Word: prado
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Deep in the Prado Museum's massive new Goya exhibition hangs a muted watercolor titled One Can't Look. Completed some time in the years before 1815, it depicts a prisoner, his torso draped in cloth, with ropes dangling from his tensed limbs. There is no hood over his head, no box beneath his feet, and what initially appear to be outstretched arms turn out, upon closer inspection, to be tattered folds of cloth. Yet it is almost impossible to look at this small work and not be reminded of the more recent image of a hooded prisoner...
...foreshadow the atrocities to come. If earlier generations have found in the Spanish painter's work clues to their own iconography of despair (The Third of May as a precursor of Picasso's Guernica, the Black Paintings as preparation for images of Auschwitz), the Prado's "Goya in Times of War" is an exhibition for us, the Abu Ghraib generation...
...around the broad shaft of natural light that streams through Moneo's glass lantern. At the top comes the delicious surprise: a gorgeously restored Baroque cloister - dismantled from the neighboring San Jerónimo church and carefully reassembled in the new wing - that functions as a sculpture gallery. "The Prado has never been known for its sculpture collections," says Zugaza. "Now we have an ideal place to show them...
...four new painting galleries will be used solely for temporary exhibits. The first of these, "The Prado's 19th Century Masters," which opens to the public on Oct. 31 and runs through April 2008, gives the museum a good opportunity to reveal another of its closely kept secrets: it holds important paintings created after 1828, the year of Goya's death, which has until now marked the chronological endpoint of its permanent collection. This exhibition of over 100 works opens with portraits from Goya's age - including one by him of a voluptuous Marquesa de Santa Cruz, and another...
Once this temporary exhibition closes, many of its works will find their way onto the walls of the Prado's original Villanueva building; now that the main galleries no longer have to house traveling shows, there's more room to show works that have tended to languish in storage. "In 1819, the museum had a gallery of contemporary drawings where Goya's work was on display," says Zugaza. "The museum's founders thought that the collection would keep extending, but our chronic problem with insufficient space prevented that. Now, we have the opportunity to stretch to our full range...