Guernica

When I was in Italy, I thought that you could be excused for thinking that during World War Two the country was decidedly anti-fascist. Apparently everyone was a partisan. The same goes in Spain. Everyone was anti-Franco, if you judge by the art, the street names, the public culture. It is not that I want a celebration of Franco, but a little honesty in history would help.

The gallery (Centre de Arte Reina Sofia) was wonderful. There is one huge room with just Guernica in it and several even bigger rooms with the sketches, photographs and lead up. It is a huge work and you have to stand right back from it to get the scope. One wierd coincidence is that I am currently reading Slaughterhouse 5 (a surrealist novel about the bombing of Dresden) . The painting and the novel sort of entwined.

There is also several rooms with the photos of Robert Cappa including the really famous one of the partisan at the exact moment a bullet hits him. In the temporary exhibition was a really masterful collection of works by someone motivated to protest against the thousands of disappeared people in Chile. There was lots of political art in addition to this, and you would get the impression that the Spanish have always been very sensitive to torture and war. Nobody, it seemed wanted to deal with Spain in the Americas or Spain in Iraq today, or even the recent bombings in Spain.

The gallery Centre de Arte Reina Sofia is right next to the Atocha railway station where 191 people died in the bombing in 2004. Such is the price for the Coalition of the Willing. Checklist: USA, England, Spain, Australia. All bombed (if you count Bali as an attack on Australia). So it was Slaughterhouse 5, Guernica and the Atocha Railway Station all within my view at a single gaze.

The gallery itself is really terrific, and unlike most of the world's first class galleries does not contain an assortment of colonial plunder. Perhaps they are all in one of the other galleries in Madrid. Most of the works I saw today were actually Spanish.

Madrid itself is quiet, it is about the same size as Melbourne and many people leave for Christmas apparently. The shops do not open til 10am and no one seems in too much of a hurry to get anything done. It reminds my of Italy except that it is cleaner and less chaotic.