartoonish, but with a few careful strokes Picasso effectively portrays a series of distinct characters and conveys their feelings of grief and shock. Anyone can see an injustice has been done.
Picasso painted the mural upon hearing the news that a Basque town in northern Spain called Guernica had been bombed by the Germans. This was 1937, years before WWII was officially declared, at a time when Spain was in the midst of a civil war. Much has been debated about who ordered the attack and what gains it served, but Picasso's depiction of innocent civilians suffering at the hands of warmongering governments remains as timely today as ever.
The Spanish Civil War influenced an entire generation of artists working in the country and their works are prominently displayed in the Reina Sofia. I was particularly interested in seeing Robert Capa's photos from the time, most famously his controversial yet iconic Death of a Militiaman. A tragic moment frozen in time, or a pose?
Along with the paintings, photography and sculpture there are many films running in the galleries as well, from Buster Keaton stunts to surrealism. The most bizarre of these was Buñuel's disturbing documentary, Land Without Bread. Depicting the hard-scrabble life of poor country folk, animals were most certainly harmed in the production of this movie, including a mountain goat falling off a cliff and a donkey stung to death by bees.
Despite the grim imagery, the film today is considered as perhaps the first 'mockumentary' with inappropriate background music and its overly earnest, contradictory narrator. At one points he says: "One eats goat meat only when one of the animals is killed accidentally. This happens sometimes when the hills are steep and there are loose stones on the footpath." Except while saying this, the film shows a goat being shot with a gun and then deliberately thrown off the cliff by the film crew.
Which leads us back to my earlier point about my being suspicious of art that requires an MFA degree to be interpreted, let alone made interesting. Anyway, I hope this hasn't been too heavygoing and that you'll be joining me again soon as I wrap up the Madrid trip with the last of the photos and tips I wanted to share.
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