Seventh and Last Day: Madrid

Next to the Reina Sophia Museum

Our last full day in Madrid is sunny and warm and we set off via subway for the Sorolla Museum. The subway trains are about half the length of those in NYC, but the entertainment is on par with the MTA, the first act being a loud keyboard player who sets up in the middle of the car and plays a whole set, first the immortal “I Will Survive” then a few other similar hits I don’t want to think about. I give him half a euro. Down the line a man gets on with a saxophone and croons some wonderful jazzy tunes – I give him a 2 euro coin in honor of my son Andrew who used to play his sax in the Paris tunnels. By the third musician, we're out of coins, so the karioki-style woman singer gets nothing, sadly.
Leaving the subway, Frank becomes engrossed in the guide book, trying to figure out which is Paseo del General Martinez Campos, and in front of my wondering eyes he blithely jaywalks across the street between lines of cars that have miraculously gone still (it’s the power of the wolf, again) but when I try to follow, a motorcycle screams around the corner making me sprint back to the curb like a scared squirrel. When I catch up with Frank, we calmly and rationally discuss the relative merits of thinking about directions and walking at the same time.
Here is the proper way to look at the guidebook.

The Sorolla Museum is an old mansion that used to house the artist and his family, and also contains his studio, a large wood-paneled room with high ceilings and sky lights. Frank is green with envy. Next to it is his exhibition and entertainment room where people came to look at work and purchase same. Frank gets greener.
The rest of the house is quite wonderful also, marble and tile floors and walls, big sunny rooms, a glassed-in sun room, not to mention the orange trees and fountains - once I recover from almost being RUN OVER AND KILLED, I am quite green myself. Although I wouldn’t want anything quite so formal, of course. And all that marble is a little cold…and one would have to have servants…I’m not sure about having people hoovering, dusting, scrubbing, polishing, running around all day in a vain attempt to make me happy…making me instead constantly tense, unless I'd torqued into some kind of arrogant toff…and what about all those clothes everyone used to wear, even in Sorolla’s day, which was quite casual compared to past eras?
We’ve lately gotten a large dose of silks, satins, velvets and giant skirts the size of VW bugs with little girls sticking up out of themand those ruffs sticking up into your chin making you resemble St. John the Baptist on a ruffled plate.And stays and corsets, stockings and laces - lord, they had to carry that weight a long time! And the time and tedium of getting dressed, not just once a day but several times, a two- or more-person job…and then having no deodorant or tampax or toilet paper…
It’s a good thing those old paintings can’t convey the smell of an age along with its sights. Of course now with so many paintings under glass, the smell would be stifled and squelched along with the spirit and soul of the painting…I swear I can hear those ancient kings and princesses choking, calling out…help, help…we’re dying in here! I expect faces to sprout gray circles of mold, although I’m sure conservators know what they’re doing, just as they’ve always done in the past…they’re only protecting priceless works of art from viewer-gak and phlegm by making the museum experience no different than paging through a glossy Janson.
Amsterdam was very bad about this, some works showing me not only their own merits but also those of the paintings on the facing wall. Even with “glareless” glazing, light reflections still mar and pock the surface. Madrid has been better, which is a great relief, and here in Sorolla’s realm there is almost no glass, all of his paintings airy and full of color and light, but let Frank speak about them – Sorolla is one of his most esteemed artists: “Joaquin Sorolla continues the special genius of Spanish painting, back to Diego Velazquez and forward to today’s Antonio Lopez. His house, now a museum run by the Spanish government, is a delight and an eye-opener. He had a combination of deftness and control equal to Sargent’s ( whom he knew ) and as much soul as anyone who ever painted. His paintings of figures on the beach—naked youngsters, fisherwomen, fishermen, oxen pulling in fishing boats and the ocean itself—are transcendent. His painting tools are on display in the studio where he worked—I noted in particular how long his brushes are, the better for expressive, bravura effects; a truth beyond exactitude.”
I say to Frank, “But I thought you didn’t care for Impressionism” and Frank replies, “That’s because most of it is a self-referential candied bag of slop. But Sorolla has structure.” Aha!

We next tackle the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, a collection of the Baron and his wife, each in their respective half of the museum. They collected in the 1980’s, and it is remarkable what diverse and amazing works they collected, and how expensive it must have been! We find a dark Van Gogh, “Watermill at Gennep”that shows a strange dormancy in the depths of darkness, as if color is ready to bloom out once the sun of Southern France warms its rich soil. We discover several rooms of Hudson River paintings by unfamiliar artists like Hugh Bolton Jones and James McDougal Hart; also a small Munch seascape, and many more. And we come across Anton Mauve who did this beautiful thing:
I also love a Prendergrast “Still Life With Apples” that jumps off the wall,
as does an Arthur Dove called “U.S.”:

