After a few days in France, I’m back in Spain (for the third time on this trip). In Bilbao, where I spent three nights, I met the full group I’ll be traveling with until we get to Porto. I’m now in Pamplona, so before I get too far behind, I want to share just a few highlights from the two full days we had in Bilbao, including our excursion to Gernika.
There’s a lot I won’t write about here, so check out the photo album for everything I saw (at least what I thought was worthy of being photographed).
Guggenheim Museum
On our first day we did a city tour by bus and then walking. I hope I’ve captured the highlights of that in my photo album.
We ended up at the Guggenheim Museum, and we had as much time as we wanted to see as little or as much as we wanted.
Me and art museums! I start out thinking I’ll spend an hour or so, and the next thing I know the museum is closing.
I didn’t quite make it to closing time at the Guggenheim, but I did spend several hours there.
Abstract Art
The first room I visited was dedicated to abstract artists. I wish I “got” abstract art, but I just can’t wrap my brain around it. And worse, it doesn’t make my heart beat faster.
Last year I visited Villa Borghese when I was in Rome. This painting didn’t evoke any memory or experience I had there. I like the colors. Maybe some of those colors were in the gardens. Maybe it’s my fault that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the colors when I was there. According to the audio guide, de Kooning painted this from memory in his studio, not in situ. My memory of Villa Borghese is nothing like this, but I have to admit that if I tried to put mine on canvas, it would never hang in a museum.
Apparently this piece is part of a series that includes other curves and other colors. By itself, I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. The audio guide suggested looking at it from various angles.
I still don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.
Maybe this inner monologue I’m having is what I’m supposed to feel. Maybe the point of this art isn’t to understand, but to ponder. Not to feel, but to think.
I don’t know what to think or feel about this one, except I do think it’s kind of nice to look at.
Other Contemporary Art
I am drawn more to contemporary art that is representational.
When I look at Basquiat’s work, I feel like I’m connecting with the artist. There’s something powerful being expressed here. Given his tragic life, his struggle with drug addition and his death at 28 from a heroin overdose, I feel like this puts me in touch with an experience and a way of feeling I’m unfamiliar with. I sense the artist was angry or distraught or sad at a level I’ve never achieved (nor aspired to achieve). And I appreciate the opportunity to gain some insight, to connect with something made available only by art.
Lichtenstein makes me smile. And the more I look at this painting, the more it makes me smile. When I first encountered Lichtenstein many years ago, I thought it was silly nonsense. But there’s something warm and pleasant that comes from seeing something familiar and mundane expressed in this way. I love the lines on the mirror! I just want to examine the reflection to see if it’s really accurate. (It is, I think, except for some of the colors.)
Other works
There is a lot more than just contemporary art at the Guggenheim. There’s stuff from the Renaissance. There’s Rembrandt, Rafael, Rubens, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Picasso, Chagall, and numerous artists I’ve never heard of from the last five hundred years or so. You can find photos of my favorites in my photo album.
Tarsila
There was a special exhibit of the work of Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973). I don’t recall ever encountering her work before. And I was so drawn to her art, I think I spent a full hour in that section of the museum.
Here’s what the signage at the museum said about her:
A central figure of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral (also known as Tarsila) created an original, evocative body of work, drawing on indigenous and popular imagery and on modernizing forces of a rapidly-transforming country.
In the 1920s, moving between São Paulo and Paris, Tarsila ferried between the avant-gardes of these two cultural capitals. Having constructed a “Brazilian” iconographic world, put to the test by the Cubism and Primitivism so in vogue in the French capital at the time, her painting was the root of the Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagic movements, whose search for an “authentic,” multicultural, and multiracial Brazil aimed to refound the country’s relationship with the European “centers” of colonization.
The activist dimension of Tarsila’s paintings from the 1930s and their ability to accompany the profound transformations of her social and urban environment until the 1960s confirm the strength of an oeuvre attuned to her time, always willing to reinvent itself, despite the unstable conditions of the different times and contexts that an emancipated, independent woman artist had to face.
With her invitation to delve into a Brazilian modernity that she contributed to forging even more than she painted it, Tarsila reveals in her production all the complexity of this concept always subject to debate, which raises identity and societal questions of great importance even today, both in Brazil and Europe.
I photographed a ton of her works, which I’ve included in the album. It would be too hard to select a handful to include here, so I’ll just post one, her 1924 self-portrait.
I made a special album just of her work. Do yourself a favor and spend some time with her art.
Gernika
I’ve written before about some of the scenes of tragedy I’ve visited, places like the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Auschwitz, Sarajevo, and Rwanda. It seems there is no end to the ways human beings can perpetrate evil against other human beings.
On our second morning in Bilbao we boarded the bus and drove to Gernika. There we did a bit of a walking tour, but we spent most of our time in the Museo de la Paz (Peace Museum).
