Museo, Museo

Tiffany and I hit two museums today, since they are one of the few things open on Easter Sunday in Spain: the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza. The latter has been talked up so much by my housemate that there was no way that it could measure up, and neither of us really loved it. I'm not a big fan of El Greco or Goya, and my appreciation of Velasquez is not much more intense. Then again, perhaps this is another manifestation of my bias in favor of art I like looking at. Both El Greco and Goya were important and innovative, but I don´t like looking at stretched out, acid-pink Jesuses or blurred portraits of Spanish royalty and leering faces.

(Quibble: too many artists depicting mythological topics are just not thinking. How could Saturn be fooled by the substitution of a stone for Zeus if, instead of swallowing his children whole, he chomped into them and bit off heads and limbs?)

The Thyssen was more to our taste and had several great paintings, including a vibrant seascape and sailboat by Hopper like nothing of his I´ve ever seen before. Unfortunately, they didn´t sell postcards of most of the good ones, and so I left without a nude by Corot or a Pissarro landscape.