Two Rolling Stones at El Classico in Barcelona as seen from a bar in Madrid
We are in a bar across the street from Santa Barbara Church in Madrid watching El Classico, the twice yearly matchup of the two biggest teams in La Liga, Barcelona and Real Madrid. We love both these teams but when face each other we side with Barca. We are the only people in the bar rooting for Barca.
They scored early, just seven minutes in and we were elated. I screamed but quickly tried to disguise it as a shriek of horror. Barca held on and looked the better side until Modric and Camavinga were subbed on for Madrid. Bellingham scored in the 68th minute and then again in the second minute of stoppage. That bar erupted.
The match was being played in Barcelona. Barca’s main sponsor is Spotify and for this match they did a tie-in with The Rolling Stones in conjunction with their new album. Mick and Ronnie were in the stands. The tongue logo was on the front of the Barca jerseys for the day. It didn’t work out for the boys.
Salamanca is still a university town. In the sixteen century the university was attracting so many people the city outgrew its cathedral, originally built in the 1100’s. In 1509 King Ferdinand ordered the architects who had designed the cathedrals in Toledo and Seville to go to Salamanca to draw up plans for a bigger cathedral. They kept the old one open for the faithful and spent two centuries constructing a new one, one of the largest in Spain, and then decided to keep the old one standing. The two share a wall.
Portions of a Roman bridge still stand over the river and the old city sits like a sandstone fortress on a hill. We spent the day walking into the Plaza Mayor and out a different exit each time only to wander on the ancient streets and return to the Plaza. If I was going back to school I would do a year abroad here.
We are already missing the Basque region where we spent the last two weeks. San Sebastián, Pasaia, Hondarribia and Bilbao were all so comfortable. We walked back into the old section of Bilbao this morning and had breakfast in the Plaza Nueva. I wanted to stick around til lunch but we had train tickets for Salamanca.
They are so proud of their futbol team up here. The red and white stripes are everywhere. (Atletico Madrid copied their colors.) AthleticClub de Bilbao are known as Los Leones because their stadium was built near a church which was named after an early Christian thrown to the lions by the Romans. The Christian, Mammes, pacified the lions and was later made a saint. Back home we love it when one of our favorite La Liga teams play in Bilbao. They turn down the lights in the stadium and the band plays traditional wooden instruments (xalaparta) before the match. The Bilbao team is community owned and they only allow players born in the Basque region to play for the team.
We arrived in Salamanca in the evening and our preview of this ancient city was spectacular. Two cathedrals a stones throw from our hotel.
Our room here in Bilbao is almost too small to exercise in. In fact it is barely bigger than our bed. We’ve been averaging 8 or 9 miles a day of walking so we’ll let the morning exercises slip for a few days. We had a café near our place and then walked to Cafe Iruña, the oldest café in Bilbao according to something Peggi read, for more café, tortilla and fresh squeezed orange juice.
We bought tickets for the Guggenheim online and we started with the Richard Serra installation. He has his own wing here in Frank Gehry’s space age castle. I was reminded of my first encounter with Serra, an article in Art Forum about the controversy surrounding his “Titled Arc,” commissioned by the city of New York and eventually dismantled when people complained about having to walk around it on their way to work. The pieces here, all giant slabs of steel, gracefully shaped into forms that invited you in, reminded me of the fun house at Sea Breeze Amusement Park. I was a little bothered by the clash with Gehry’s organic setting, wondering if it was any better than a white cube, but that’s being way too picky. This was tour de force. Like every major museum in the world, the Guggenheim has a Picasso show timed with the fiftieth year since his passing. This one was all sculpture from all his periods and it was a sensation. The museum installed this show with a generous amount of space, allowing you to move freely around the work. Finally, someone here curated an absolutely beautiful show of the Museum’s collection, a Sol LeWitt installation, Motherwell, Tapies, Oteiza and more Chillida!
We had lunch/dinner at a seafood place nearby. We split una ensalada verde, gambas al ajillo and sea bass (the whole fish). We had walked by the Museo Bilbao yesterday and someone outside said the museum was closed for the installation of a new show. They told us to “Come back tomorrow,” so that was our next stop. The Museo paired centuries old artists like Morales, Ribera, Velazquez with artists from the last century. Some really nice Saura’s and Oteiza sculptures.