After all the dense content and imagery of the last week, Modernism seems so expansive and refreshing. Frank, of course, finds much (most?) of it inconsequential and inept.
Outside, we run into yet another street sculpture:

Our last museum visit is to the Reina Sofia where we see Picasso’s “Guernica” anda room of Richard Serra pieces. The Serra room is long and lit with bright white light that renders his blocks and rectangular wedges of steel shadowless, as if they might levitate and hang in front of our eyes like Borg vessels floating through the cosmos. There are intriguing exhibitions here like “Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945-1968)” but we have pretty much run out of time and concentration – down to our last hours in Madrid – to do them justice. I slow down for a long moment to watch a Moholy-Nagy “Lightplay” film that was like Malevich’s “Black Square” come to life. It was entrancing, and like all good art-video (a rare occurrence), it focuses on visual effects, and one can come upon it at any point in its duration. You don’t need two hours, a plush seat and popcorn to get it.

We end our time in Madrid with a trip to the upper deck of the Reina Sophia which is scary and vertigious, but has a great view,

And last but not least, more moon-over-Madrid.

Sixth day: Madrid

I am well by morning, so after an absurdly expensive hotel breakfast that makes us yearn for the Amsterdam free hard boiled eggs and cheese, we make our way once again to the Prado, where we see some men working.
Frank is wearing his Mountain Three Wolf Moon t-shirt again and right away we begin to see the effects as he is accosted in front of the Prado by a woman asking him an incomprehensible question, probably asking for something called mehdh, then right inside the museum another women asks him if he would like a “92”! A 92? What strange code is that? Frank, however, wonders if the t-shirt only attracts women of a certain age. We forge onward, trying to find Goya’s “Third of May.” I ask an attendant who waves her hand around and would have sent us to the wrong floor but we realized in time that she was simply angry that I had been the one asking instead of the man in the wolf t-shirt. We find the painting, along with the “Second of May” which is more an ordinary sort of war scene with sabers and men falling off horses, and for all its overt violence, it’s much less compelling than the “Third of May” with all of us rooting for the glowing guy in the white shirt but knowing that nothing will stop that ominous line of backs in uniforms from doing what they do, leaving behind only that river of red flowing into the ground. Next we go into the room of Goya’s Black Paintings which Frank had entered yesterday but left immediately, so eerie and forbidding it was. But with me along (and the three wolves), he is brave, and we spend some time contemplating the dark and dire parts of Goya’s oeuvre, which is dark and dire indeed. I had never seen the drowning dog painting before, and I’m not sure if I’m happy to have it now embedded in my mind.With Goya around, one can never be too unaware of the sinister part of the human spirit that lurks underneath all the…all the everything.

I come out of the Black room feeling that the world is filling up with a kind of syrupy evil…everyone’s smile laced with rotting teeth and evil portent…the only thing for it is a good dose of Heronimous Bosch, or “el Bosco”, as he is labeled here.

The “Garden of Earthly Delights” lives up to its name. What one misses in the reproductions, along with the clarity of the bizarre imagery (this very clarity rendering it even more bizarre) is the quality of the color, the delicate rose petal pinks, the vibrating pastel blues, the succulent saffron greens…the softness, the richness, the pillowy seductive hues that might just lead you into doing odd things with fruits and animals were you to experience it even for a moment…oops, there you go, stage right, into the harsh and tenebrous tones of hell to be impaled or strung up on your favorite instrument…I’ve never noticed before the duck force-feeding the man some kind of red berry. Indeed, these berrys are ubiqutious, and they look very similar to those decorating the piece of cheesecake that we had just eaten at the Prado café. Coincidence? I don’t think so! What is it with Bosch and fruit, anyway? What is it with him and those alchemic structures sprouting spearlike appendages? Is it sin and shame and punishment he's portraying, or wonders that are worth every second in that dark fiery place. Or does that dark fiery place hold certain pleasures of its own? One could stand in front of this painting forever, marveling at the mysteries and puzzles, and never find a way either into or out of his maze. Maybe el Bosco was an afficianado of Amsterdam hash bars...
The top of the right panel, “Hell”, reminds me of a night some time ago when I was in a cab at night hurtling down the West Side Highway, going by the site of “Ground Zero”, still in a state of chaos with steel building skeletons looming over a tangle of machines and materials, some of the “buildings” sporadically streaming out with welding flames that spewed outward into the night.
By the time we leave the Prado we are ready for sunshine, and it greets us in the form of the Botanic Garden that abuts the museum, not unlike in New York with the Brooklyn Museum and adjacent Botanic Garden. Here we find a Caucassion Elm, the even more rare Metal-Star tree, and Frank sits and wonders where all the babes have gotten to.
More treats lurk outside the museum in the form of lifesize Velaquez people perched on balconies, And a Neptune sculpture that comes alive and blows his horn for us. Later we try to go to the Samarkanda restaurant in the in Atocha train station that was written up in our guidebook, but when we got there at eight, they said they weren’t opening until nine, leaving us to have a less than inspired meal at our hotel. It was either that, or this: Or else this:
But we do get a great view of the moon over Madrid to top off our night.

