Museo Reina Sofía: From Royal Hospital to Modern Art
Why is it significant?
Stand in front of this long, severe granite facade and count the windows... it looks like a barracks or a hospital, and that is exactly what it was. This was the General Hospital of Madrid, begun in the eighteenth century under Charles III, with Francesco Sabatini among its architects.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo Reina Sofía: From Royal Hospital to Modern Art |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Santa Isabel 52, 28012 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.40800, -3.69440 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid's Landscape of Light: The Paseo del Arte, the Prado & the Retiro |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in front of this long, severe granite facade and count the windows... it looks like a barracks or a hospital, and that is exactly what it was. This was the General Hospital of Madrid, begun in the eighteenth century under Charles III, with Francesco Sabatini among its architects. For two hundred years people came here to be cured, or to die.
By the 1960s it was condemned, and there was serious talk of demolishing it. Instead it was saved, and in the 1980s it reopened as an art centre, later named after Queen Sofía. The British architect Ian Ritchie added those glass lift towers outside, so that the old walls would not have to be gutted for elevators. And in 2005 Jean Nouvel attached a new wing behind, under a great red roof that floats over a courtyard.
But most people come for one room. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian aircraft supporting Franco's side bombed the Basque town of Gernika. Pablo Picasso, living in Paris, had been commissioned by the Spanish Republic to paint a mural for the World Exhibition, and he answered with Guernica: a canvas nearly eight metres wide, all black, white and grey, a horse screaming, a mother holding a dead child, a light bulb like an eye.
Picasso refused to let it enter Spain until democratic freedoms returned. So Guernica spent decades at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso died in 1973, Franco in 1975, and only in September 1981 did the painting finally fly to Madrid. It was first shown in a building beside the Retiro, behind bulletproof glass and guards, and moved here in 1992.
Seeing it in person surprises everyone: it is bigger, flatter and stranger than any reproduction. When you are ready, walk north up the Paseo del Prado, the broad tree-lined boulevard on your right. In a few minutes you will see a brick building that seems to hover above the pavement, with a wall made entirely of plants.