The Prado is vast, overwhelming and amazing. I set out early to get coffee and then meet the tour guide I’d booked for my visit to the Prado. Although I was early to the meeting point at the Goya statue near the ticket office, I found myself still waiting while other tour groups came and went. Fortunately, it was a beautiful sunny day and there were no lines for tickets.
After an unsatisfying “chat” online with the company that handled the booking (I will let you know if I ever find out what happened and whether I get the refund I requested), I bought my own ticket, got an audio guide and went in.
Three and a half hours later, I was art blind. I think my jaw hurt from gaping at all the amazing Goya, Velazquez, Rubens, Caravaggio, Durer, Bosch, Titian, Sorolla …. It was and is mind-boggling. I was particularly thrilled by the Sorolla portraits that were grouped in a special exhibit and the room of Goya’s so-called black paintings. Any resistance I’d had to the Prado (in my mind, I was sure it was great but all that hype?) was gone. I am in awe of the work and the entire experience, including the well-lit galleries and decent audio guide information.
I left the Prado to head into the Real Jardin Botanico, which, even in winter, is a beautifully designed garden.
I paid for “full admission” to the garden so I could also see two photography exhibits there in the Villanueva Pavillion. They were fantastic. The first, by photographer Angel Marcos, was entitled Architectures to Survive. His photos, many mounted on corrugated cardboard, show vulnerable people in landscapes, both urban and rural, that could be many places in the world. A post-earthquake photo of people among rubble really hit hard today, when the Turkish/Syrian catastrophe was in the news.
The second exhibit of digital photography by Felipe Lavin looked, at first, like many works of different patterns of vertical lines. The lowest fragment of the photo, however, showed the source of the colors and patterns as the torsos and feet of people or the lower floors of an urban landscape. A few of the works were digital videos of people on a train platform — again, mostly the colors that emerged from their bodies as they moved through and past one another. It was mesmerizing. I was completely energized by the work, even as I thought after the time in the Prado I couldn’t look at another thing.
And then! I had one more art destination I had to go to. In the past few years, I’ve taken many workshops online with artists who revere the Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia. He also goes just by Antonio Lopez (I verified this looking at his website.
https://www.antoniolopezweboficial.com/obra-actual) and in addition to a lot of spectacular painting, he’s also done work as a sculptor. Almost adjacent to the Botanic Garden, the Atocha Station features his work Dia y Noche, two huge heads of a baby, modeled on his granddaughter. One of the heads appears to be sleeping, the other has eyes open and they face each other across a small plaza next to the station.
You can see the scale of the heads when you see how they dwarf the cars nearby. I found them mysterious and innocent at the same time. It could be that my future grandchild has me especially tuned in. I haven’t found Antonio Lopez paintings yet in galleries here, but I’m going to do some more research on that to see if I can get face to face with his paintings before I go home.
So — after setting out at 9 am, here it was 3 pm and thank goodness restaurants were still serving lunch and I was able to collapse into some tapas and a local vermouth.
I’ve done all my Madrid exploration so far on foot, and tomorrow I’ve got an early morning ticket for the Sorolla house and museum, which may mean it’s time to figure out the Metro.
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