madrid

so...this is way delayed but i went to madrid several weeks ago and it was el mejor.  i love love love spanish spanish (say what you will about the lisp, i think it's beautiful) and i just wish i could live in madrid for a while.  everything happens about 2 hours later than usual - dinner at 10? fine by me! and there is soooo much great art there! basically all i did there was wander around the prado and the museo reina sofia and it was maravilloso!

alexander calder in the courtyard of the reina sofia which is where picasso's guernica is and several dalí's and miró's and other picasso's.  i bought dalí's diario de un genio and i can't wait to read it.  he was just rawther eccentric and fabulous via this quote: " every morning upon awakening, i experience a supreme pleasure: that of being salvador dalí, and i ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this salvador dalí." don't you sort of wish you thought the same thing every morning? basically, i just wish we were besties. desfortunatamente, he died six months before i was born.  life is so tragic sometimes.

i was sort of surprised by the amount of time i spent in the room with the early italian renaissance paintings in the prado because 1) by this point i've seen about a million italian renaissance paintings and 2) aren't most of the good ones in italy?  well, yes but here's the thing of it:  1) no artist can move me to tears like the italian trecento/quattrocento painters (like fra angelico) and 2) if i were a painter, i would want to paint like botticelli.

that's not at all to say i didn't enjoy the spanish paintings at the museum, like the most famous - las meninas. one of the reasons i wish i lived in madrid is so that i could go to the prado all the time and just sit with masterpieces like this.  the problem with huge museums like the prado is that there is so much to see! i was there for about four hours and i still feel like i rushed through some things.  

one of my favorite things about going to museums is discovering new favorite artists.  this time it was goya.  i'd liked his paintings that i'd studied before but now i just find him fascinating mostly because of the room dedicated to goya's black paintings.  the black paintings are a series of paintings that goya painted late in his career when he was deaf and living alone in a house outside madrid.  on the walls of this house he painted a series of intense, dark, and haunting images unlike anything before in the history of art.  the main thing that attracts me to these paintings is the mystery behind them.  what do they mean? why did goya paint them?  i did some research and it turns out some scholars don't think that goya even painted them.  

so much of the value of a piece of art is in its attribution to a famous artist.  but should it really matter whether a beautiful painting was painted by one of the great masters or only by one of his students? the painting doesn't change if it is reattributed.  only our attitude toward it.  right?  but, in this case, i really want the black paintings to be by goya.  it's not just the physical painting but the story behind it that matters.  goya is one of the first romantics.  the black paintings can be seen as the manifestations of an aging artist's tormented mind.  what could be more romantic?