Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Nov 05, 2007 - 10:08 AM Madrid

The new extension to the Prado Museum in Madrid was inaugurated on October 31st, 2007, and the big question was, was it worth all the fuss? Like tens of thousands of other Madrid residents and visitors, driven more by curiosity than love of art, I went to the Prado last weekend to see the extension and form an opinion for myself, and I have to answer yes, with certain reservations. The new "space," designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, is entirely appropriate, does not spoil the oriiginal Villanueva building in any way, and clearly fulfils its role of providing extra room for the ever more important temporary exhibitions as well as for work like restoration, research or even administration. And there is a touch of genius in the theme chosen for the inaugural exhibition: The 19th Century in the Prado, which will remain on show until April 20, 2008 and which I heartily recommend. Read more, or visit the new Prado Museum website.

The extension is to a large extent invisible from the outside. It is stretched out behind the original, Villanueva building, and runs under the street to the side of the Iglesia de los Jerónimos, Church of the Hieronymites, from which it has "appropriated" the delapidated cloisters. Tardis-like, it exists on three floors, though it is difficult to see how, especially from the outside. The ground floor runs parallel to the original building and much of it is dedicated to matters other than art - a huge lobby, an auditorium which I have not seen, a cafetería, the inevitable museum shop - though it has five spacious, contiguous exhibition rooms. The second floor is, essentially, another six exhibition rooms, arranged 5 + 1 (the '1' is distanced slightly from the other five, and currently contains an exhibtion of Goya prints). The top floor is 'outside,' or would be if it weren't walled in - it is, essentially the former church cloister, now being used as an exhibition space for statues (this makes seeing the extension symmetrical, if you come from the Villanueva building - the room from which you move into the new space is also newly dedicated to statuary). In the middle of the room is a square well, Moneo's cube as it is being called, down which you can look to the exhibition room below.

Now you have seen it from the inside, you will want to take it in from the outside, so you exit and make your way to the back of the Villanueva building. You will see the ground floor of the extension between the street (the Calle de Ruiz de Alarcón) and the Villanueva building, though you cannot see its walls, effectively underground, or even its roof, which is gardened with small box hedges. You can, however, stroll to the edge of the roof overlooking the Villanueva building and peer into it from a height. There is a new entrance in the northern face of the extension, the Jerónimos entrance - the queue to get in there ran all the way back to the Paseo del Prado when I was there, probably much further.

On the other (east) side of the street, you can see the 1st floor of the extension, recognisable by the large, characteristic doors to the service entrance through which the largest works of art could be passed, and on top of that, the cube-like structure enclosing the cloister (which reminded me, if no-one else, of the other cube it contains).

Another day, I'll write at more length about the exhibition The 19th Century in the Prado, because I feel it deserves your attention, though I'll point out two things here. First, that we were obliged to see the first half of the exhibition in the wrong order, beginning at Room V and ending at Room I, largely spoiling the overall effect (it is arranged chronologically), which I felt was an amazing lack of foresight, to say the least. The second thing is that, at the inauguration, the Spanish Royal Family posed in front of a large (no, enormous, many of these paintings are) picture representing The Execution of General Torrijos. Now, if your knowledge of Spanish history is anything less than profound, you have probably never heard of Torrijos, so I'll just point out that he was a Spanish liberal, who on returning to Spain was captured and shot, together with a goodly number of fellow liberals, on the beach at Málaga. It was one of the most cruel, repressive acts ever ordered by a Spanish monarch (at least since the expulsions of the Moors and the Jews), precisely by absolutist Fernando VII, a direct forebear of the current Juan Carlos I. I have not quite worked out how to interpret this choice of spot for a family portrait, so I shall leave it up to you to draw any conclusions.

Now, I did say I had reservations about the new extension. Particularly, it seems to me incredible that, though the new space provided by the extension amounts to over 50% of the Prado's oriignal capacity, the number of works in its collection (going on for 9,000 works) which it will be possible to see has barely been increased. Today's priorities are not those of the original Royal Collection which was the basis for that of the Museo del Prado, of course, but I do feel that it is a little cynical to spend so much effort and money to expand the museum, then devote almost all the space gained to the more popular, fashionable and commercial business of temporary exhibitions, rather than the permanent collection.

In addition, the Museo del Prado has also launched a new, greatly improved version of its website (this was the original subject of this news item, to which I have added all the above to avoid having too many stories about the Prado). The new site's design is much better, it is more attractive, less cluttered, and more informative. The most welcome addition is thorough presentation of its collection, much more of which now seems to be available online, at various levels of zoom, and through an efficient search engine, or easy-to-use thematic indices. The collection is also described in terms of the different nationalities - Spanish, Italian, Flemish, and so on - and eras represented, and media - as well as paintings, the Prado has sculpture, prints and drawings, and decorative arts items like tables, consoles, glass, pottery and tapestries.

One attraction of the new site is that, given the impossibility of taking in everything in a single visit, it proposes three different tours of the museum, for those with 1, 2 or 3 hours to spend (the idea seems to be that you can take in 15 or 16 works per hour, which I would have thought is fairly belting round).

Exhibitions past, present and future are presented, there is a corner for other events such as concerts (the Prado has a new auditorium), and researchers have a space, as do the admirable Friends of the Prado Museum.

The only element which is, I imagine temporarily, absent in the English-language version is a fabulous online version of the museum's encyclopedia, which has (in Spanish only for the moment) "1,645 biographies of artists, 175 exhibitions" and "162 selected master works," available from a thematic index or using a search box. (Many of these encyclopedia entries are erudite in the extreme, which is only to be expected from an encyclopaedia but does make me think that the children's games under "Prado Play" ("colour the picture" and so on) stop short. There is a whole lot of art appreciation space between painting by numbers and a scholarly analysis of, say, Goya's Black Paintings. So why do these children's corners of websites always cater to kids under the age of ten?)