Get your fill of the abstract art from your textbooks in Madrid
There is a saying about art in Madrid: go to the Prado for the classics, and the Reina Sofía for the modern. I was a bit nervous before going to the Reina Sofía, because for a viewer like me, understanding modern art is a stroke of luck, while not understanding it is the norm. But since I was already there, it was worth the trip just for Guernica, which I remembered from my art textbooks.
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The Reina Sofía Museum itself is interesting. It was converted from an 18th-century hospital, and in 2005, French architect Jean Nouvel added a glass and steel structure. An old hospital paired with a glass tower—you can tell just by looking that it houses the most restless works of art.
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A few steps inside, my expectations were confirmed. Those legendary Spanish names—Miró, Dalí, Picasso—are all masters of abstraction. Miró's canvases feature stick figures in red and blue, with dots for eyes and crosses for stars, lively like an advanced version of children's doodles. Dalí is even more extreme: clocks are soft, people are fragmented, and strange limbs grow from the ground. I even suspected I was looking at a high-end version of emojis. The gallery was crowded, but everyone had the same expression: tilting their heads, frowning, checking the labels, looking back at the painting, and tilting their heads again... It really is hard to understand, or perhaps everyone just has their own story in mind.
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Of course, the most crowded spot in the entire museum is the famous Guernica. This massive work, painted by Picasso in 1937 for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, takes up an entire wall. I remember when I first saw this painting in my art textbook as a child, I was stunned and at a loss for words—I didn't know you could paint like that!
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The painting is only in black, white, and gray: a bull with a twisted body, a neighing horse, a mother holding her dead child with her mouth open to the sky, a broken sword, and an eye made of a light bulb looking down from above. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Condor Legion, at Franco's request, bombed the small northern Spanish town of Guernica into ruins. It was the first large-scale carpet bombing of a civilian area in human history. Picasso began painting three days later and finished in just over a month.
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In this gallery, the lighthearted atmosphere of "what is this painting?" vanished. Everyone was silent, standing in a row in front of the painting. I stood there for a long time, and for the first time, I didn't tilt my head in front of a piece of modern art, because this painting doesn't need to be understood. It doesn't express emotion. It is the emotion itself.