Day 21: Having fun for the LAST day in Madrid



Wow. Three weeks just whizzed by and it is our last day of muchos turistos in Madrid. We started the day by getting our shopping done for souvenirs and for a Spanish dinner with friends when we get home. We mostly bought FOOD. What a surprise!

Paul is very at home here with the late eating hours, but especially because there is a mega gin and tonic craze that has been going on in Spain for YEARS, even through the economic downturn. He has discovered a gin that we don't get in the USA (Yes, he looked on line to see if ANYONE sells it and got a goose egg!), so one of the stops on our shopping trek was the liquor store that sells Nordes gin. It has  a very floral background and he loves it. We are bringing back "the limit" per customs.

Paul's souvenir shopping--gin. He was depressed that he cannot take home all the wine.

Then we were off to the Reina Sofia art museum. It was once a hospital. It has a great collection and we really enjoyed the layout and the space between object d'art. We were literally overwhelmed at the Thyssen and Reina Sofia gave you a chance to "digest" what you saw. 

Giancometti's cat

The museum had sculptures, paintings, minimalist displays and a lot of film, too,

Miro

Side by side Miro. Also much Dali and Picasso, as well as quite a lot of Kandisky.

Another large Richard Serra ironwork exhibit

We were pleased to see more work by Richard Serra in the Reina Sofia. This room was constructed specifically for his work. We saw some "small building" sized work of his at the Guggenheim. It is all done in steel.

Different perspective

Calder in the courtyard

This mobile piece by Calder in the courtyard was delightful.It rotates in the upper section much like a windmill. There were smaller indoor Calder pieces as well.

More Miro

and even more...

Dali's depiction of Luis Bunuel

There was a film  in the museum by Dali and Bunuel called the Andalusian dog. It was quite abstract and admittedly, I didn't "get it." But it was interesting to watch. Maybe not getting it is what surrealism is all about? Paul said he read Bunuel's biography called The Last Sigh in which he says that after his death, he hopes he can come back and buy a newspaper every now and then. Probably NOT the Knoxville News Sentinel?

Human sized metronome

Paul Parris peruses man and machine

The crowning glory per se of the Reina Sofia is Picasso's Guernica.

 

Picasso's homeland of Spain is central to the meaning of Guernica, a mural the artist was commissioned to paint for the 1937 World Fair in Paris. Although Picasso expatriated to Paris and never did return to Spain during his life, the artist's connection to his homeland of Spain is evident in Guernica, named after a small country town in north Spain that was the target of a terror bombing exercise by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War (with Franco's permission.) The civilian slaughter was immense. You can see the images of  death throughout the entire mural.

 

"My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. In the picture I am painting — which I shall call Guernica — I am expressing my horror of the military caste which is now plundering Spain into an ocean of misery and death." Pablo Picasso

 

It is by far the most impressive thing in the museum both in sheer size and in the depiction of human suffering...and that's in a museum full of amazing works of art.

 

The scale on this painting is HUGE. There were literally two ladies standing next to this painting guarding it and they were dwarfed by it.

Madrid sky with Reina Sofia in the foreground

We spent about three hours in the museum and thoroughly enjoyed it. And then we saw another work of art...the sky hovering over the museum with these amazing clouds. How lucky can you get? Especially when it -173 degrees Centigrade. (or so they believe at the bank.)

It's COLD in Madrid today!

House of Congress is across the street from the hotel.

We saw this site tonight on our way out...they house of Congress. We have seen protests outside. Peaceful ones.

Jazz quintet

The composer

We concluded our visit to Madrid in an apropos manner for my husband...a jazz show at Bogui. The artist is a Azerbaijani pianist named Amina Figarova and her quintet playing selections from Blue Whisper, her latest CD. Lotsa fun!!!  So we are leaving Spain tomorrow with our own blue whispers. Sad to leave, happy to go home.

Paul's Ponderings:  A great three weeks in Spain comes to an end!  The museum today was fabulous and we topped it off with some great jazz!   Hard to ask for better.   Tomorrow it is a migration back to real life as they say.