Serendipity in Madrid
February 2008
Early one Saturday morning, I stepped into an antiques store near Madrid’s Plaza de Santa Ana. Flipping on lights as he went, the owner led me from a room lined with Impressionist-style paintings to another showcasing a Baroque altarpiece. Finally we reached the back. The light went on, and I found myself face to face with an El Greco. The owner pulled out papers from a former director of the Prado Museum authenticating the work, and told me he was beginning the verification process.“It’s very possible that it was authentic,” says Manuel Merchán, editor of the Madrid-based magazine Antiqvaria. “Until the early part of the 20th century, the court was in Madrid, and all the great aristocratic houses are still based here. Every now and then the heirs of a family put a major work on the market.” That’s the beauty of Madrid. Although it is rapidly catching up with longtime rival Barcelona as an important center for contemporary art and design (witness the hotels designed by cutting-edge architects and the red-hot ARCO contemporary art fair), the capital retains its Old World charm.
The fact that Madrid is promoting its historic laurels while refusing to rest on them is nowhere clearer than in the “Golden Triangle,” which contains its three big museums: The Prado, The Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofia National Art Center. In the past few years, each institution has remade itself. At the Thyssen-Bornemisza, which lavishly traces European painting from Fra Angelico to George Grosz, a new wing has created space for blockbuster temporary shows. At the Reina Sofia, dedicated to modern and contemporary art, the Jean Nouvel–designed expansion has given the museum an extra 30,000 square meters with which to display its permanent collection and also made room for Michelin-starred chef Sergi Arola’s eponymous restaurant. In October, the Prado opened its own new wing, designed by Rafael Moneo around the old cloister of the San Jeronimo church for temporary exhibitions. (Recommended accommodation: The Hotel Urban, which is packed with Asian works from owner Jordi Clos’s personal collection, including of Egyptian antiquities in the basement.)
There are other signs of a renaissance. Conservators at the San Antonio de la Florida hermitage recently finished 16 years of restoration, unveiling gorgeously reinvigorated Goya frescoes populated with the gossipy majas and frolicking children that the artist loved to paint (Goya himself—minus his head, which mysteriously disappeared—is buried in the church). The top floor of the San Fernando Academia de Bellas Artes opened to the public in October 2006, displaying etchings by Picasso and paintings by Gris. And while the massive Matadero contemporary art center (housed in the old city slaughterhouse) awaits completion of its exhibition space, it has begun staging concerts and plays in its performance halls.
For collectors in search of old Madrid, the city divides into three zones, helpfully arranged by price. At the lower end, the Rastro area is home to dozens of antiques shops selling everything from 17th-century manuscripts to Art Deco lamps. The Calle del Prado, which leads from Plaza Santa Ana down to the museum, is lined with mid-range shops, which, as my El Greco experience suggests, occasionally end up with major works.
The city’s most exclusive galleries are in the Barrio Salamanca, which is a chic shopping and residential district. Serrano is Merchán’s favorite stop for 18th-century furniture, while he recommends Caylus for 17th- and 18th-century paintings.
The Barrio Salamanca is filled with modern galleries as well as classic ones. Rafael Lozano specializes in Spanish artists like Antonio Clavé, one of the leading painters of the postwar Paris school. “There’s no room for intermediate works in this market,” Lozano says. “A well-known signature isn’t enough. You have to have the signature and the quality.”
Indeed, the contemporary galleries that line Claudio Coello street in the Barrio Salamanca tend to feature well-known artists. At Rayuela, works on paper by celebrated painters like Antoni Tàpies and Antonio Saura are but one sign that this gallery tends to stick with what director Manuel Fernández-Braso calls “classic avant-garde.” The exception is a magnificent work in paint and clay by a young artist, Amaya Bozal. “Her work is so tactile,” says Fernández-Braso, “and it pushes the boundary between abstract and figurative art. That’s very Spanish.”
For more boundary-pushing, look to the scrappy Chueca and Malasaña neighborhoods for galleries that specialize in emerging art. Or go in February, when everyone who is anyone in the Spanish art world meets at Madrid’s annual ARCO fair. Last year, the fair’s first under director Lourdes Fernández, hosted 271 galleries and saw sales go up 15 percent over the previous year. Fernández attributes that success to the quality of the participating galleries: Some 600 applied for this year’s slots. But she also emphasizes that ARCO is distinguished by the city that hosts it: “The fair’s most notable characteristic is Madrid.”
Madrid-based Lisa Abend is the Spain correspondent for TIME magazine and The Christian Science Monitor.
MADRID ITINERARY:
Antiguëdades Serrano
011.34.91.576.85.83
Caylus
011.34.91.578.3098
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
011.34.91.774.1000 museoreinasofia.es
Ermita de San Antonio de Florida
011.34.91.542.0722
Hotel Urban
011.34.91.787.77.70 derbyhotels.es
Matadero Madrid
011.34.91.517.73 09 mataderomadrid.com
Museo Nacional del Prado
011.34.91.330.2800 museoprado.mcu.es
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
011.34.91.369.0151 museothyssen.org
Rafael Lozano
011.34.91.431.2436 rafaellozano.com
Rayuela
011.34.915.77.06.48 galeriarayuela.com
Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
011.34.915.240.864 rabasf.inside.es