Filling in the Gaps in Madrid : Old Masters Still Reign at Revamped Prado, but New Museums Showcase Modern Art

Finding a French Impressionist or 20th-Century American painting in Madrid was once as difficult as finding a restaurant open as early as 8 p.m. The Prado Museum is surely one of the half-dozen most wondrous art museums in the world; only a wastrel would come to Madrid and skip it. But the Prado, based on the taste of long-ago kings, has great gaps.

The museum world of Madrid, however, is spinning. In the last year, visitors have found that Madrid now boasts two other art museums--both within walking distance of the Prado--that cannot be passed over. They fill the gaps of the Prado and make art in Madrid more stellar than ever before.

The most dramatic addition is the controversial Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in the 19th-Century Villahermosa Palace, separated from the Prado by the enormous Plaza Canovas del Castillo, with its wonderful fountain of Neptune and his horses riding through the sea. The museum houses 715 of the paintings of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a 72-year-old industrialist of German and Hungarian parentage who assembled a private collection unrivaled by any other in the world except that of Queen Elizabeth II. The Spanish government recently signed an agreement to buy the collection for the bargain price of $350 million. Sotheby’s auction house has estimated its value at almost $2 billion.

There were many other suitors. The collection was once displayed in the baron’s crowded Villa Favorita on Lake Lugano in Switzerland. But when the Swiss government rejected the baron’s request for funds to enlarge the building, he decided to take the paintings elsewhere. Britain, Germany and Los Angeles’ J. Paul Getty Museum bid for the works.

But Spain has always had the baron’s ear. His fifth wife, Carmen Cervera, is Spanish, a former Miss Spain, and she acted as Madrid’s chief advocate. The baron and his wife, better known to their friends as Heini and Tita, are mainstays of the jet set at Marbella.

In 1988, the baron agreed to loan the paintings to Spain for 10 years, pending a decision on where they would go permanently, a decision finally made in Spain’s favor this year. The whole project infuriated Prado officials. To exhibit the paintings, the government had to renege on a promise to turn over the Villahermosa Palace to the Prado. Prado officials had planned to install their Goyas and conservation studios there. Instead, the Villahermosa was refurbished for Heini and Tita’s paintings.

“It is a serious setback for us,” said Alfonso Perez Sanchez, when he was director of the Prado in 1990. “The presentation of our collections will be mutilated for several years.”

An anonymous Prado curator was far more biting. “Everybody is falling all over themselves to exhibit a couple of Jose de Ribera paintings that the baron is bringing to us,” he said, “even though we have 30 Riberas hidden in the Prado basement for lack of space.”

As a visit to the new Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum quickly makes clear, that criticism is overblown and unfair. If you go to Spain mainly to see Spanish painting such as the works of de Ribera and Goya, then it is true you are wasting precious time at the new museum. The baron’s Spanish holdings, though excellent, seem paltry next to those of the Prado.

But as a whole, the baron’s collection is an extraordinary tour through Western art from Italian primitives of the 13th Century to American Pop Art of the 20th Century.

The Villahermosa, built almost 200 years ago, in what Spaniards call Madrid Neo-Classic style (akin to Washington Federal style, with gabled roofs and red brick walls), was acquired by a Spanish bank that completely rebuilt the interior in the 1970s to accommodate its offices and cashier cages. The Spanish government commissioned Spanish architect Rafael Moneo to redesign the interior. He came up with the three floors of galleries surrounding a great inner patio.

The paintings are arranged chronologically on the three floors of the palace. A visitor starts at the top and works down. Over the decades, the baron and his father tried to assemble a collection that reflects as many periods and movements as possible. As a result, the museum is a little like a reduced version of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The real surprise is the collection of works from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Many movements are covered: Impressionism, Post Impressionism, the Fauves, Expressionist painting, Cubism, Surrealism, Pop Art. The museum exhibits some first-rate 19th-Century American paintings by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and George Inness, painters who are surely unknown to even the best-educated Spaniards. The collection also has a strong representation of German Expressionist painting of this century.

“The Hotel Room” by American Edward Hopper and “The Card Game” by Balthus, the French painter of Polish descent, would surely hold a prominent place in any retrospective of either of these brooding painters. Works like these simply cannot be seen anywhere else in Spain.

The second new museum, the Queen Sofia National Museum Center of Art, is a short walk down the Paseo del Prado toward the Atocha railroad station. Designers have refurbished the museum from an old hospital, keeping its spacious, light-filled outdoor patio.

The galleries fill with light from ample windows. The corridors offer a mood of tranquillity as visitors look down on the quiet patio with its benches and trees. Two glass-encased elevator shafts attach to the facade, giving the building a touch of modernity.

In the museum, Spain has attempted to assemble its national holdings of 20th-Century Art. Although some of the great names of modern art are Spanish: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, Juan Gris, the holdings are uneven.

With a few exceptions, the museum, has only minor works by Picasso and Miro. Contemporary Spaniards like to blame this on the dictatorship of Francisco Franco that lasted from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until his death in 1975. But that is only part of the story.

It is true that once Franco took power, it was not politically correct to buy paintings by such anti-fascists as Picasso and Miro. But, more important, Spaniards have old-fashioned tastes, preferring the tried and true like Goya and Velazquez. By the 1930s, just before the civil war erupted, Picasso was the most highly regarded of the contemporary artists of Paris. Yet Spaniards did not buy his paintings. His most important collectors were American.

However, the Queen Sofia Museum does have Picasso’s “Guernica,” one of his greatest masterpieces and surely the most famous political painting of the century. Picasso painted this tormented mural for the Spanish pavilion of the Paris World’s Fair in 1937. Working in fury and anguish, he tried to symbolize the terror of the Basque town of Guernica during its massive bombing by Nazi planes under Franco’s orders.

