[Leica] Nathan's PAD 17/6/2021: art in Madrid

[Nathan Wajsman]

Once in a while I take a day trip to Madrid to visit art museums and galleries, and just to enjoy the big city. The high-speed train covers the 440 km from Alicante to Madrid in 2 hours 20 minutes, making it perfectly doable. And now that I have turned 60, I get a completely unjustified discount on the train ticket—I mean, my salary has not gone down, and I still occupy the same amount of space on the train, but I’ll take the discount.

I arrived at Madrid’s Atocha station around 11 a.m. and had made an itinerary of 3 museums to visit, adding a fourth once there. My first stop was the Prado, where I go mainly to see my perennial favourites, like the Garden of Earthly Delights and other works by Hieronymus Bosch. A lot of other people do the same:
https://www.greatpix.eu/All/Picture-A-Day/i-3fJPSqK/A

In the same room is a round wooden table painted by Bosch, depicting the seven deadly sins, here gluttony:
https://www.greatpix.eu/All/Picture-A-Day/i-XjDQm46/A

I love looking at the faces of people from more than 500 years ago.

As I was walking to the Prado from Atocha, I saw posters advertising a Georgia O’Keeffee exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza gallery, a bit further up the road from the Prado. It was not on my planned itinerary, but since it was raining and I wanted to see O’Keeffee’s paintings, I went there. And I was not disappointed. The art was great, and I got a nice image of this museum guard spending her time reading a book about art:
https://www.greatpix.eu/All/Picture-A-Day/i-4x5Hgwq/A

After visiting Georgia O´Keeffee, the next stop was lunch, and after that a visit to the Fundación Mapfre on Paseo Recoletos. Mapfre is a big insurance company, and like other similar companies (banks, the phone company Telefónica etc.) it has a large art museum in the centre of Madrid. I went there to see and exhibiton of photographs by Bill Brandt, but they also had a nice Espace Miró, where by chance another visitor spent some time looking at this painting at length, thus providing me with a photo opportunity:
https://www.greatpix.eu/All/Picture-A-Day/i-xtpMZHX/A

While I was at the Fundación Mapfre, the rain stopped and the rest of my day in Madrid I enjoyed good weather, conducive to walking around a bit. A couple of new monuments have been added in the past couple of years in the area near Madrid’s city hall on Plaza Cibeles. In 2019, this monument to the refugees was put up on Paseo Recoletos, to replace the large “Refugees welcome” banner that had been draped across the façade of the city hall:
https://www.greatpix.eu/All/Picture-A-Day/i-nV52Njd/A

And the newest addition, right on Cibeles, to honour the victims of the Covid pandemic, around 100,000 here in Spain (the official death toll is around 80,000 but if you go by excess mortality, the number climbs into six digits):
https://www.greatpix.eu/All/Picture-A-Day/i-CJmCtgw/A

Much more to come.

Nathan

Nathan Wajsman

Alicante, Spain
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YNWA

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