Get On The Blandwagon!: Art

Technically most Spanish breakfast places are actually brunch places, and a common process for ordering brunch is to choose multiple items off three stages or courses of the menu. And so it was this morning that I went to a cafe called Mamua just wanting a little something on toast, and came away with coffee, orange juice, yoghurt with fruit and granola, some poppyseed cake, and a little something on toast, specifically avocado, salsa, Iberian ham and a poached egg.

It turned out I would need every one of these delicious, delicious calories to support my visit to the Reina Sofia, the second of Madrid’s main art galleries.

To be fair, Reina Sofia is more of an art museum than an art gallery. An art gallery shows you some beautiful pictures. An art museum gives you lessons with and/or about art, and Reina Sofia does this with a depth and commitment I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

The first exhibition I saw explored the creation of art immediately following the liberation of Spain from the fascists in 1976, which coincided with the global explosion of punk. To quote the wall blurb, “The absence of hegemonies would end up translating into an eclecticism of forms that defied artistic practices in that decade”… which is one of the few examples of high academic language actually being used to express a complex idea rather than to cover the lack of any genuine idea. The exhibition focused on underground video art, poster design and graffiti to show how liberated young artists dealt with the sudden freedom they had to say whatever they wanted.

Next, there was a retrospective of works from the early 20^th century Canary Islands artist Nestor Martin-Fernandez de la Torre, who was, according to all evidence, a bit of an odd fish. As he left his birthplace in Gran Canaria and moved variously between Barcelona, Paris and Berlin, his work slowly evolved from sensible landscapes and elegant portraits into fantastical explorations of sexuality, gender, landscape and identity. Also, fish.

A hundred years on from their creation, his paintings still blaze with light and colour. He was also a muralist, a wallpaper designer, and conceptual architect, and every phase of his personal and artistic development was laid out with clarity and a keen curatorial eye.

Similarly, the retrospective on Lebanese artist Huguette Caland tracked her first works in the late 1960s, which took their inspiration from the psychedelic movement, through her finding her artistic voice in the 1980s and 90s, then to her having to evolve her practice and style to accommodate her advancing age in the 00s and 10s. Interestingly, she had the maturity in her youth to embrace negative space, either in big colour-blocked canvases whose only details were on their peripheries, or in white fields with colourful writhings drifting off their edges.

And yet in her old age she grew into the negative spaces and embraced thickly detailed walls of colour and pattern, as if Van Gogh or Monet had developed an eccentric interest in textiles.

These were just the main exhibitions. In between were displays on urban design across Spain, the history of workers’ rights in Barcelona, and examples from the museum’s huge collection of works by Picasso (including Guernica), Salvador Dali and Joan Miro. I was in there for three and a half hours and emerged absolutely exhausted but pretty sure I’d seen everything. Admitted towards the end, I was drifting past priceless Picassos and only barely taking them in.

In the evening I tried another one of Madrid’s famous rooftop bars, the Azotea de Circulo, but it was a far more tawdry experience than the refined boozing at Oroya. For a start, there’s a $10 cover charge just to access the rooftop, and once you’re up there, it’s so packed that you’re lucky if you find anywhere to sit. I had to perch on a step near the bar, listening to the American trust fund kids with a table behind me talking about what their parents do, since they themselves haven’t done anything yet. Ugh.

The drinks were a little underachieving, but they were also comparatively inexpensive, so all things considered, not too bad.

At least I got some good pictures of the Madrid skyline, including the iconic statue.