Yesterday I did little to no technical work. I went to dance Saturday night, which meant I was rather sleepy Sunday morning. Then I went for a long walk through Madrid with Laura, including a long due visit to the Reina Sofía Museum.
There was a temporary exhibit about Le Corbusier, which I found interesting though I had a strange deja vú feeling, like I had seen the very same exhibit last week, which was obviously not true. The paintings were personal and looked to me like a naive mixture of Gris and Picasso.
Later, while walking around, I stump on the Guernica. I must confess I never went to watch it (in 20+ years!) because
- When it first came to Madrid there was plenty of a row to see it, plus it was surrounded of menacing shadows and covered in a very big glass cage to avoid attacks on it
- later I plainly forgot it was home.
- last times I went to the Reina Sofía it was to go to thick exhibitions like the recent Gris one, and I had no time left to wander through the permanent collection
I had been thinking, quite naively, that it was no different from the big posters and illustrations I was tired of seeing. Quite the opposite. It impressed me a lot. I stood a long time just staring at it and wondering how different was the texture of the painting from the incountable number of posters and photographs out there.
On the way out, I showed Laura the room with Gargallo sculptures. No wonder that Gargallo remembers me a lot of Gris and Picasso, as:
He spent a significant part of his life in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France, where in 1903 he lived for a time in the artists commune Le Bateau-Lavoir with Max Jacob, Juan Gris and other “starving” artists, including his friend Pablo Picasso whose head he modelled as a sculpture. The following year, Juan Gris introduced him to Magali Tartanson, whom he married in 1915.
I remember the Gran Profeta and, very specially, his sculptures around Greta Garbo.
My fuzzy memory had turned Garbo into Marilyn Monroe, quite impossible as Gargallo died in 1934. In a sense, I thought, if the cubist message was a stone thrown up by Picasso and Gris, it would probably hit the floor back by Andy Warhol and pop art. So, the botella de anís from Gris, and this wonderful Greta Garbo with eyelashes are, in a sense, begging for the Campbell Soup and Marilyn Monroe’s series.
sidenotes: It would be great to have a svg of this synthetic Greta Garbo silhouette, which is being used in twitter by Adriana Freitas. Also, of note that my Huma was originally named Picasso when we thought she was a he. Later, when we found the truth, I suggested a related name that, at least in Spanish was not so masculine: Gris (Gray). My daughters didn’t like it but, as the brainstorming kept going, and as she was painted smoke grey, she got named Huma (femenine of Humo, smoke in Spanish).