From the Museo we walked across the river into the Casco Viejo, the old section. We had a beer at an outdoor café, a “1906,” the especial cerveza from Estrella Galicia. When we were here in the nineties Bilbao was celebrating their big yearly festival and we watched a parade with gigantescas in this old section. We stopped at a bookstore and chatted with the. owner. He confirmed our assessment. Nearby San Sebastián is idyllic but Bilbao is for real. San Sebastián is aristocratic and Bilbao knows how to have fun.
“Guernica” by Picasso at Museo de Reina Sofia in Madrid
We have been on somewhat of a news fast here. Our neighbor, Sue, is enjoying our newspaper subscription while we’re gone. We’ve gathered the Israel/Hamas war plays differently here in the Basque region. We watched a huge demonstration in support of Palestine, thousands of people in San Sebastián. Most of them were wearing the stickers that organizers were handing out. The sticker used imagery from Picasso’s Guernica along with a Basque slogan offering support for Palestine. Many were carrying the Palestinian flag and some were waving flags with the Star of David with a Nazi sign inside of it. We are in Bilbao now, only 34 miles from Guernica and we just saw Picasso’s masterpiece last week at Museo de Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Arranging our itinerary on the fly last night, Peggi booked a room in the Parador in Hondarribia, about a half hour to the east of San Sebastián, still on the coast, it is the last town in Spain before the French border. We are just north of St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, where we started the Camino de Santiago. The hotel was formerly the home of Carlos Quinto, the Holy Roman Emperor in 1500.
Our room overlooks the channel that separates Spain and France, the Bay of Bisque and the Pyrenees. This was the first first parador we stayed in thirty three years ago. We reread our trip notes from that year and noted that we played Gin in our room and Peggi won two out of three. So we asked at the desk if they had any playing cards but no luck.
We had dinner at a restaurant called Zeria and sat outside on the patio of a small very Basque looking building that has been here since 1575. We had bream fish, the whole fish, baked with garlic and olive oil, ensalada and a glass of wine. After dinner we walked back to the statue we had seen from the bus on the way into town. It depicts San Juan de Dios who has apparently been knocked from his horse by the Archangel Gabriel. Maybe his conversion?
At the Chillida Museum we learned the number 3 had a special significance for the artist. Today we found that the third time is indeed a charm. We walked to the edge of town for the third time and finally found it safe to enter the plaza where Peines de Viento is installed. The wind had prevented us from entry for two days. We took at ton of photos like everybody else except we didn’t do any selfies. The three Chillida pieces installed here are a flat out masterpiece. This is how Chillida described it.
““My sculpture, The Comb of the Wind, is the solution of an equation that has elements instead of numbers: the sea, the wind, the cliffs, the horizon and the light. The steel shapes are mixed with the forces and aspects of nature, they speak to them, they are questions and answers.”
I took three shots of this wall in the fishing village of San Pedro before getting my in-camera cropping right.
We walked out near San Sebastian’s stadium, Reale Arena, this afternoon as their La Liga Primera Division team Real Sociedad was about to kick off for a home match against Mallorca. Blue and whites stripes were everywhere on young and old. The bars were packed all over the city since the match is not broadcast locally. We stopped to eat at a sidewalk restaurant and could tell immediately when The home team finally scored in the 84th minute. Back in the hotel we heard all these people chanting in Basque just a few blocks from our room. We assumed it was a victory parade of sorts but it was a huge, twenty or thirty blocks long demonstration in support of Palestine.
Peggi led a mini yoga class in the room this morning and we walked a couple of blocks down the street to the Bar Restaurant we had walked past a few times. It looked like a comfortable old fashioned place and it turned out to be exactly that. We had cortados and tortilla Espanola. The tortilla had caramelized onions on top and it was delicious.
The plan for today was to visit Peines de Viento, the Chillida sculpture installation at the eastern edge of San Sebastián, where the city meets the sea. It was raining, we had our raincoats on, and when we got to the spot at the end of the La Concha we found that the site where the sculptures are was closed because it was too windy. This Chillida quote at the entrance stuck with me. “The Peine del Viento (Wind Comb) is a query about the future; a tribute to the wind, which I admire a lot, and to my home San Sebastián.” The wind that prevented us from seeing it!
