El Prado & El Museo de Reina Sofia

I've only been here three days, and already I've had so many eye-opening and culture-shock inducing experiences that I barely know where to start. In the last two days we visited El Prado and El Museo de Reina Sofia, two of Spain's most prominent art museums, which feature thousands of the most famous artistic masterpieces from the 15th-20th centuries. Among the most familiar names were pieces by El Greco, Velasquez, Dali, Monet, Picasso and Rembrant, [among many others] and just walking through the halls of these galleries was truly overwhelming.

What struck me most, was the difference between seeing a piece of art on a slide or in a textbook as I have in class, versus standing two feet from a 500 year old painting, and seeing the physical colors and brushstrokes layered onto a
canvas. This is especially true for the impressionist pieces, which we were able to literally stand a few inches from without any alarms going off, or spanish guards chasing us down. [I was a bit worried about that, after noticing the skeptical looks the museum ushers were giving us when they realized we were a herd of young American students.]

Throughout this post, you can see a few of my favorite paintings: the first and second are by Picasso, the third is by Dali, and the last one is by a 19th century impressionist artist named Joaquin Sorolla.

What's incredable about Picasso's second painting
[called El Guernica] is both its history, and the the fact that it literally fills an entire wall, from floor to cieling. It's hard to tell from the small picture I included, but look at it closer, and you'll start to see recognizable shapes and figures: a bull, a horse, a woman carrying a dead child, a bulb of electricity, an older woman holding a lamp, a fallen soldier with a broken sword. The painting represents the bombing of the city Guernica by German and Italian war planes (on behalf of the nationalist spanish government which was in power at the time)

during the gruesome Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Standing in front of this giant mural, it's impossible not to admire Picasso's brilliant artistic ability to show the suffering and pain of war, and the effect that it has on culture. People from virtually every major country were visiting El Museo de Reina Sofia alongside our group [Germans, Italians, Japaneese, and Swiss just to name a few I saw] and despite the difference in cultures, it was amazing to see that we all had a similar reaction.



The other paintings I'll spare you the historical detail, but they're equally as fascinating and brilliant in their own right. Dali's surrealism is something an art history teacher could spend years on - and the bottom impressionist painting when looked at up-close, is actually made of dozens of paint splotches, mixed in dots to create this viberant 3-D image of a beautiful garden.

I should have known, with my parents having met in an art class, that somewhere inside me was an artsy fart. But after spending a full day in Spanish art museums, it's absolutley official.

Lots more to update [up next: El Valle de los Callidos and la Basillica, two of the most exceptional cathedrals I've seen in my life] but it's almost 2am, and I'm still working off the jet lag. So I hope you enjoyed a small piece of my new fascination with Spanish art and history, and I promise I'll have more pictures and stories up soon.


Amor y Juevos Rotas [broken eggs - I'll explain next time]


Shell