After the war, Picasso, certain that his painting would be destroyed in Franco’s Spain, loaned “Guernica” to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it remained for 40 years. It was returned to Madrid in 1981.

For more than 10 years, the painting was exhibited in a small annex to the Prado. Moved to the second floor of the Queen Sofia Museum a few months ago, and still exhibited behind bulletproof glass (out of fear of extreme right-wing reprisals), “Guernica” is beyond doubt the chief attraction of its collection.

Since many tourists have still not discovered the Queen Sofia Center, the “Guernica” does not have the clusters of spectators that it used to attract at the Prado annex. On a recent weekday morning, for example, I found only one Spanish couple there. But no visitor to Spain should miss it.

Visitors should also take time to look at the Dalis, the late Miros, the work of Antoni Tapies, who is Spain’s best-known living painter, and the sculptures of Eduardo Chillida.

Important as the two new museums may be, the magnificent Prado must remain the climax for any art aficionado’s visit to Madrid. But the Prado is enormous, and, without some advice in advance, innocents may end up wandering aimlessly through its great salons, missing a good deal.

Originally built in 1785 to house a science museum, the Prado became an art gallery in the early 19th Century when King Ferdinand VII and Queen Maria Isabel de Braganza decided to remove the large paintings from their palace and decorate it, in the latest French fashion, with wallpaper and small paintings. They packed up the big stuff and sent it to the Prado, which opened as a museum in 1819. The collection, augmented over the decades by more royal holdings, numbers 5,000 paintings--1,000 on permanent exhibition and 4,000 in storage.

The Prado has just completed a period of updating--part of Spain’s push toward modernization that followed Franco’s death--that included brightening the lighting, reordering displays, redesigning galleries, restoring paintings, installing a gift shop and brushing up its public relations. For the first time, visitors can pick up a map of the galleries, making it easier to attack this grand and endearing hodgepodge of a museum.

The Prado has three sets of holdings that exist nowhere else in the world: the works of Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch, better known in Spain as El Bosco. While museums elsewhere have some samples of the painters’ work, none can match the size and magnificence of the Prado collections.

The Prado displays the Velazquez holdings in the main rotunda and its surrounding galleries on the upper floor. Velazquez was a 17th-Century court painter, and his most famous work, “Las Meninas” (the Maids of Honor), now holds the place of honor in the rotunda, just opposite the entrance.

The scene is one of the best-known in the history of painting: “Las Meninas” shows Velazquez painting a portrait of the king and queen while the court--children, dwarfs, maids of honor, courtiers--looks on. But the king and queen cannot be seen. The viewer of the painting, in fact, is standing just where the king and queen should be, and almost all the figures in the painting are thus looking at the viewer. It is an odd and enthralling experience, one of the most exquisite that art can offer.

The paintings of Goya are displayed in rooms on the upper and ground floors of the south wing of the building. The best-known works, including “The Naked Maja,” are all there. Even more significant, the Prado also displays the dark and bitter murals that Goya painted on the walls of his house during the last years of his life before he died in 1828.

When the Prado revamping began a decade ago, the officials foolishly installed the dark, powerful paintings on insipid burlap that seemed to mock the terror displayed. Critics finally convinced Prado officials that they had erred badly. In the last year, the Prado reframed the dark paintings in thick black wood, much like it was before, an almost breathtaking improvement.

The reordering of the galleries has not helped El Bosco, the Dutch painter of fierce allegories about the war between good and evil. His paintings, completed in the late-15th and early 16th centuries, have been tucked into the Flemish galleries on the ground floor. But once found, they are incomparable.

There are not many Boschs in the world. But the Prado has the bulk of his best work, including two triptychs, “Garden of Earthly Delights” and “Hay Wain”; the table-top “The Seven Deadly Sins,” and the small, mocking painting “Extraction of the Stone of Madness.”

After spending time with Velazquez, Goya and El Bosco, a visitor still faces the rest of the Prado. The museum boasts fine collections of El Greco, Jose de Ribera, Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Peter Paul Rubens and Albrecht Durer.

So, amazing as it may seem, the Prado would count as one of the most important museums of Europe even if it did not have its holdings of Velazquez, Goya and El Boscos. That underscores the new reality. With two new museums trying to fill the gaps of the magnificent Prado, Madrid is now an even more formidable center of art.

GUIDEBOOK

Madrid’s Museums

Getting there: The Prado is within walking distance of the Atocha and Banco Metro stops. The other two museums are a few minutes’ walk northwest and southwest from the Prado. Bus lines 10, 14, 27, 34, 37 and 45 stop near all three museums.

Madrid museums:

Museo del Prado (The Prado Museum), Paseo del Prado at Plaza Canovas del Castillo. Open 9 a.m.-7 p.m. daily; 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Sundays and holidays; closed Mondays. Admission: 400 pesetas (about $3.10 at 130 pesetas to the dollar); free to students with international student cards. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum), Paseo del Prado, 8. Open 10 a.m.-7 p.m. daily; closed Mondays. Admission: 600 pesetas ($4.60); over 65 years and students with school identification cards, 350 pesetas ($2.70); children under 12 free.

Museo Nacional Central de Arte Reina Sofia (The Queen Sofia National Museum Center of Art), Calle de Santa Isabel, 52. Open 10 a.m.-9 p.m. daily; 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Sundays and holidays; closed Tuesdays. Admission: 400 pesetas ($3.10).

For more information: Contact the National Tourist Office of Spain, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 960, Beverly Hills 90211, (213) 658-7188.