Tomorrow’s plan was to walk to San Pedro, a fishing village about ten miles to the east, but Chillida comes first so we turned around and walked to San Pedro today in order to see the Chillida installation tomorrow. It rained pretty much the whole time and the route was rather dismal but we made the best of it. We stopped at an Aldi’s to go to the bathroom and then found a restaurant in San Pedro that served us the best pulpo we’ve ever had. We shared a Bonito with smoked peppers salad and a beer. We put our soggy raincoats back on and walked further along the same side of the inlet out to a great view of the open sea (above). We took a bus back to San Sebastián and stopped at a natural food store where we bought prunes, Ramon Bilbao Organic Rioja and some yogurt.
Tomorrow’s forecast is full sun so we’ll see Chillida and then get to a bar by 2PM to watch The San Sebastián La Liga team play Mallorca.
Chillida sculptures at Chillida Leku in San Sebastián
Now what? Chillida Leku was our target, the pièce de la résistance of our trip to Spain. We did not imagine it would be as good as it was. How could we have? We were in the master’s garden for most of today. Near the end of his life Chillida bought an estate on a gently rolling hillside just outside of San Sebastián. He situated his sculptures in this gorgeous, natural setting so they have a dramatic dialogue with their surroundings.
We too carried on a dialog with the pieces as we walked from one to the next. Some were thirty yards or more apart so your perspective and vantage point continually changes as you approach. And when you’re near, your instincts take over. You get close enough to touch (you are allowed to) or walk around the piece or maybe back off to find your sweet spot for dialog. It was exhilarating.
We took a train up to San Sebastián yesterday and found it warmer than Madrid for some reason. Eighty degrees Fahrenheit called for a walk along the beach. We found a Chillida sculpture overlooking the bathers and then had some calamari at an outdoor restaurant.
This morning we did some exercises in our room and had our coffee and yogurt then headed across the street to a café for more coffee. We walked to Monte Orgul, the park at the end of the peninsula that wraps around La Concha. It is a good climb with many paths to chose from and lots of steps, a cemetery and the remains of old forts.
There was a Oteiza sculpture at the base of the mount. We chatted with a couple from Vancouver and stopped for a beer at the “Secret Bar” near the summit. The park was gorgeous with plenty of stunning views of the bay, the city and the mountains beyond. We ended our hike in the old section of San Sebastián and we stopped at the first place we saw for lunch. It was so crowded we had to stand but it was fabulous. We split three tapas and had a glass of Rioja.
Just a few blocks away was the Garry Winogrand “Women Are Beautiful” show we had seen advertised at our hotel. But when we got to San Telmo Museoa they told us that show had ended in January. We went in anyway and saw their permanent collection, mostly historical in nature. I copied this passage from a wall tag, “In a Europe ever more intolerant and immersed in religious wars, the witch-hunting processes revealed the extent to which the social limelight of Basque women came up against the Official Church Rites that were pagan in nature, quarrels between neighbours, and even childhood fantasies, were interpreted as acts of the devil. The result: scores of people were either burned alive or hanged, and hundreds were jailed, exiled and humiliated. The most notorious witchcraft trials in the Basque Country took place from 1609 to 1612.” We picked up a bocadillo on the way back to our place and arrived as the sun was going down.
Years ago we saw a performance of a Lorca piece in a bookstore near Plaza Santa Ana. They closed that location during the pandemic but kept their other store on Calle de Magdelana open. We stopped in that store and learned this location would soon close as we because the owner of the building planned to turn into a disco-tech.. While in the Embajadores area of Madrid we stumbled on an exhibit at Filmoteca Espanola entitled “El siglo de Margarita Alexandre, Lola Flores y Ana Mariscal.” The three women ruled Spanish cinema in the middle part of the twentieth century. Lola Flores was a revelation!
Ben Shahn’s “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” 1931-32 at Museo de Reina Sofia in Madrid
We are taking in as much of Centro Madrid as possible before moving on to San Sebastián. We walk in a different direction everyday, usually with an art exhibit in mind. We stop for coffee, pop in book stores, have a midday meal somewhere and stroll some more before stopping for a cerveza.
I went home with 60 Euros and some change four years ago, our last visit, and I brought it back with me this time. The smallest cafes, the Metro and even the holy card store take Apple Pay so I’m still hanging onto most of it. Years ago we would go from one Telebanco to the next.
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres says “Even wars have rules.” How about, don’t start one? Which brings me to “Ben Shahn: De la no conformidad“ at Museo de Riena Sofia. This is a laugh out loud show. – if you take delight in Shahn’s skewering of the opposition. Shahn’s wit is fully employed in a series of paintings, photos, posters, book covers and murals. He steered clear of art movements and stayed true to the human heart as he championed the fight for a free world.
