MikePadgett.com

Museo Reina Sofia

— Madrid's museum of Spanish art, particularly renowned for its collection of twentieth century works and an exhibition dedicated to the Civil War.”

The Reina Sofia is not immediately obvious to those who approach it from the Atocha metro station at Plaza Carlos V. The complex is set back slightly from the boulevard and observant visitors will note how at distance it seems to peek out from beyond the façade of older buildings, playing a sort of edificial hide-and-seek.

With its hiding place is finally found out, the complex turns out to be both modern and enormous, with a monumental entrance court containing a tall Lichtenstein sculpture.

From this aspect, the museum’s latest development makes even the permanent exhibits feel temporary. The whitewashed displays that enfold visitors tend to suggest that a shopfitting is happening behind, with the actual works of art an advertisement for greater things to come, opening soon.

The Reina Sofia is most famous for a brave and fairly recent effort to acknowledge Spain’s difficult history, now firmly contained behind the fence of last century.

Films are shown of young men joining up for the Republican cause, wiry, smiling bashful and uncertain of how to handle their ageing Lee Enfield rifles. Then the bombings and the barricades. Then the infantry fighting across dry plains, all about which we already know from a single Robert Capa photograph.

The chief witness of this painful testimony is Picasso’s Guernica, surrounded by tourists who form a wide semicircle more or less consciously around the massive work. The jumble of curves and straight lines represents chaos, suffering, agony and anguish.

I have always found it hard to connect with Picasso’s ideas. Here, I’m unable to think myself into the horror, so I try to summon instead my memories of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a prose of disappointment stung by the sudden loss of fragile ideals.

Eventually I realise that my lack of empathy has less to do with Guernica than the setting in which it hangs: a tall, bright and hopeful space full of people, each of whom can expect some share of the future.