Reina Sofía National Art Museum

The building of the museum, built in 1781, joins the Classicism with the modernity of a Museum of Contemporary Art inaugurated in 1990, respecting the historical testimony and meeting the requirements of use. The idea was to join most of the centres and hospices of the city in one building. It was built during King Felipe II´ s reign, in 1566. Carlos III entrusted the project of the hospital to Sabatini, building just part of the project.

The restoration of the building carried out by Fernandez Alba started in 1880 and at the end this year, José Luis Iñiguez de Onzoño and Antonio Vázquez de Castro continued with the last modifications from which the three towers made of glass and steel are relevant. The last architectural intervention is the enlargement made by the architect Jean Nouvel (2001- 2005).

The collections from the old MEAC (Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo), the new acquisitions made by the museum and the donations, such as Dalí and Julio González´ s, covert its walls.

The collection is distributed along 17 rooms where you can see the evolution of the Spanish art and its international context from the end of the XIX Century to the 40´s of the XX Century. In these rooms Modernism and Noucentismo are alternated. You can be witness of different artistic styles such as Cubism (Miró, Picasso, Juan Gris, Gargallo) and the Surrealism (Marx Ernst, René Magritte and Óscar Rodriguez.) During the postwar period groups such as Pórtico appeared as well as Zabaleta, Cossío and Tapiés pieces. Comparisons between Spanish and European vanguards, Informalism and Pop Art, Figurative Narrative and Minimal Art context, Anglada Camarasa, Solana, Iturrino, Zuloaga, María Blanchard, are part of the second part of the collection.

It is a wide and varied collection composed by paintings, sculptures, engravings, drawings, and installations that has one of the most important masterpieces in the Spanish Contemporary art: Pablo Picasso´ s Guernica, universal proof of Humanity. Names such as Saura, Tapiés, Chillida and the foreigners Newman or Klein are also relevant.

The so- called temporary collections take place in the Velázquez Palace or in the Glass Palace. The ground floor receives the last trends of the most novel authors, in the so- called Espacio Uno. The enlargement that took place in the museum consists of three buildings that basically receive temporary collections, an auditorium with a capacity of 500 people and another smaller one with a capacity of 200 people, as well an art library.