Vist to the Museo Reina Sofia

Monday March 9 was a very nice sunny day with a high of 17C.  The sun makes all the difference as to whether it feels warm or cool.

We headed to the Mercado Barceló to get some provisions.  The produce, fish and meat are excellent and there is lots of choice.

Gorgeous veg

Can't touch-- staff comes over and gets what you want

We had a light lunch at the apartment and then headed out to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia,  Spain's national museum of 20th century art.  The Museum was inaugurated in 1992 and is named for Queen Sofia.  It has an incredible collection, which we visited in 2015.   The Museum is located near the main train station and not far from the Prado Museum and the Thyssen.  A Golden Triangle of Art!

Rebel for Life-- couldn't resist the pic

Walking down the lovely Paseo de Recoletos

Outside of the Reina Sofia

Alberto (Toledo 1895- Moscow, 1962), The Spanish People have a Path that Leads to a Star 1937/2001
Originally done for the 1937 Spanish Pavillion at the Paris World's Fair.

We went to see a number of temporary exhibits, as well as paying a visit to Picasso's Guernica.

The first was an incredibly moving exhibit with paintings by Ceija Stojka entitled: This has Happened.  I had read about the exhibit in the fall, in the New York Times.  Stojka (1933- 2013) is an Austro-Romani artist who documented the persecution and genocide of the Gypsy community by the Nazis.  She was deported at the age of ten along with her family.  She survived three concentration camps during WWII (Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen).  "She divulged her experiences 40 years later, from 1988 to 2012, when she undertook an intense exercise in memory through writing, drawing and painting".

Stojka was born to a Gypsy family, a long line of horse dealers of Hungarian origin who lived in Austria.  Her father was arrested and deported to Dachau in 1941. He was murdered at Schloss- Hartheim.  The family lived clandestinely in the forest of Kongresspark.  They were arrested in March 1943 and deported to Auschwitz, where they were assigned to the Gypsy family camp. Stojka was also deported to Ravensbrück (June to December 1944) and Bergen-Belsen (January to April 1945) where she and her mother were liberated by the British army.  Four of her five siblings also survived.

The exhibit started with her picture of life before the war.

Country Life, 1993

Idyll with farm, 2002

Summer journey in a field of sunflowers, 1996

Ravensbrück, 1944, Liberation, 15.4.1945, 2005.

Attention, attention. Rossauer Lände, Auschwitz, Blood is flowing, 1943, 2005

Untitled, Vienna-Auschwitz s.f.

The trains are already full, but we have to get in.  Come on, come on, hurry up! Come on, everyone, off to Auschwitz! I can't forget it, 2005

The SS shouted: March! We were scared, 2003

Arrest and deportation, 1995

Deportation to an extermination camp, 1994

Ceija Stojka

One of the books she wrote

Bergen-Belsen, 1945, 1996

Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1993

Bergen-Belsen 1945.  Then=1945 was then in the middle under them protected by my mama.  From outside cam no help Why???  2003

The 15th of April 1945.  We didn't yet know that this day was to be our liberation day.  That's the way it was. 2004

Mama, Mamooo.  We are free. We didn't have any faces yet, 2004

I am starving, 1995

Untitled [concentration camp guard, Dorothea Blinz], 2001

Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, 1993

Ravensbrück 1944, 1994

Auschwitz 1944, 2009

Birkenau concentration camp, 1944, 2009

Auschwitz, 2003

 There was a final room with pictures on "Returning to Life" after the war.

Untitled, 2006

Untitled, 1996

Untitled, 1995

There was a short video in which Ceija Stojka was interviewed by the documentarian Karin Berger. In 2004, after having written two books and filming a documentary on Stojka, Karin Berger interviewed her again.  They specifically discussed Bergen-Belsen, the last concentration camp to which she and her mother had been deported.  Stojka talks about her everyday life among the piles of corpses and her mother's determination to survive, the liberation by British troops and the long journey home across a devastated Germany.  Unfortunately, the interview was in German with Spanish sub-titles, so we only watched a section.

Ceija Stojka's registration card

Her mother's card.

