My debut as an art professor

I’m here in Madrid and I just love it! It’s a bustling, buzzing, beautiful city. Here are 3 pictures taken from the single block of my hotel on the Gran Via:

Quick food break: I had my best meal of the trip right next door to the hotel at a place called Honest Greens – tofu, sweet potatoes, beets, asparagus…and a big salad:

Let’s get back to Madrid’s architecture. It’s different than Barcelona, which has a cohesive Modernista style. Madrid is a grand mix of Gothic, sort-of French, Modernista and some Art Deco too. It feels like a big, important city. People are extremely fashionable here and tons of people I walk by are speaking English. The fashion level is such that I’m pretty embarrassed by my attire but there’s nothing I can do. This is definitely not an LL Bean polar fleece/Birkenstock type of city:)

Plaza de Cibeles (City Hall – from 1919):

The Atocha train station (1851 and major remodel in 1892):

The Prado Museum:

Torres KIO (from 1999 – world’s first inclined skyscrapers at 15% angle):

Madrid’s Royal Palace (from 1764):

Canalejas Square:

Last one: The Metropolis building (from 1911):

My Art of Spain Road Scholar group is just 14 people and, as always, I am the travel newbie. There are people on this tour who have done 85 Road Scholar tours…65 tours…and dozens of tours with other companies. They do turnarounds (arrive back in US and leave US for next tour) in as little as 3 or 4 days.

It is hard to distinguish myself in a group like this – I’m just not that well-traveled – so I had to find something else special about me. We had our first little bus tour today, driving around Madrid…so comfy, so cozy…that I fell asleep on the bus and missed one of our sightseeing walks completely. I woke up on an empty bus – slept through 14 people gathering their stuff and climbing out of the bus – parked on the side of the road…total panic;) but then saw the driver. I have received a few delicate comments/ribbings from my new friends – one tour member said all of us doze off on the bus from time to time but you were out – really asleep…and I suppose I should just be grateful I didn’t have an imprint from my zipper smooshed into my face for a few hours.

By way of redemption…and you’re going to need to sit down for this…we started off our day with a 90 minute art lecture in the hotel – and not only did I manage to stay awake for the whole thing – I enjoyed it, took actual notes, and learned something.

I’ll happily share my limitless art knowledge, based on these notes I took:

The Golden Age of Spanish Art was 1575 – 1675. To the extent that you have already heard of these paintings/own copies/have painted replicas, keep it to yourself because this was the first time I had seen/heard of ANY of these paintings.

El Greco (1541 – 1614) was a biggie artist of this time. He had two artistic periods. The Italian period pictures had main subjects in the middle of the canvas and the backgrounds were very “renaissance” and elaborate. The Spanish period pictures had no specific background items and the bodies he painted became less human and more dream-like and that is everything I learned about El Greco. Here is his masterpiece painting called The Burial of Count Orgaz and I am going to see this at the Prado Museum in a few minutes:

There was also a painter called Velazquez (1599 – 1660). When he was 15, he painted Old Woman Frying Eggs and it became clear he was going to be a painting heavy hitter:

Later on, Velazquez painted Las Meninas, which was groundbreaking for its use of light and the varied perspective of the people. If you look closely (or if it’s pointed out to you in a Road Scholar lecture), you can see that everyone is looking at something – even the painter off to the left, who is SUPRPISE!!!! Velazquez himself. But if you look in the mirror at the back, you can see that they’re all looking at what’s reflected in the mirror – the king and queen.

And even cooler than that – once I became aware of the existence of Las Meninas, the import of that painting became clear. The entire art world has – without my knowledge all these years – idolized this painting. Imagine how humbled I am – this is considered to be one of the best paintings in the history of art – and I have never heard of it.

Picasso painted dozens of Meninas derivative pictures like this one – with many of the same components – like girl in dress, dog laying down, man coming in through door in back:

I also got to see this amazing picture at the Prado, by Hieronymus Bosch – painted in 1490 – 1510. It looks like a Pink Floyd album cover instead of something over 500 years old and I was completely smitten. It’s called The Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s 13 feet wide and 7 feet tall and tells the story of Adam and Eve and sin in the first section, a world of carnal pleasure in the second, and the terrors of hell in the third (far right) section.

I’ll leave you with one last “art” offering. This is the view from my hotel room and, I can’t figure out exactly what it is, but numerous times a day, trucks add debris to the pile. In addition, all day/evening long, people from nearby restaurants and homes drag blue garbage cans up and down the street, like they wish they had dogs, but are making the best of things with their trash can.

Even better, directly attached to my exterior window is this. It’s a construction/freight elevator and so, during working hours, random men ride this elevator past my hotel room window.

I thought about asking for a new room, but one of my tour mates reported that she had a drunk man outside her door last night, screaming for her next-door neighbor to let him in, and I decided – using my new knowledge of painting, perspective and art history – that I prefer strangers riding by my window in an elevator to intoxicated men in the hallway.