Museo Reina Sofía

A couple of weeks ago, my roommates and I figured we better begin hitting museums while the weather was still less than ideal. Nighttime lows around 26F aren’t the best, but at least it rarely gets any colder than that during the whole “winter.” There’s plenty of more fun things to when it’s 75F than be in a mostly static museum.

All of us are in a course called Spanish Art in the Museums of Madrid. Class is one day a week. It’s essentially a high school-level art appreciation class. For example, on our first day of class, we talked about how to describe a painting. Mind blowing, right? I’m not complaining. Anyway, we had heard from various people, including our prof, that we have to see the Reina Sofia Museum.

Pros: We could talk about the art in class, could check it off the list, it is free at certain times, the building architecture is cool, it would us out of the apartment.

Cons: It’s “art,” it’s not very interactive, it’s guaranteed not to get the adrenaline rushing.

Well, the pros win. We went.

For the sake of brevity, it’s a museum. It’s much like any other place that is the home to hundreds of pieces of art. It’s white, sterile, and smells funny. Typical.

Some things that were cool. It did have cool architecture. From my observations, there was an old part and a new addition. The old part had large stone supports, decorative wall pieces and more. The new part features a fourth story patio that is a nice place to watch the sun set over Madrid through 7 foot high glass panels that surround the open-air deck that overlooks a courtyard ~40 feet below.

The museum got me thinking about the meaning of art. It got me questioning what is art? I found myself shaking my head numerous times throughtout my hours in the building. Some pieces just look like trash. Does this really belong in one of the most famous museums of Madrid? I guess that’s the beauty of art; its value changes with every person.

I struggled to make pictures inside the museum. Partially because of my opinions on the pieces. One piece did strike me as awesome though– Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.” I had heard a few times that it’s big. Yeah, so what? Let me tell you, it’s huge! It’s around 25 feet wide, and over 11 feet high. It’s massive! How does one person even paint something that giant?

You’re waiting on my picture of “Guernica?” There’s the catch, the museum does not allow the general public to take photos of the painting. Why? Don’t know. There are two employees eying the whispering, awestruck crowd. They see you bring your camera up to your face? They’re quick to start walking over to you as they shake their finger and tell you “no photos.” I’m sure people get shots all of the time, but I held back. Plenty of images online. Here’s an image from the Museum’s Flickr page. They’re stingy with pixels; forgive them.

I did find one piece I liked. George Brecht is the artist.

Simple and witty. My kind of art.

After looking through the courtyard a bit and snapping a few frames, I was finished with the museum.

Reina Sofia Museum: check.

Little did I know that some exciting things were happening just a few blocks away… See next post for deets and frames.

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