Wednesday, May 4th
Another beautiful, sunny day. We've fallen into the pattern of going to a local shop for breakfasts of Cafe Americano or Cafe con Leche (hot milk) with assorted pastries. This morning, though, Stew chose a delicious “sandwich” of grilled bread, ham, and an egg with its sunny side sticking up provocatively through a little round hole cut out of the top slice of bread. Note the little round piece of bread discreetly set to one side. Then, we all strolled down to the second of Madrid's “Golden Triangle” of museums, the Arte Reina Sofia. It houses only “modern” art, meaning most of the 20th Century, with a particular concentration on the brutality of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Along with its many abstract paintings and sculptures were photos and movies running on endless loops. Most of the latter were graphic depictions of war, extermination camps, and distruction except for one incongruous and hilarious silent film with Buster Keyton.
This museum is the one that houses its national treasure, Picasso's Guernica, which depicts the horrors of “modern” warfare where those who kill no longer see the suffering of their victims. In this case, the fascist Francisco Franco gave Hitler permission to use the small, defenseless town of Guernica in Northern Spain for target practice. Most of the town and its inhabitants were destroyed by bombs dropped from planes.
Picasso's channeled his rage into a huge monochromatic, largely abstract painting representing the anguish of the men, women, children, and animals so mercilessly destroyed. He displayed the painting in the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair, after which, it traveled around the world as a powerful anti-war protest, ending up in New York's Museum of Modern Art, where most everyone in our group saw it as much as fifty or more years ago. (Before Bob's time!) Picasso had stipulated that it not return to his native Spain until democracy was restored. Franco died in 1977, and Gurenica arrived in Madrid on September 11, 1981.
At one point, Marty told us that the Spanish Civil War had killed “half of Spain,” a shocking statistic, and probably none of us failed to think about yesterday's view of Goya's painting almost a hundred and fifty years earlier, or of how warfare has now become even more abstract with the development of technology—atomic bombs, drones, cluster bombs, missiles. Stew was reminded of Huck Finn's poignantly simple summary of the human condition, “People can be awful mean to one another.”
That was enough museum-going for one day, so at lunch the group made two administrative decisions. We've been pushing ourselves too hard, so we scrapped tomorrow's plan for a trip to Spain's most tourist-visited site, Toledo, so that we could explore this city in a more leisurely fashion. Also, Tosh decided to wander the streets of the old city with Steven and Marty while Bob and Stew returned to the hotel for much-needed naps. The latter two of us returned through Madrid's beautiful Parque del Buen Retiro which is almost as big as the downtown city it graces.
