Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

This is where I went instead of the Prado, which I will be going to tomorrow along with the Royal Palace. The Reina Sofia houses the more modern artists: Picasso, Dali, Diego Rivera, etc. And it has “Guernica.”

How to describe this painting? We’ve all seen it.

But unless you’ve stood in front of “Guernica,” you haven’t seen it.

It is huge, for one thing. Almost twelve feet high and over 25 feet long. The figures are larger than life, and their impact is equally large.

The whole painting is screaming.. The screams enter your eyes and tighten your chest before roiling around in your stomach. They echo in your head, all the more powerful in their silence. Each figure screams in a different way: the horse in terrified innocence, the mother in unimaginable grief, the half-naked woman and the woman trapped by fire in different forms of despair. Even the man at the bottom is locked in a scream of death. And over it all the bull, which I assume is Spain, looks on in befuddlement while the lady with the lamp, which I assume is America, is horrified.

They say Velasquez was one of the first artists not to romanticize war, to paint it more like it truly is. “Guernica” is war. It is the horror of war and the toll it takes upon the innocent. And it was all the more affecting because 85 years later the same thing is going on. Right now. And not just in the Ukraine. And the same damn thing has been going on for millenia, and will go on for millenia more, probably. Humans just can’t seem to stop killing each other.

I will write more about some of the other exhibits, most importantly “Kuba,” but right now I need to get to bed because I have to be at the Royal Palace at 9:45 in the morning, and I have to get dressed, and breakfast, and a taxi, and…They somehow have my language as Spanish even though I clearly marked “English,” so I need to get there all the earlier. But I learned if I don’t post some of you worry, so I’m posting. Good night.