Fourth and Fifth Day: Madrid

American Gothic in Madrid (or Frank and Jeanne looking for a place to have dinner before 9PM when all the restaurants open.)

Day Four and Five:
We're somewhere on the way from London to Madrid - over France?

The Madrid airport is in the middle of a great valley with hills and mountains all around. It feels very ancient.
Frank writes: Once we get out of London, the flight to Madrid is only two hours. What with all the damn connections, though, it is over nine hours hotel-to-hotel.
Graffiti outside Madrid.
We refresh ourselves with smoked salmon and a spot-on Spanish white at the hotel bar, then make a beeline to the Prado.
Wall of greens on the way to the Prado.
A major part of Frank’s vision quest is to see the fabulous collection of paintings by Diego Velazquez, in particular “Las Meninas”, a painting so good, so overwhelming that Manet referred to it as “ the school of painting”. And it is. Frank is slack-jawed and almost in tears. Here’s where you either quit painting or ramp up, big time. Can’t quit now, so have to ramp up. But the Prado is rich beyond imagining, especially in Spanish painting, so we’re lured on and on, gallery to gallery. Jeanne sees wonderful things in the Goyas making Frank thoughtful.
Later, we watch the unfolding catastrophe in Japan on CNN.

Jeanne says: While I haven’t been a big Goya fan, I find myself transfixed by the rich abstractions within the dress of the nasty Queen of Spain, which remind me later of the tree stump destroyed by fungus in the Madrid Botanic Garden:I stare at the expressions on the faces of the rest of the Queen’s entourage – terrified, bored, vacuous, envious, arrogant – there are subtleties, a turn of the mouth, a glint in the eye, you can’t see in reproductions. They come alive as real people, some not very nice people, people you don't want to meet at, say, an immigration counter, but living and breathing and either miserable or making everyone else miserable. Or, like the king, off in another universe. After the Prado, I am feeling exhausted and like the king, in another world,so when we find out that the hotel restaurant opens at 8PM – to paraphrase Frank Sinatra (and Rogers and Hart), “We get too hungry for dinner at eight…that’s why Frank must be a tramp…” – Frank goes out to scavenge dinner and comes back with a cone of shaved meat from the Museo del Jamon (yes, the “Museum of Ham”), a jar of dill pickles, a stiff tomato, and a wedge of cheese. This meal does not sit well with me. Sad, because Frank was so proud of his efforts.Madrid Still Life
We find Madrid to be very noisy after being in Amsterdam, with many cars going very fast and almost no bicycles. It seems wrong, somehow, not to have to look both right and left before you take a step. Outside the Prado, however, the forsythia is in bloom and things looked pretty good.


We sleep until 10 the next morning, but I wake up feeling like crap. (Every time I travel, I get sick. I need to do the vitamin thing, my sister Sherry tells me.) Frank has a hard time getting the hotel restaurant staff to let him take a plate up from the breakfast buffet, but he prevails, finally wresting the plate out of the waiter’s hand and making a heroic run to the elevator. I am down for the count, yet I generously encourage Frank not to worry about me, I’ll be fine, you just go and have fun. So he does, and heads back out to the Prado. We decide not to have people come in to hoover our room and annoy me with dust rags and such, which means Frank has to take out the garbage which fits into a good ol’ American plastic doubled grocery bag (don’t ask how we accumulate so much garbage in one night) but then he has to find a place to get rid of it, eventually finding himself almost all the way to the Prado still carrying his bag which he’ll have to put through security, so in a panic he ends up smashing it into of the many plastic “cans” affixed to poles with three inch slots for trash (actually, Frank reports that he was only 100 feet from the hotel and not completely in a panic ).Obviously they are not prepared for good ol’ American trash here, but again, Frank prevails. A New York wardrobe being washed in a Madrid tub.

While I sleep, dreaming about auditioning to become a comedy star, more wonders await inside the Prado for Frank, including some Spanish 19th century landscape painters of whom he’s never heard. He comes back for lunch, at 3:30, which we do in the hotel, which is hardly mediocre, overpriced, and the hapless, uninterested waiter brings us the wrong stuff, two of the shrimp fried in shredded wheat which I hadn't wanted all that much in the first place, and Frank didn't want at all. Then he tries to overcharge us by 90 Euros ($135 , an error Frank catches and sternly corrects. ) The thing I like best is the dried and salted spinach leaf on my salad. I retreat to the room to sleep away the rest of the day with bizarre dreams while Frank figures out the Madrid subway protocols to go to a wine shop. Thus ends our first full day in Madrid.Madrid man of the street kissing his kitten.