Museo Nacional del Prado

 

We booked! The day was spent with crowds wandering the corridors and rooms that is the Prado. It’s an iconic museum internationally and worthy of a visit to experience the art. 

The crowds wander almost aimlessly with maps in hand while others are led by the hand of a tour guide. It’s a cacophony of sounds and people of all ages. What an amazing collection of Spanish artists from way before women artists were invented! 

The Prado does however have its magical ‘hot spots’ devoted to Spanish artists including, Goya, El Greco, Velazquez plus Brueghel, Rubens and Caravaggio. 

Though photography is both banned and impossible to take without an audience it’s a cat and mouse game for all. 

The guards watch attentively moving across the room fleet footed and determined to prevent photography. But theirs is a lost cause with mobile mobile phones surely a hindrance to them being in control. 

But both sides are civil and apologetic recognising each other’s role in protecting and capturing art!  But back to the museum and the art…… 

The Museo Nacional del Prado is one of the world's premier art museums. Charles III, ‘mayor of Madrid’, commissioned the neoclassic building but its purpose shifted from science to art, opening as the Royal Museum of Paintings with 311 paintings in 1819. Today, the Prado hosts over 7,500 paintings and is recognized as a cornerstone of European art. 

Madrid meanderings!

 

Fundacion MAPFRE - Anders Zorn



Anders Zorn was born in Mora, Sweden in 1860 and became the most prominent Swedish painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

His mastery of a range of painting techniques enabled him to achieve international fame as a portraitist of kings, politicians, and other celebrities of his time.

The breadth and richness of his career was deeply rooted in his origins, and is reflected in the portraits of personalities from many countries that capture their often not recognised  

However it is the scenes of traditional life in his native Dalarna County that are the most intimate and characteristic of rural people. They provide a window into life in rural Sweden and its culture. They are expressive of his continuing connection to rural life until his death 1920. 

 

Fundicion MAPFRE - Photographer Helen Levitt



The life and times of Helen Levitt and many artists that came before and after. 

Helen Levitt was born in 1913 and began photographing the streets of New York, her hometown, in the late 1930s. She focused mainly on poor neighborhoods such as Spanish Harlem or the Lower East Side, where the street is the main stage of daily life. 

Her interest in photography began after attending an exhibition Documentary and Anti-Graphic: Photographs by Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Alvarez Bravo in New York, in 1935. Levitt met Henri Cartier-Bresson and inspired by him in 1936 she bought a used Leica III. 

Her camera was directed toward children and their street games and ‘transform everyday situations into images that convey all that life can hold of emotion, mystery, or humor’.

Levitt was a socially committed artist and one of the first women to forge a professional career in photography. This exhibition is the first to be organized based on the entirety of her work. 

Levitt died in 2009 in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was a life lived as an artist with its ups and downs. 

In recognition of her work as an artist she received the Francis J. Greenburger Award for Excellence in the Arts for "artists who have made important contributions to the fields of contemporary art but for one reason or another have not been fully recognized by the world at large". 

It was great we were able to see her work and reflect on a life lived as an artist. 

 

La Casa Encendida - The Fold by Hoda Afshar

 Hoda Afshar is an Iranian documentary photographer based in Melbourne. She is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre. 

 The Fold is a visual and psychological investigation of the French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934). 

Afshar during research at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris came across an archive of thousands of images taken by de Clérambault in Morocco of veiled Islamic women—and sometimes men. He collected these  images to explore his psychoanalytic ideas about covering and fantasy. 

However there is controversy surrounding his photographs and his psychiatric work. Through the  film, ‘inspired by the house-of-mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), directed by Orson Welles, and  the complexity of multifaceted characters’. 

Afshar captures a through a series of interviews with researchers from different disciplines a range of hypotheses about the figure of Clérambault, often contradicting one another. 

This is a compelling story told through research, interviews, film and photographs.

‘The Fold explores the enduring legacy of Orientalist and colonial photographic practices. It is an investigation into the regimes of perception and control that determine what we see and how we see’.

Here in Madrid ‘The Fold’ appropriately takes place in La Casa Encendida a social and cultural space that is a ‘meeting point accessible to all people, where contemporary creation coexists with educational activities, reflection and debate around Culture, Solidarity, the Environment and Education.’

The center of a city as a place for play and politics!