winchou: Norte de España

Our 'Norte de España' trip concludes in Madrid (pop 3,506,730 in 2025), which is not in the north of Spain, but is the home of Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" – which tells a quintessential story of Spain's Basque Country.

The Museo Reina Sofia has special 'free hours' on Sunday, from 12:30-2:30; so, we grab a quick breakfast and plan a late brunch. The journey's end begins on the Gran Vía and into the Plaza Canalejas, just west of the Puerta del Sol. Here we find a collection of beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings, including:

the "Edificio Meneses" (José María Mendoza & José de Aragón, 1915),
El Palacio de la Equitativa (Four Seasons Hotel, José Grases Riera, 1887-91),
and the "Edificio del Banco de Bilbao" (Ricardo Bastida y Bilbao, 1920-23).

We make a mental note to return later and take a longer look.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Santiago Calatrava, 2004) provides an orderly process for this special Sunday entry (other viewing options are available). When the gates open, we make our way to planta dos; "Guernica" (Picasso, 1937) is in sala 205.10.

The presentation of a singular masterpiece is a test for any museum (think of the Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre or Michelangelo's "David" at the Accademia di Firenze). But the story of "Guernica" is of a specific place and time – and that is not Guernica, but Paris, 1937, and the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (where it was originally presented at the "Pabellón de la República Española" (Josep Lluís Sert & Luis Lacasa, 1937, sponsored by the anti-Franco República Española; gallery).

Perhaps this speaks to the dangerous and tragic nature of the town of Guernica in 1937 that we cannot arrive there directly, but must approach from the safety of distance, both in chronology and geography (Madrid, Paris). The Museo's challenge is thus to impart an education of this doom as well as allowing the painting to speak for itself.

The room is extremely crowded, as is to be expected, but the size of the mural and the gallery allow layers of visitors to cycle forward and back. We had understood that photography was not permitted, but the Museo's new director (2023) has reversed this policy, and everybody snaps away.

The black may have lost some intensity, and the white may have yellowed, but the power of the imagery is overwhelming (top image). A strong diagonal rises from the lower right and directs our gaze to a lamp held by a figure, in stunned shock, leaning from the window. The building is on fire, and a second figure burns in agony while a third stumbles into the light. In the center of the composition, under an eye-shaped streetlight, a horse writhes in pain, pierced by a spear. The broken body of a slain man lies under the horse, his severed arm still gripping a shattered sword. To the left, a mother wails in sorry, cradling her dead child. A bull, a kind of stand-in for Picasso, observes the scene in horror, while in the darkness, a bird (perhaps a peace dove) calls skyward.

As we slide in closer to the rope, we can see the textures in the paintwork, especially the whites, where the composition has been worked and reworked with ghosted images. The patterns of the horsehide and the lives in the hands and feet add a level of tension – as if the repetitive marks are the build-up and the ragged lines are the release. The only sign of hope is a small flower near the guard of the sword.

Studies by Picasso (gallery) and a series of photographs of the creation by Dora Maar (gallery) line the room. Surprisingly, the original drawings show the slain man still alive, in reverse orientation, and his fist held straight up; and the horse appears to be dead. The streetlight is originally rendered as the sun, and the raised fist is holding a tangle of grass or hair (?) in its glare.

A poster for "Paris 1937, Arts et Techniques: Exposition International, Mai-Novembre" (Jean Carlu) hangs nearby – quite a different mood.

Sala 205.10 is preceded by sala 205.09, where we discover the "Maqueta del Pabellón de España en la Exposición Internacional de París de 1937" (Sert & Lacasa, 1987 – museum label quoted below) of the. Astonishingly, the "Pabellón" is also the birthplace and generator of several other remarkable pieces of modern art, such as:

"El Campesino Catalán en Rebeldía" (Joan Miró, visible in the 'hole' in the model – see Surovek Gallery)
"El Pueblo Español Tiene un Camino que Conduce a una Estrella" (Alberto Sánchez Perez, vertical sculpture at the corner of the model)
"Fuente de Mercurio" (Alexander Calder, now at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona)
"La Montserrat" (Julio González, standing figure at the stair landing)

The Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, held in Paris in 1937, represented an ideological programme with two main aims: to bind culture to social progress and to challenge visitors with the threat posed by fascism.

Other pieces in the gallery add visual and historical context, such as "La Guitare" (Juan Gris, 1918) and "Pierrot Tocant la Guitarra" (Salvador Dalí, 1925).

Additional frames of reference and commentary are provided by the following:

"Portrait II" (Joan Miró, 1938)
"Peinture (Hirondelle)" (Miró, 1937)
"La Femme au Jardin" (Picasso, 1930-32; bronze replica, Julio González, 1932)
"La Belle Allemande" (Max Ernst, 1934-35)
"La Nageuse" (Picasso, 1934)
"African Guernica" (Dumile Feni, 1967 – museum label quoted below)

HISTORY DOESN'T REPEAT ITSELF, BUT IT DOES RHYME.

Dumile Feni's African Guernica was first exhibited in Johannesburg at Gallery 101, one of the few cultural spaces in the segregated city that exhibited work by contemporary artists of colour. The monumental drawing has since been hailed as a foundational document of Anti-Apartheid aesthetics and African resistance to the brutalization and dehumanization of Black life.

Here, the work is shown, for the first time in Europe, and in confrontation with Picasso's Guernica, produced thirty years earlier, to which it owes its name.

With our free passes quickly expiring, we head to planta cero to see Richard Serra's "Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi" (1986, recreated 2006 – translated from the Museo's catalog).

Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi (Equal-parallel: Guernica-Bengasi) was created specifically for the Reina Sofía Museum as part of the References exhibition. An artistic meeting in time, with which the Reina Sofía Art Center was inaugurated in 1986. The sculpture consists of four solid blocks of corten steel, four volumes that align with an elevation of 148.5 cm (the author spoke of "equal elevations", corresponding to the dimension in height of the window sill of the building that houses them). … Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi focuses on a spatial experimentation of the work, but also on a temporary parallelism of two historical facts on the premise of equality: the bombing of the Condor Legion on the civilian population in the village of Guernica on April 26, 1937 and an event contemporary to the creation of the sculpture, the attack of April 15, 1986 on the Libyan city Of Benghasi by US aviation. This attack, with civilian casualties, responded to a bomb attack at a nightclub in Berlin attributed to Libyan agents, in which a woman and two American soldiers died. Weaving these references, Serra alludes to the debate about the role of history: if it is exhausted in the bodily and individual experience, or if instead, its story can function as a construction of the world.

With just a few minutes left, we decide to ride the elevators to the planta cuatro. There is a small collection of contemporary art in the exhibit (Colección. Arte Contemporáneo: 1975 - Presente). But we soon encounter the fantastic views from the elevator lobby of the Invernadero de Atocha (Rafael Moneo, 1992), part of the Madrid Puerta de Atocha (Alberto de Palacio Elissague & Henry Saint James with Gustave Eiffel, 1892) train station, as well as "El Pueblo Español Tiene un Camino que Conduce a una Estrella" (Sánchez Perez; replica, Jorge Ballester, 2001), which is in the Museo's open courtyard.

With the Museo closing, the staff herds us down the stairs, into the Edificio Nouvel, and past the bright yellow "Brushstroke" (Roy Lichtenstein, 1996/2001).

After lunch near the Museo, we return to the Puerta del Sol, the Calle de Alcalá, and our interrupted visual examination of Spanish architecture. We get some great pictures of the buildings and sculptures: