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Published: December 8th 2006
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The Reina Sofia Museum and Crazy Christmas Wig Happenings
Modern Art at its Best After waking up kinda late we decided to hit more art museums today with the most important one being the Reina Sofia Museum near Atocha Train Station. This museum was created in the 1970s from an abandoned hospital building that was one of Madrid’s first hospitals. After some extensive remodeling the Reina Sofia museum was opened and has become one of the world’s best modern art museums.
We walked down to the museum after breakfast and realized immediately that going to a major museum on a holiday weekend continues to be a crazy idea. Today was the beginning of the Catholic celebration of Christmas so everyone had taken the day off. Obviously a bunch of those people had decided this was the place to spend that day off.
We got into the museum and got an audio guide. There were some serious learnings at the Prado earlier this week and one of those big learnings was: Audio Guides are well worth the extra money, especially in a museum.
We spent our time on the 2nd and 4th floors
which are the permanent exhibits. We will start with the second floor:
Picasso, Dali, Gris, and Miro The second floor has an extensive collection of the four most important Spanish modern artists. The Picasso collection consisted of at least three rooms of paintings and his number one most famous piece, Guernica. Guernica was Picasso’s depiction of the German air force bombing of the small Basque town during the Spanish civil way (I believe this was in 1937). The painting is enormous; it stands 12 feet tall by 30 feet long. I found it to be incredibly powerful and everything that I had read and more. They also had a cool set of pictures of the work as it was being made which had been taken by Picasso’s girlfriend of the time.
There were some really cool Dali pieces. The more you look at the work of these artists you have to believe that they were all brilliant and probably completely insane. Dali’s work must be what it's like to be on serious drugs. I really liked one piece which was obviously about bombings. It contained various objects dropping bombs, planes, pitchers of water and elephants
with huge legs.
I didn’t connect with Miro’s work as much. It’s all very abstract and often meaningless to a person who is as unartistic as me. Despite the audio guide’s best attempt to tell me what some of the pieces meant, I still didn’t really get it. At least some of them were really colorful and nice to look at.
The big surprise for Kel and I was the discovery of the artist Gris whose work we really enjoyed. He only lived to be 40 but had a huge impact on other later modern artists. His work uses the crazy perspective of other modernists, but it tends to be a little more cohesive. You feel like you are looking at a real scene but that it has just been tilted in strange ways. His color is really cool as well, uses a lot of greens and grays which feel cool and soft.
I. K. B After spending a considerable time on the 2nd floor we moved on up to the fourth floor where the more recent modernists are displayed. A note of warning, after the 50’s I have a real difficulty with modern
Mike and Kel in Wigs
Kel does model pose and Mike as Pippi Longstocking. art. It has gotten very abstract and can sometimes be so difficult to describe that even the audio guide would sound like it was just guessing.
A couple of pieces really caught our eyes. One was an abstract blue work by an artist named Yves Klein. Klein often only worked with one color - he really loved to use blue - because of his belief that pure color often conveyed themes well all by themselves. In this case, Mr. Klein was so pleased with his work that he dubbed the color International Klein Blue (IKB) despite the fact that others had used it before him. In his defense he did work with some chemists to help develop the medium used for the work.
We also really enjoyed some of the modern sculpture. One artist (his name escapes me now) created two nude statues, one a man and one a woman. Both of these statues are so life like that if they weren’t colored a brownish hue, you would expect them to be two naked models standing before you. The statues took the artist 40 years to complete and he worked on them for so long that they actually
started haunting his dreams. Crazy!!
Christmas Wigs Due to the fact that we had no pictures to show for today’s activities we decided to walk around in search of pics of the crazy Christmas wigs we’ve been telling you about. Most of the pics are a little blurry and grainy because of the fact that the people didn’t pose for the pics and I didn’t use a flash.
After about an hour of trudging through crazy crowds capturing pictures, Kel decided it was time to join in on the fun. Reluctantly I let her drag me to Plaza Mayor where the Christmas markets were selling wigs and let her go pick some out. I stood out of the way because it was absolutely packed with people.
Kel cam back with two wigs, one a pink Pippi Longstocking sort (for me) and one a long red head style wig for her. I was disappointed that she didn’t go for anything crazier. I’ll let the pics speak for themselves.
On the way back to the hotel I got a lot of laughs and stares in my pink wig. You’d think no one had seen a
Mike and Kel in Wigs
Hair Band Mike!! I could so have been a member of Motley Crue! Eat your heart out Jeff B! grown man with pink Pig-Tails. Huh??
You guys enjoy a laugh at my expense. Hope you’re all well!!
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Tracy
non-member comment
too funny
Love the wigs you guys! I am enjoying the pictures!