Our tour through the museum was with a guide who helped make our experience of the museum interactive and extremely powerful. There were several sections to the exhibit:
- What is peace?
- The paths toward peace
- Peace in the 21st century
- What happened in Gernika in the absence of peace?
- 26 April 1937: They were all like Begoña
- The town talks to us
- Gernika in the 30s
- The bombing of Gernika
- The destruction of the town
- Gernika in the post-war period
- Victims and responsibility
- Toward reconciliation
- Testimony of survivors and witnesses
To say the visit to the museum was sobering is an understatement. But I also didn’t know the full story of what happened in Gernika on April 26, 1937.
The bombing of Gernika
Monday was market day in Gernika. In addition to a population of 7,000, around 3,000 people from surrounding communities were in the town that day.
The first bombs fell at 4:30 pm. Bombing continued for three hours. The town was essentially obliterated. Only a few buildings survived. Fires burned for three days afterwards.
The bombs came from German and Italian air forces, but neither country was at war with Spain at the time. In fact, Hitler carried out the bombing at the behest of Francisco Franco on behalf of his Nationalist rebels. This was during the Spanish Civil War, while the Nationalists were fighting against the Spanish Republicans.
The raid was ostensibly intended to destroy bridges and roads in an attempt to cut off Gernika from government operations in Bilbao. But the main bridge was not destroyed, nor was the armament factory in Gernika. Houses and facilities used by civilians were.
The number of casualities is in dispute. The Basque government reported 1,654 dead, but others have put the number as low as 170.
Shortly after the bombing of Gernika, the Basque region fell to the Nationalists, and by 1939 Franco was the Spanish dictator. For the nearly forty years Franco was in power, he denied culpability, as did the Germans. In fact, they attempted to plant evidence suggesting that the local population deliberately burned and dynamited their own town. They accused the international press of lying. And the truth was surpressed until after Franco died in 1975.
George Steer
But one journalist, George Steer, was already in the Basque country reporting on the Spanish Civil War for The Times of London. He made his way to Gernika after the attach and saw the destruction first-hand. He saw German bomb casings and other evidence of German involvement. In spite of the Nationalists’ denials, Steer’s reporting was clear and compelling. Here’s what he published in The Times and in the New York Times on April 28:
Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders. The bombardment of this open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of aeroplanes consisting of three types of German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers, did not cease unloading on the town bombs weighing from 1,000 lbs. downwards and, it is calculated, more than 3,000 two-pounder aluminium incendiary projectiles. The fighters, meanwhile, plunged low from above the centre of the town to machinegun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields.
Picasso
Early in 1937 the Spanish government commissioned Picasso to create a painting for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. He was working on other ideas, but on May 1 he read George Steer’s eyewitness accounts. He immediately began sketching his ideas for what would become Guernica.
The painting today resides in Madrid, and I’ll be going to see it when I’m there in May, so I will talk about it later. But for now, it’s only important to note how profound was its effect on the world who saw it. Franco’s suppression of the truth was in vain. The world knew what had happened, thanks to George Steer and to Pablo Picasso.
In a street of Gernika is a mosaic reproduction of Picasso’s painting.
After our time in the museum, we walked up to this place to engage with this work of art.
Mafalda, our tour leader, suggested a group photo in front of it. I opted out. If you are reading this, I hope you understand why.
Home-Hosted Dinner
There is a lot more I could write about, but I invite you to see my photos to get a feeling for the other things I saw in Bilbao and around the area.
I do want to mention the home-hosted dinner, though, because this is a regular feature of OAT tours, and it’s been a bit of a mixed bag for me. The home-hosted dinners are a time when we, as travelers, visit local residents in their homes and have dinner with them. It’s typically an opportunity to do some cross-cultural sharing and learn about how regular people, not connected to the tourist industry, live.
It’s usually a nice experience, but sometimes these dinners feel like they have been thoroughly rehearsed, like the family is performing for us. Sometimes you get the feeling they are going far out of their way to make us feel welcome, entertained, and at ease, but it doesn’t always feel natural and authentic.
Our dinner with Macu and her son Yared was none of those things. Perhaps it was because this was their first time hosting travelers at their home. They wanted to give us a nice experience, but what they succeeded so well in doing was giving us a truly real, genuine experience. We learned that she works in (or possibly owns) a bar not far from their house, that she traveled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to adopt Yared when he was an infant (he’s now 17). She spoke no English, but Yared translated. He talked about his goals (traveling and going to university to study medicine). They asked us questions about our homes and our travels, and they were obviously not stories they’d ever heard before. It was clear this was as interesting a learning experience for them as it was for us.
Next
I’m far behind in my blogging. I’m in Pamplona now. Yesterday we spent some time in San Sebastian on the way here. Today we walked a bit of the Camino for the first time, and we met a fellow who shared with us about his experience running with the bulls. Tomorrow we move on already.
I’ll try to get caught up. ‘Til then, adios and eskerrik asko.
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