El Prado:Taking in the Art of Madrid

Fabulous Madrid, where I buried myself in art and culture. All three of Madrid's glorious art galleries , Museo del Prado, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Centro de Arte Reina Sofia are within a kilometre of each other, and to get there one walks along what is known as the Paseo del Arte. The first day I thought I had died and gone to heaven ( and not because of the angels so prevalent in El Greco, but having been starved of culture for 12 years since my last overseas visit). First to El Prado with its huge collection of paintings (oneof the best, best in the world) including El Greco,Velazquez, and Goya....plus huge Titian's, (poor man he must have been exhausted with all the painting he did, on a vast scale and so much oil paint....some I have to say, were not resolved,  and you can see this, and as a fellow artist I love him for it. Empathy for all those artists who struggle to resolve difficult compositions) ...Oh but those Tiziano that were resolved worked so well you could lick the paint off the canvas, like delicious ice cream ... sensuous, silky and soft, the paint I mean.... The corner detail in his Venus, with the little dog below and the silky drapery is a perfect example.

 El Greco...well call me ignorant but I never realised the proportions and huge scale of his major works, which are very tall.  The strong tonal contrasts, rich blacks and vibrant acidic greens and yellows, whites on highlighted skin, superb elongations and foreshortened figures which twist and thrust out of the picture plane at the viewer, left me speechless. Figures, clouds and angels are in a tumultuous dance as they move around in a push-pull effect of light and dark.  In art history one is reminded no reproduction ever does a work of art justice and you really really cannot understand or experience the work unless you see it in the flesh....  especially regarding the scale of the work in relation to the viewer and the painter's actual paint marks. Standing in front of a large El Greco is like being engulfed in a expressive surge of pulsating paint, and no matter how much it wants you not to believe it, it is paint, pretending to be great swathes of rich drapery, elongated white grey limbs or cumulus clouds. No print reproduction that I have seen shows his brush work or the acidity of his surreal colours sufficiently. You become one with the painting, it sucks you in like a magical doorway and you feel you could walk right into it like a hypnotic trip. The Prado disallows photographs in the museum, and it was very hard to take these photos unnoticed... sneaking a couple of close-ups (without a flash). It turnsout The Prado has a fantastically good web site with an online gallery and very close up details of the paintings, so for those who can't get to Madrid, technology is just a click away to enjoy and experience the artists work.

http://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/

For me, what El Greco,Velazquez and Goya all unexpectedly had in common was their incredibly free, spontaneous use of paint in their later works; they become gestural painters, using paint in a modern way akin to Manet or Whistler. They acknowledge the paint and canvas, and the act of seeing ' painting', not just the subject it represents. The gesture of the painted mark is important and as you move further away from a Velazquez or Goya and gain distance it miraculously transforms into a room, skin, velvet, lace or blood. A close up detail of a 17th cen Dutch or French painting shows how tightly and realistically the artist works with paint and regardless of whether one views the work from up-close or far away the paintwork is the same. You know it is a painting because your brain tells you so and by virtue of you standing in front of it and being in a gallery, but these tight paintings never draw attention to the canvas or the hand behind the paint; that is to the human gesture made by the artist himself. Paintings that pretend to be windows to a virtual reality are never as exciting as those that remind us that this is a flat surface, a board or canvas on which colour and tone have been manipulated by a person/artist with the humblest of tools a brush, palette and paint. So in this respect artists like El Greco,Velazquez and Goya are forerunners of artists like Monet, Whistler and Picasso. Enjoy moving around the fabulous high resolution of Las Meninas and the May 3rd Shooting below...courtesy of the El Prado web site.

Beautiful illusions,.....but where is the paint?

 The mark of the artist.....

  Diego Velazquez

Francisco Goya

Taking it in....

 One of the many Spanish guards who has the pleasure of seeing the art each day...she was guarding the Goyas and looked just like a subject from one of his paintings...

Walking to the Edward Hopper Exhibition at the Thyssen- Bornemisza Museum...strictly no photos allowed...but here is the link...

http://www.museothyssen.org/en/thyssen/home

Edward Hopper (Nyack, 1882 - New York, 1967).Hotel Room.

" Within the context of Europe, Hopper is one of the best known and most highly appreciated American painters. Despite this, however, his works have only been seen here in public exhibitions on a limited number of occasions. With the aim of rectifying this situation and of bringing his work to the attention of a wider public, two major cultural institutions of particular importance for the artist and his work have joined forces. The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza houses the most significant collection of Hopper’s works outside the United States, while in the case of the Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris and early 20th-century French painting were key reference points for the start of Hopper’s career.

This exhibition in Madrid includes 73 works and it offers an analysis of the artist’s work structured into two principal sections. The first opens with Hopper’s time in the studio of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art and covers the years of his training, with works from around 1900 to 1924 that start to reveal his particular and distinctive style. Paintings, drawings, prints and watercolours are displayed alongside various works by other artists including Henri, Félix Vallotton, Walter Sickert, Albert Marquet and Edgar Degas in a dialogue that recreates the one that existed between Hopper and these artists at the time. "