My father would have loved this show. He made sure I had a copy of Shahn’s 1957 book, “The Shape of Content,” a credo of nonconformity which he saw as a precondition for all significant artistic production and great social change.
His watercolors of the Dreyfus Affair, two paintings from the Sacco and Vanzetti series (his mural of Sacco and Vanzetti on Syracuse University’s campus is a must see), 15 gouaches on Tom Mooney, and a scathing caricature of Father Coughlin. It’s all here. He assisted Diego Rivera on his ill-fated Rockefeller Center fresco. Shahn is America’s Diego Rivera and he might just be a better artist.
Medardo Rosso “Carne altrui” [Flesh of Others], 1883–1884 in Madrid
During our time with Duane in New York I devoured as much as I could of two Brancusi books. One featured Brancusi’s photos of his sculpture (the catalog from a show we saw in Chelsea) and the other his relationship with Duchamp. With photography Brancusi brought new beauty and mystery to his work. His photography was a full fledged part of his work, presenting sculpture in a two dimensional space. As Duane pointed out – no studio photographer, no matter how skilled, could bring as as much mood and feeling to his work.
“Medardo Rosso. Pionero de la escultura moderna” at Sala Recoletos in Madrid dramatically illustrates that Medardo Rosso was way ahead of his time. Working at the turn of the century in Italy and then France he was profoundly misunderstood in his time although appreciated by Rodin, Giacometti and Brancusi. Rossi and Brancusi even traded pieces before having a falling out. Like his god-like successors Rossi doesn’t hide the heroic effort involved with creation from a lump of clay. “Carne altrui” [Flesh of Others], above, features a French prostitute.
Photography was a brand new medium in Rosso’s time and like Brancusi Rosso photographed his sculptures in a manner that transformed the sculptures. The photographs look mysterious and unreal or sometimes more real than the sculpture. Rosso’s time has come.
Group show at el Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid entitled “Common Vibrations”
I’ve borrowed my neighbor’s cajon a few times. And I hang onto it as long as I can. So this installation at the Círculo de Bellas Artes building in Madrid caught my attention. We learned the Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucía and his Brazilian percussionist were touring Peru in 1977 when they first heard the Peruvian cajon. Paco de Lucía decided to incorporate it into his music and the cajon became a feature of flamenco. We were not allowed to play these. They had speakers in them and the arrangement was surrounded by video displays of musicians playing cajones. Their sounds were coming out of the cajones. A guard was standing by.
Dos Margaritas in front of Jose Guerrero at Antonio Machón Gallery in Madrid
We are surrounded by churches in this old section of Madrid. Our place is on the fourth floor and we can see the tops of three churches, one basilica and one cathedral. We are quite happy with the place. It’s quiet at night, there are cafes nearby and grocery stores. When we step outside in the morning we hear tour guides pointing out the “oldest church in Madrid, San Nicolas.” We have not seen the inside of it yet, it always seems to be closed. We will head up to San Sebastián in a few days and eventually return to Madrid so we’ve been scoping out other neighborhoods. We walked up to Universidad, the college section, and then Malasaña, both felt really comfortable. We found too many young people in Chueca. Salesas and Justicia were low key and just right so we’ll look into renting a place there when we return.
Years ago we bought a Jose Guerrero print at Antonio Machón Gallery and we stop back whenever we are in town. Antonio recently passed and his wife, Margarita, is in the process of retiring. She was boxing up the artwork when we stopped in today. We chatted (Margarita y Margarita en Español while I watched the animation) for an hour or so and then she invited us to her art filled place for coffee and pastry and more conversation. In our last visit Margarita recommended the Abstract Art Museum in Cuenca and we loved that. We told her we were headed up to San Sebastián to see the Chillida Museum and she showed us her Chillida pieces and then gave us the catalog for Chillida’s last show (while he was still alive) which was in her gallery. She highly recommended the sculpture museum in Valladolid so that city has been added to our agenda.
Margarita told us Chillida was a goalie for a team in San Sebastián before turning to sculpture.
A plane flew low over our place in Madrid this morning. It was so loud my instinct was to hide rather than check it out. That should have been the first clue. While we were having coffee a fleet of planes flew over in formation. And then a string of clunky helicopters. We remembered that tomorrow was Día de la Hispanidad, we had it marked on our calendar, and we assumed they were warming up.
