Spain 2024, #1

After a weekend of wedding revelry followed by a lost sleep cycle on the trans-Atlantic flight, we were pretty trashed when we landed in Madrid. We had wisely allocated a jet-lag recovery day, devoted to museums and parks, plus a couple of good meals. 

I am often deeply moved by museums. Beauty catches my eye, and art makes me think. I was especially open to this experience in my travel-hazed state, and my visit to the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum had a lasting effect, setting a tone for the rest of the trip and beyond.

We chose the Thyssen as our first museum for their excellent collection of Impressionist works, saving the Prado and Reina Sofia for our return visit to Madrid at the end of our trip. I feel a sense of recognition standing in front of these paintings. Viewing a portrait of oceanside cliffs by Monet, I know I’ve seen that shifting play of light before.  Pissarro’s orchard conveys a familiar whole that is more than the details of color and hinted edges. And of course Van Gogh, with shapes and colors that break like waves on my senses and make me feel like I’m standing at the doors of perception.

As I wander through this wide-ranging museum, I start noticing some other less familiar themes. Frames around and within a painting slyly draw attention to what was included and excluded in the scene. The precise use of light and shadow not only reveal the subject, but at the same time define the viewer’s place in relation to the displayed work. Surreal images that were somehow both accurate and impossible make me question my expectations of the artistic experience.

And then there was this:

Richard Estes painted this self-portrait from a photograph he took of the World Trade Center with his reflection in the intermediate pane of glass.  I stood in front of this canvas for quite a while before taking this photo, and then stood even longer thinking of the act I had just performed and the act that was the subject of the painting. I don’t often take photographs of photographs in museums — a bit too meta — but this was something else.

I appreciate the Thyssen’s tolerant photography policy (unfortunately but understandably not shared by Museo del Prado). When I photograph something in a museum, my goal is to create a reminder of how I was seeing the subject of my photo, rather than a souvenir of the subject itself. In the wealth of visual riches of any top notch museum, there’s always something in particular that reaches out and catches my eye, and the photo I take home is at least a reminder of that moment, and at best a chance to re-experience that attraction. This photo of Estes’ painting was the moment that crystalized my shifting sense of the boundaries of art and of the nature of my role in the encounter with art. 

Under the influence of this experience, my subsequent wandering through the Botanical Garden made each photograph feel like an exercise in tossing a frame around something and making it art, while pondering what sort of art it could be. It didn’t hurt that I thought I was running out of camera battery, making each exposure feel like an expenditure of a limited resource. Once I started thinking this way, I wanted to hold on to that perspective, with and without a camera in hand.

And then, the next day we traveled to Bilbao, and found this:

The Guggenheim Museum was high on our list of things to see in Bilbao. I don’t know what I expected; the featured exhibitions sounded interesting but different than what I usually enjoy. But even before we got to the entrance, it was the building that captured my attention. I returned to this structure many times over our stay in Bilbo, looking at it from different directions and at different times of day. Each time brought my eye to some bit of intention, of form and contrast, of art.

Encountering such an impressive artistic accomplishment in the wild of a bustling urban setting made all of Bilbao take on an artistic dimension. The city has certainly embraced the impact of Gehry’s masterpiece, and they have complemented it with architecture and public art that supports that experience. I found that in the context of all this public art, every segment of riverfront, or the light on an old church, or a hilltop view, seemed to be just a frame away from being worthy of a museum wall. And the camera provided that frame.

There were so many interesting dimensions of a month of travel. The food, the people we met, the living history of an older civilization, the modes of transportation, being a couple outside of our usual routines. Nancy is writing about many of these things; and I hope to touch on some of them as well. My focus will be to follow my photos as they frame moments that felt like discovering art on the road.