I was reminded of that famous quote from George Santayana after our adventure Tuesday morning. Also, this paraphrase: "Those who do not use maps are condemned to be lost."
We wanted to go to the the Fundació Bancaixa, a charitable arts foundation funded by one of the big Spanish banks. They have an exhibit on of very naughty Picasso prints that I wanted to see. For some reason, we always get confused about where exactly this place is and the quickest way to get there. So I asked Google Maps to help.
My search turned up the foundation, no problem. I asked Miss Google for directions to it, and off we set. The instructions seemed convoluted and, based on our rough knowledge of the location and the city's geography, a little counter-intuitive. But we followed them anyway - into Carmén, the funky nightclub district. Finally, Miss Google announced, as we stood in one of the ram-shackle grafitti-covered squares that are typical of the neighbourhood, 'You have reached your destination.'
Except we hadn't. We weren't anywhere near it. And at the moment she said it, it all came back to me. We had done exactly the same thing last year when heading to Bancaixa, with exactly the same result: we trusted Google Maps and had been dumped in the middle of Carmén, a kilometer from our actual destination.
There's another quote that comes to mind, this one usually credited to Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
Which might beg the question, why did I then go back to Google Maps to get new directions? This time, I punched in the name of the square in which the Bancaixa building sits. Miss Google had no problem with that. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived.
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| Street view enroute to Bancaixa |
By the time we got there, though, it was after 1 pm. The place closes for siesta at 2 and we were tired and fed up. So we changed plans, grabbed bikes and rode home for lunch/dinner.
It was a beautiful day, sunny and 27C. We sat out on the upstairs terrace most of the afternoon, reading, puzzling, sewing, etc. At one point, I may have snuck inside for a nap.
All day, we had been tracking the progress of our Ms. Boyes. She arrived in Madrid the night before, after a trans-Atlantic crossing from hell - squawling child, delays, unscheduled landing in Bordeaux due to drone sightings over the UK, no food, lost luggage, and on and on. She was supposed to be training down to Valencia, where she's staying for three or four weeks, arriving in the late afternoon. We finally heard from her a little after six. She was in her Airbnb near the central market, would we come for "drinkees?" Yes, we would.
So we loaded up the backpack with booze and headed over to where she's staying. It was easy to find, but our initial walking route was longer and more complicated than it needed to be. It took us almost a half hour.
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| View from Shelley's terrace |
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| Timmy's in Valencia! |
This morning, Wednesday, we biked over to Bancaixa. (The route is now branded in our heads, never to be erased.)
The Picasso exhibit, "Models of Desire," is massive, with hundreds of prints, mostly engravings and aquatints done between 1968 and 1972, in the so-called Suite 347 and Suite 156 series. There are some informal portraits, some images of generic families, but most are depictions of the kind of exotica and erotica - scenes in brothels, circuses and artist studios - that apparently obsessed the great man at this time.
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| Picasso, from Suite 347 |
The first umpty-ump prints we looked at were lewd cartoons of scenes in brothels, almost all featuring the bearded figure of Picasso's older contemporary Edgar Degas, an artist he greatly admired but a man he apparently never met, even though they lived in Montmartre in Paris at the same time for three years in the early part of the last century.
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| Picasso, from Suite 347 |
Most of the images use some of the same cubist techniques pioneered by Picasso in paintings years earlier - one eye shown from straight on, the other from the side; limbs and body parts shown from different perspectives making subjects appear misshapen - but they have a completely different feel. They look like spidery ink drawings. Most are brilliantly executed, filling the frame with riotous, often very funny detail.
And most are very explicit. The man was evidently obsessed with the female form, particularly in erotic postures. One sub-series of Suite 347 depicts scenes of the renaissance painter Raphael with the model for his famous picture, La Fornarina, a young woman who appears topless in Raphael's painting. Picasso imagines the painter carrying on a torrid affair with his model while taking her portrait, sometimes in the presence of the young woman's father. Raphael is shown wielding his paintbrush mid-coitus. It certainly tests the limits of what might be considered obscene. Can it be obscene if it's also funny?
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| Picasso, from Suite 347 |
Karen felt the exhibit was "boring" and "repetitive." I know what she means about repetitive, but boring? I didn't think so.
We walked home through the centre, had a late Spanish-style lunch/dinner on the downstairs terrace, then sat on the upstairs terrace for awhile until it got too hot. (This apartment is definitely a keeper.) It was supposed to be cloudy today and only 15C, but the sun came out in the afternoon and the temperature definitely went higher than forecast. The terraces are also protected from breezes so they're real heat sinks.
We're inside now, but about to go out for an early-evening ramble...
Wow, I wished I'd listened better when (if?) you told me about the Picasso exhibit. I would have liked to have seen that.
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