We planned to just wander today and thought we’d pop in and out of the galleries in the Doctor Fourquet area so we headed down through La Latina and stopped for another café con leche. The streets were packed with people. The first gallery and then the second were closed and only then did we put it together. Today is Día de la Hispanidad and the feast day of the Virgen del Pilar!
The parade along Paseo del Prada had finished and families with children carrying Spanish flags were settling in the restaurants. The Royal family was presiding over an official event in Palacio Royal, just a few blocks from our AirBnB so we walked back over there, stopping for tapas along the way. Crowds were gathered out front to catch a glimpse.
In the US we have mostly stripped Columbus of his renown. Spain celebrates much more on the 12th. The Spanish Empire was the first global power in world history and what is now the US was just a small part. They say the holiday is a celebration of Hispanic heritage but it comes off like a patriotic show of military might.
The Holy Day though is something else. This is the anniversary of the day the Virgin Mary’s apparition “in flesh and blood” in Zaragoza to Santiago, the apostle Saint James in AD 40.
To say that we’ve made plans for a month in Spain is not entirely accurate. We will be in Spain for a month but have only the first week planned out. That and a La Liga match with Atletico at the end of the month. We bought tickets to that last night. We’ve been reviewing notes from our past trips to Spain and, of course, looking at old pictures. This hotel in Comillas up on the Bay of Biscayne was nice. And then again we have not been down to the southern coast since since the middle 80s.
Peggi and Paul near beach in southern Spain
We came across an entry from our first trip that described how we caught someone trying to break into our rental car while it was parked in front of an historic church. It was one of first stops and they damaged the locks on both doors so we were unable to open them. Rather than return to the rental company I climbed in through the trunk for the rest of the trip. We don’t rent cars anymore. We take public transportation, look out the windows and dream.
We stayed at Duane’s place near Prospect Park for two nights and divided the bulk of our waking hours between two big box museums, the Whitney and MoMA. Outside the museums we walked seven miles or so each day with Duane (in his orange hat) as our guide. We walked the length of the High Line after the Whitney and all the way downtown after MoMA. We found “restaurants nearby” with Apple’s map and ate Mexican and Indian. My brother, Mark, came in from New Jersey and met us at the Picasso show.
I had a crazy nightmare the first night and woke Peggi with my cry for help. Sea lions, like the ones we saw in Maine when we rented a boat, were climbing onto the bed (Duane’s coach) and one of them had three long claws wrapped around my wrist. The second night there was a fire at 1:30 in the morning at the 24 hour car wash on the next block. Peggi woke up to the sirens and the flashing lights. I was aware of the disturbance and had a restless night’s sleep.
Ed Ruscha is mostly fun. Once a commercial artist, he found a way into fine art by doing uncommercial projects. Playing art director he gave himself wacky projects like photographing every building on Sunset Boulevard. Also, he was from California, an outsider to New York cool school. His paintings look like comps for ads.
Ruscha revisited his Course of Empire, a ten-painting installation originally created for the 2005 Venice Biennale, repainting the buildings a decade later with signs of dubious progress (international logos, barb wire). I saw them all at the old Whitney a decade ago. MoMA had three of the pairs in their “Ruscha: Now Then” roundup. They were my favorites.
Henry Taylor’s “B Side” show at the Whitney was a real trip for me. A trip because I went in knowing only “I’ve seen a few reproductions of his paintings that really caught my eye” but here those paintings, large and on display in the first room, struck me as blown up reproductions. I spent the first half hour or so looking for others to like. I scanned the rooms instead of proceeding one by one, following my eye and I slowly discovered Taylor could pull off more than a few good paintings.
He paints quickly with exuberance. His brushwork is like Guston’s. His portraits have real personality, real likenesses if they are someone famous. They bring Alice Neel to mind. He is playful like Basquiat, he riffs on famous paintings, adapting Whistler’s mother in his portrait of the Black Panther Party Minister, Eldridge Cleaver (above) and giving him somewhat of a dandy appearance.
With time I was laughing out loud as I found one thoroughly enjoyable painting after another. Paintings that looked simple at first looked rich and expressive. Rewarding! Henry Taylor is now one of my favorite painters.
![Medardo Rosso “Carne altrui” [Flesh of Others], 1883–1884 in Madrid](https://www.popwars.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/IMG_2023-10-15-190403.jpeg)
