I had the honor of experiencing Picasso’s great Guernica Friday at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. I haven’t taken any art classes since middle school, so I didn’t have quite the same appreciation and infatuation for the Picasso exhibit as the two other people I went with. (One girl nearly peed her pants from a mix of delight and disbelief of where she was.) It was a good thing, though, that I didn’t have such an extensive background with Picasso or know the controversy surrounding the piece because I could appreciate it all for what it was instead of getting bogged down by all its baggage.

The Guernica part of the exhibit was nicely laid out, showing the development of the piece with all his studies and practice sketches for certain parts. Thanks to x-ray technology, there was also a projection of the Guernica at different points in its construction so you could see how it looked after, say, 10 months, 20 months, etc. to get the full history and thought behind the piece’s progression. Seeing all these ‘doodles’ made him and the painting seem less godly to me because I’ve always had this idea of a painter walking up to a canvas and just working until poof we have Guernica or what-have-you. Even geniuses have to practice!

Now I’m playing a part in this aura surrounding the piece by not addressing the other 3.5 floors of his works in the exhibit. The Reina Sofia has a few other Picassos besides the Guernica, but many are on loan from a Picasso museum in Paris. Overall, the exhibit highlighted how talented he was. He wasn’t just a painter; he also sculpted wood and bronze, made collages/multi-medium pieces, and other ‘objects’ that I don’t quite know how to categorize.

I was a big fan of all the collage and multi-medium pieces just because they have more depth and I guess symbolic meaning to me than a drawing or painting. He had a musical instrument phase, too, so I held up the other two canvas-oriented people I was with while lingering over these. I was pretending that the violins were violas…

The exhibition evoked conversations ranging from what is real art to pondering all the what-if-someone-did…to the Guernica. I’ll let your imagination fill in all the possible profanities we the other two discussed. Although I wouldn’t cut off my leg to own a Picasso (as the friend who was on the verge of crying and peeing her pants the entire time), it was a very neat exhibit. You have to be a genius to represent all angles of an object on a flat plane (pretend you are walking around the object and you will see all those views in his one representation of it) and to include the bare minimum needed to get an emotion across; forget about art representing what you see, it’s about what you feel.

The museum has made a really nice website and you can practically view the whole exhibit online. Of course, these images are nothing like seeing it in person, where the oil paint has its own dimension and the colors are not orange instead of brilliant yellow.

Use the left-to-right scrollbar below the images to see select works from Room 1, Room 2, Room 3, and Room 4. They go in chronological order so you can get a sense of how he developed as an artist. Now I have to go back and see the rest of the Reina Sofia…

See how her face has all the angles represented in it? And her orange-y skin tone was bright, almost Big Bird yellow. I swear!