Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on May 13, 2008 - 07:44 AM Art

The room housing Picasso's Guernica in the Reina Sofia Modern Art Centre has been remodelled to allow it to be seen better. Before this, viewers were obliged to stand too close to the enormous canvas to be able to get a proper perspective of the picture, or look at it from an angle. This is the first in a series of innovations announced by the Reina Sofia's new director, Manuel Borja-Villel, who has emerged as a leading figure among world museum directors. Read more about the Guernica, Picasso, the Spanish Civil War and Borja-Villel.

The Guernica is one of Pablo Picasso's most famous works. It depicts the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, one of the clearest examples of terror bombing the world has known. Guernica was destroyed by Nazi and Fascist aircraft using the attack as a military exercise in preparation for the coming World War.

Picasso had been commissioned to produce a mural for the Paris World's Fair and took the bombing as his subject. The Guernica is an oil painting, very large (nearly 8 metres long and 3.5 metres high), and striking for many other reasons, including being in stark black and white. It "presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness," entirely from the victims' point of view - the cause of all this horror is not represented. The images representing this are crude and very violent, humans and animals being slaughtered and torn apart.

Picasso always refused to allow the Guernica to be shown in Spain while Franco's dictatorship lasted. New York's Museum of Modern Art "returned" it to Spain's Prado Museum in 1981, and the Prado transferred it to the Reina Sofia in 1992. In the Prado, bullet-proof glass hampered appreciation of the Guernica, and until now, in the Reina Sofia, lack of distance was the problem. So now it is possible to enjoy the painting properly in Spain for the first time.

And there is another 'first' in this story. Until 2007, directors of state-owned museums in Spain were appointed by the Minister of Culture of the moment, so there was a strong political element in their nomination. But Manuel Borja-Villel was chosen by a normal process of selection and elimination of candidates by a panel of experts (his curriculum alone would probably have been enough to place him at the top of the list - before the Reina Sofia, he was director of the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) which he made both more relevant and popular). It is promised that this will continue to be the normal process of selecting candidates for these positions, and it is to be hoped so.