El culture vulture (The culture vulture)

Another week has flown by under the Madrid sunshine... I had friends over to visit almost constantly, so this is my excuse for neglecting the blog!

Madrid is not the first place to come to mind on the list of the world’s great tourist cities. This is in fact a topic I highlighted back in my first post, unbelievably almost a month ago.

Yet Madrid’s crop of museums acts like a magnet for art lovers the world over. The art scene revolves around the ‘Golden Triangle’ in the south east of the city centre: the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the world-renowned Prado.

Every day during these summer months, crowds of tourists and aficionados alike descend on these enormous, imposing buildings, to get their fill of everything from Canaletto to Velázquez. Somewhat surprisingly for large tourist attractions, I’ve found that each museum has a unique and memorable character. Rather than scribble in a vaguely informative manner – there are guidebooks for this and they do the job better than I can – I thought I’d share my personal impressions, now that I’ve become intimately acquainted with these three galleries (hooray for free student entry).

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is a private collection of artworks that belonged to the esoteric German-Hungarian magnate, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. (There’s even a garish glass-and-steel extension next door, built to house the copycat collection of his widow).

It doesn’t compete on the level of world-class museums such as the Prado or the Louvre, simply because it’s trying to do something altogether different. Here you won’t find the stereotypical museum curators engaged in their perpetual game of international one-upmanship, constantly striving for the most exhaustive assembly of works from a particular artist in one place. Instead you have before you the most comprehensive, high-quality overview of Western European art I’ve seen anywhere.

Ordered chronologically from early Renaissance through to the latest in pop art kitsch, movements in art are represented by two or three seminal works from the leading artists in a particular style. It’d be the perfect place to do a ‘beginner’s guide’ for the completely uninitiated. And for those more in the know, the names inscribed on the gallery plaques read like a ‘who’s who’... the big names are too many to mention. Such a high-altitude overview makes for an invigorating gallery experience – and for this alone, it’s my favourite.

The Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is best-known for being home to Picasso’s wartime masterpiece, Guernica. This enormous canvas is infinitely more moving in the flesh than it seemed when pasted into the pages of my year 8 art sketchbook. The rest of the second floor makes for a superb collection of modern art (often with a Spanish twist); so there’s plenty of wacky Picasso, disturbing Dalí, and the occasional splash of Kandinsky. As for the rest... well the third floor is like a mystery, an inaccessible slab of concrete bypassed by all elevators and stairwells. The remainder comprises a lukewarm collection of either extremely experimental or box-checking boring modern art – a sombre atmosphere to match the forbidding sheer walls of this cavernous old hospital.

The Prado is huge. Much like the Louvre, one day is impossible for a full appreciation (a three-day ‘tapas’ approach works much better). This self-satisfied cousin of its Madrid counterparts sits proudly on the Paseo del Prado in Antonio Villanueva’s purpose-built palace. It has all the swagger of a world-class gallery, not to mention better translated blurbs.

I happen to have acquired quite a taste for 16th and 17th century Italian art, as well as a mild obsession with El Greco. Both can be attributed to this classy landmark, in whose elegant corridors I’ve spent many an hour wandering, mildly incomprehensible guide map in hand.

Less rambling and more scribbling to come... 

El Prado

Spanish of the Day

me aburro como una ostra - I'm bored to death. (Lit. 'you're boring me like an oyster'.)

escurrir el bulto - to bury your head in the sand.