Fundación Ortega-Marañón, an oasis in the city.

June 18, 2024 / antonioyrocinante / 1 Comment

Few things are as rewarding as walking around the concrete jungle that is a city, and finding an oasis, a quiet corner, a patch of grass, trees. Madrid, as beautiful as it is, is still a concrete jungle, and the other day I discovered the Fundación Ortega-Marañón, one such oasis, literally around the corner from my mom’s house in the Chamberí neighborhood.

José Ortega y Gasset is considered Spain’s top 20^th C philosopher and Gregorio Marañón was a humanist doctor. Their respective nonprofits joined forces and merged in 2010. They are housed in an old palazzo with a beautiful garden and in what used to be the Residencia de Señoritas, a women’s college dorm which sits right behind the palazzo. They have done a beautiful job with the construction, preserving both the palazzo and the dorm.

Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo.

José Ortega y Gasset

During my visit, there was a great exhibition on the Revista de Occidente, Gasset’s literary magazine. With the title Claridad, claridad, it explained the trajectory and writers that participated in the magazine. It was very well done, and I was all alone. After my visit I was able to sit in the garden and read my book, what an oasis in the city.

El Greco, a proto-Impressionist and the new exhibit at the Norton Museum of Art.

October 31, 2023October 28, 2023 / antonioyrocinante / 1 Comment

Confession time: I like the Impressionists, but as a collective, it is not my favorite artistic movement. I like and appreciate the Impressionists individually, but I am not crazy about them as a whole. I can explain.

I am privileged in that I am a supporter of the Prado Museum through their Amigos del Museo del Prado program which is (mostly) fantastic. The main advantage of this “membership” is free access to the museum, which I do take advantage of frequently, plus I love showing the museum to friends and in Tonxo Tours.

So, I often get to see El Greco’s work. Domenico Theotocopulos (1541–1614) was born in Crete, moved to Venice, Rome, Madrid and eventually Toledo, where he would flourish. One of the many interesting things about El Greco was how much nineteenth-century collectors and artists loved his work. Why? Because he was an Impressionist avant la lettre!

Picasso and Renoir were blown away by El Greco, here was someone painting how he wanted to paint more than what he “saw”, a very unreal, conceptual art, and around three hundred years before them!

Why am I pontificating thus? you ask. Well, I recently had the opportunity to visit one of my favorite places in South Florida, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. They have just opened a new exhibition titled Artists in Motion: Impressionist and Modern Masterpieces from the Pearlman Collection. It is a smaller exhibit with some niece pieces: a Gaugin wood carving, a van Gogh, some Cezanne, a couple of Modigliani, etc. My favorite was a Modigliani portrait of Jean Cocteau -yes, you could say it is very Grecoish.

When I am at the Norton, I always enjoy walking around and checking out the permanent collection, the gift shop, the sculpture garden, it is all a very rewarding and enriching, my blood pressure goes down. As I have said before many times, an oasis of culture and beauty in South Florida.

Museo Sorolla

July 3, 2015June 21, 2015 / antonioyrocinante / 2 Comments

Literally a block away from my parents’ flat in Madrid is the Museo Sorolla. A little jewel of a museum. It is the urban palazzo of turn of the century painter Joaquín Sorolla which now houses his museum.

Once cleared the gate you are welcomed into a small refreshing garden. An oasis in the middle of downtown Madrid, surrounded by apartment buildings, shops and offices.

If being in the garden seems like a departure from the city, walking into the museum takes you to Sorolla’s beloved Mediterranean coast, where he painted most of his oeuvre. Some of the paintings are massive, but more important is the artists’ grasp of light. You see, light on the Mediterranean is quite different from light anywhere else – if you have not seen it, you will have to trust me on this one. Sorolla captures that light, that breeze, that heat, and puts it on the canvas, which is the reason he is called the “painter of light”. While some people label him an impressionist, he is beyond impressionism. The house also holds a lot of art that was given to him, his great collection of Valencia ceramic, where he was from, and many of his random knick-knacks.

Since I was a teenager, having the museum so close to home was a blessing and a curse. I did not always go into the museum, I just stayed in the garden, reading. But knowing that it was there I took it for granted and did not visit for a long time. A couple of years ago my sister Susana and I took our niece and nephew for a nice visit. This May, during a coffee run, I sneaked in for a few moments of escape.