From the video in 2004

It was an incredible exhibit.  The horror and the trauma that Stojka experienced from ages 10-12 are unimaginable.  These paintings provide a vivid picture of life in three concentration camps.  Some of these pictures reminded us of the paintings by Adolf Frankl, a holocaust survivor who had been deported to Auschwitz in 1944.  His paintings are found in Frankl House, a small art gallery in Vienna run by his son.  Never again!

A look out one of the windows at the massive  Calder mobile in the courtyard

We then went to see another temporary exhibit of the work of Spanish painter Miguel Ángel Campano (1948-2018)  enticed D'après.  The exhibit was massive and spanned more than forty years in his painting career through a number of different styles and approaches.  "While Campano often painted in the wake of other artists, the pieces collected under the title of "d'après (d'après Poussin, Cézanne, Guerrero, Gris) "follow on from" rather than are just works "after" the painters he studied".

We are only highlighting a few of the pictures that appealed to us the most.

Shipwreck, 1983

The Deluge d'apès Poussin, 1981-1982

Red Mountain, 1982

Simón, 1998

Prayer, 1997

Elías (d'après Daniel Buren), 1996-1999

Alano liked this piece a lot

Spring, 1999

EH 3, 1993

In 2001, Campano received a commission to paint in dialogue with the work of José Guerrero (1914-1991), a Spanish artist, known for his abstract expressionist paintings.  Campano decided to work from The Viznar Breach, 1966 in which Guerrero draw a furrow in paint across the canvas, signifying the site, event, and silence of the shooting of Frederico García Lorca. 

A copy of the original picture by Guerrero

Cave of Bones, 2001

Unfinished Flower to F.G. Lorca, 2001

We then went to the room with Guernica which included Picasso's preparatory drawings, Dora Maar's photographs of Picasso painting Guernica, and other paintings from the Civil War period.  Unfortunately, there were no photographs allowed.

In one of the hallways, we passed the famous Man Ray (1890-1976) piece entitled Indestructible Object 1923-33.   The original 1923 readymade was titled Object to Be Destroyed.  When his lover, Lee Miller (whose photography exhibit we had seen in Málaga) left him in 1932, he replaced the photograph of the anonymous eye with the photograph of one of her eyes and renamed the work, Object of Destruction.  In 1957, a group of students destroyed the metronome during a Dada exhibition in Paris.  In 1958, Man Ray planned a multiple edition of 100 (constructed in 1965) and renamed the readymade Indestructible Object.

A 1982 reproduction of the famous Man Ray readymade

We went into the courtyard for a closer look at the sculptures which include the massive mobile by Alexander Calder (1898-1976).  The top portion swings in the wind.  It is entitled: Carmen (1972).  It was installed at the Reina Sofia in 1992.

Joan Miró, Moon Bird,1966

In front of the Calder

After the museum, we wandered over to the Mercado San Miguel, where we shared a few tapas and a glass of draft vermouth.

The Vermut stall- lots of choice

We then headed to a ceramic store recommended in our guide book.  It is called Antique "Casa Talavera" and featured hand-made ceramics from a number of cities in Spain, including works reproducing designs from earlier centuries.  The ceramics are not mass produced but rather come from the small family potters of Andalucía and Toledo.

The store has operated since 1904 and José, the present owner, is the 4th generation of his family.  He is often dealing with 3rd or 4th generation ceramic makers.  It was a great find.  The store even had pre Spanish Civil War posters on the ceiling.

Beautiful ceramics- each with a story and each with a different price

José's prize possession which he will not sell

Lots of choice and lots of different shapes

Posters from before the Spanish Civil War on the ceiling

The Family

José with Alano -- note the ceramic floor

It was quiet when we visited the store at around 7:30 p.m.  We were able to have a nice chat with José.  We made a few small purchases.  Highly recommend to Madrid visitors.

The outside of Casa Talavera-- the extraordinary tiled facade of the shop was a treasure itself

We headed back to the apartment for a late dinner: pasta with homemade tomato sauce, green beans, salad, wine and a piece of chocolate.