Weekly Travel Feature

Madrid for Its Art Museums

Prepared by Harold Stephens

Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International

A day at the Prado Museum in Madrid will get you through the front door. To visit all the galleries you will need a year, at least. Indeed, the Museo del Prado is one of the finest museums in the world with about 1,300 paintings on display. Without question, the Prado is the custodian of an astounding heritage of Spanish artists, plus many artists from the continent as well. This large number of the finest works includes Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, El Greco, Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera and most other leading Spanish old masters.

Thai Airways now has direct flights from Bangkok to Madrid and Royal Orchid Holidays (ROHS52) does offer a tour of Madrid that makes a fine introduction to the city. In the three-day tour a visitor can get a feeling for Spain and its arts. In a way, Madrid is a museum piece itself with a display of fine architecture at every turn.

But no trip to Madrid is complete without a visit to the Prado Museum. Extend your THAI flight and allow yourself a day or two extra. It will be well worth it. I had spent a few years living in southern Spain, had come to Madrid often and found it hard to break away from the museum. One imagines the Prado as an art museum but when you enter you are handed a brochure that tells you The Museo del Prado not only features one of the world's finest collections of European art, from the 12th century through the early 19th century, but it also contains important collections of more than 5,000 drawings, 2,000 prints, 1,000 coins and medals, and almost 2,000 decorative objects and works of art. Sculpture is represented by more than 700 works and by a smaller number of sculptural fragments. You can understand why it would take a year to see it all.

In Paris at the Louvre Museum it’s Mona Lisa that everyone wants to see. At the Prado the best-known work on display is Las Meninas by Velázquez. When the Prado first opened its doors in 1819, the museum had but 311 canvases on display of which Velázquez had 44 and, surprisingly, only two works of Goya.

Las Meninas, Spanish for “The Maids of Honour”, was painted in 1656 by Velázquez and has become the most widely analysed work in Western painting due to its complex composition. It raises questions about reality and illusion and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted.

Another painting in Prado that catches attention, perhaps with partly closed eyes, is The Naked Maja by Goya, painted in 1800. Much like Las Meminas, Francisco de Goya’s nude lady has created a controversy. Who was the lady? And why did Goya create another painting of the same woman identically posed, but clothed, entitled La Maja Vestida, “The Clothed Maja.” Both paintings were recorded as belonging to the collection of Duke of Alcudia and, likely, the woman depicted was his young mistress. It has also been suggested that the woman was María del Pilar, the 13th Duchess of Alba, with whom Goya is rumored to have been romantically involved.

In 1815, the dreadful Spanish Inquisition summoned Goya to reveal who commissioned him to create the "obscene" The Naked Maja, and when he refused he was stripped of his position as the Spanish court painter.

One cannot simply saunter through the gallery that displays Goya’s paintings and be immune. The paintings are beautiful, grotesque, marvelous, ugly, frightening, everything combined. In his early years Goya painted the Spanish royal family, including Charles IV of Spain and Ferdinand VII. In later life his themes changed from merry festivals to scenes of war and corpses. We can clearly note the darkening of his temper. Near the end of his life, he produced frightening and obscure paintings of insanity, madness, and fantasy.

Of course, any mention of Spanish artists and Pablo Picasso comes to mind. But actually Picasso, born in 1861 and died in 1973, was considered a modern painter. Nevertheless his renowned work, Guernica, was exhibited in the Prado upon its return to Spain after the restoration of democracy to the country, but it was moved to the Museo Reina Sofía in 1992 as part of a transfer of all works later than the early 19th Century to other buildings for space reasons.

Museo Reina Sofía is Spain's national museum of 20th century art. It was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992 and is named for Queen Sofia of Spain. It too is located in Madrid and for art lovers should not be missed. Reina Sofía is mainly dedicated to Spanish art and includes both Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. Certainly the most famous masterpiece in the museum is Picasso's great painting Guernica. The Reina Sofía also has fine collections of the works of Juan Gris, Joan Miró and Jorge Oteiza.

Picasso painted Guemica in 1937. If for no other reason it’s worth a trip to Reina Sofía to see it. Painted on canvas 349 × 776 cm, or nearly 12 feet high and 26 feet long, the painting depicts the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The painting represents the suffering of war victims and acts as a reminder of the horrors they had survived.

Picasso is the most recognized artist of the twentieth-century and is credited with the co-founding, along with Georges Braque, of the Cubist movement. Among his most famous works are Guemica, just mentioned, and the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon which he painted in France in 1907. The eye-catching painting depicts five prostitutes in a brothel and is one of Picasso's most famous works. It now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City which acquired it in 1939.

When Picasso was 16, his father sent him to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, the foremost art school in the country. It was here that he began exploring the Prado, and here he studied works of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya both of whom he greatly admired. At the Academy he found it difficult accepting formal instruction and stopped attending class.
After Madrid, Picasso made his first trip to Paris in 1900, then the art capital of Europe. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. He could have hardly imagined then that one day he would be the highest paid artist in the world. A few of his paintings have sold for over a hundred million dollars. It was in Paris that he started to sign his work simply Picasso.

During the Second World War, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. Picasso’s artistic style did not fit the Nazi views of art, so he was not able to show his works during this time.

It was in Spain in the 1020s that Surrealism was formulated and the two key figures that contributed decisively to this movement were Salvador Dali and Joan Miro. Dali followed a more orthodox surrealism in his first years, then gave free rein to personal experimentation and, as one critic stated, were obsessions that were not always artistically grounded. His work can be seen in the Dali Museum in Figueres and in Cadaques . Miro's work is on display at The Miro Foundations in Barcelona and Mallorca.

To see the old masters, it’s the Prado Museum, but to get a feeling for Spain’s 20th century art, one has to view the permanent collection in the Reina Sofia National Art Centre in Madrid. And Thai Airways will take you there on a direct flight from Bangkok.

Next I will tell visitors how not to get wet in Bangkok. Coming to Thailand’s most popular festival, Songkran.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Q. Dear Mr. Stephens. I just returned from a great 12-day trip to Thailand. We stayed at Phuket, Chiang Mai, and Bangkok and on a Live-aboard boat (SCUBA Diving) and I wasn't able to locate a nice collectable map that I can have framed for my Shop here in the USA. I was wondering if you had any suggestions or could offer me any help. Thanks, Ryan Weeks. Sydney
A. Dear Ryan, there are a few good mapmakers around. APA Press, the publisher that produced Insight Guides, has a good line of maps. Some of the most attractive maps I have seen are by B&B Maps of Thailand produced by David Unkovich, a photographer who lives in northern Thailand. These maps are really first class and worthy of hanging on any wall. Another excellent shop is Map & Prints at River City in Bangkok. --HS