Slowing Down

If the first few days my sister Pat and her friend Helen were here seemed hyper-active by Karen’s and my usual slow-travel standards, the next few were decidedly calmer.

On the Sunday – I’m still writing about more than a week ago, the 12th of March – the ladies set their sights on the cathedral and a couple of fairly major museums: the Picasso and the Carmen Thyssen. Karen and I joined them for the cathedral in the morning, our first time inside after walking around and by it dozens of times since arriving. It’s difficult to avoid in this city, especially if you live where we do.

You pay to enter the cathedral most days. Today, it was free, as it was open for services. There was a mass in progress when we went in, which limited where we could go and what we could see. The nave is partly enclosed – an unusual design – so the altar wasn’t even visible from the back of the church where we came in. There were big TV screens set up so overflow worshippers in one side aisle towards the back could see the service. It was possible to walk up towards the front on that side and get a glimpse of the altar and congregation, but it felt like intruding. Mostly we just enjoyed the sense of immensity and richness, which is readily enough apparent just walking around the outside, but heightened inside. We may go back and pay for a proper tour.

After the church, Pat and Helen were going off to see the Museo Picasso Málaga, which is not far away. In the late afternoon, we planned to visit the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga together, when admission would be free. Many museums here are free the last two hours on Sunday. Karen and I had decided to wait for another Sunday to do the Picasso during the late afternoon free period. Being cheapskates and all. So we went off for a walk down to the harbour and beach instead.

Bishop's palace from cathedral porch

At the harbour, we poked into the Muelle One artspace near the Pompidou Centre. There are open retail areas and some enclosed shops under an over-hang, selling mostly not very exciting art. There’s also a lounge area served by a small bar. Some amusing outdoor metal sculptures of imaginary creatures made with found objects earned a second glance (but not much more). Two stages were set up. One wasn’t active. The other was doing some kind of advertising/DJ/hip-hop event. We couldn’t really figure out what the hell was going on, but it had attracted a small crowd.

We walked to the pier out to the cruise ship dock – where a big one was moored this day – and then along the beach a bit before cutting back up to the city and home.

Pat and Helen turned up some time later. They were lukewarm about the Picasso museum. Apparently only a limited number of works were on display because the museum is undergoing some big change. By the time we go, they assured us, a new permanent exhibition should be in place with many more pieces. I think they thought it was important to have seen, but not a great experience. Neither of them, it seems, is much of a Picasso fan.

We lounged around the flat for a couple of hours and then set out about five to go to the Thyssen, which is only 15 minutes away on foot. As often seems to happen in this city, the information we had about opening hours was conflicting or wrong. We thought the museum was open till seven, meaning it would be free from 5. When we arrived, we found a line-up to get in. We had been warned about this possibility. It didn’t seem to be moving very fast, though, or at all. It turned out the museum was actually open until eight, so this was the line-up for free admission at six. They did let us in a bit before the hour, though. Very confusing. We’re on Spanish time here.

Across from Carmen Thyssen Museum: spotted while queuing for admission

The Thyssen is a branch plant of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The Thyssen in the name is Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza,  a Dutch-born Swiss industrialist of the mid-20th century with a Hungarian title. Carmen was his fifth wife (or possibly third, depending on which Wikipedia article you believe), a former Miss Spain, who began the collection now in the Málaga museum.  It’s mostly historical Spanish art, with the main focus being Andalusian art of the 19th century. The museum usually has a couple of temporary exhibits as well.

The current temporary exhibit that interested me, and Pat also, was of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, most from the collection of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao. I had not realized Pat was such a fan. She told us she had often taken time from her research at the British Museum when she was doing her Masters in the mid-1970s to sneak away to an exhibit of Japanese prints on at the time. I’ve been a fan from about the same period. Karen and I still have some modern reproduction prints on our wall that were made by re-cutting blocks from original designs by ukioy-e masters, then printing them using traditional methods. We bought them for, I think, $25 each, soon after moving to Toronto in 1980.

This was not a big exhibit, just one small room. And many of the prints, to my eye, looked faded. But there were some good ones, including by some of the big names such as Hiroshige and Hokusai. Ukioy-e refers to depictions of the “floating world” the demi-monde in Tokyo during the Endo period (mid 17th to mid 19th century). Subjects include actors, courtesans, street scenes, iconic landscapes. They were often bound in books – which were then ripped apart to sell the prints separately when the prints became wildly popular in Europe in the early 20th century.

The museum’s permanent collection includes a few choice pieces, but no great masterpieces by artists whose names you’d recognize. There was one nice portrait by Ramón Casas Carbó, who is sometimes referred to as just Ramón Casas. (You may have seen reproductions of his famous painting of two casually-dressed, pipe-smoking Edwardian gents riding a tandem bicycle.)

Ramón Casas Carbó: Julia

Famous painting by Ramón Casas (not at the Carmen Thyssen Málaga)

Julio Vila y Prades: Valencians

Eduardo Léon Garrido: The Beau

And that was our Sunday. I think I fed them a meal of sausages and rice that night. Yum, yum, said Pat, the vegetarian.

On Tuesday, the weather changed. It was cooler – single-digits-celsius cool - and threatening rain. This was the day Pat and Helen were heading to Granada. Pat was still sick, but claiming to be better. (She was diagnosed with bronchitis and conjunctivitis when she got home and put on antibiotics.) She wore a thick sweater of mine under a thin rain jacket, and tights under her jeans. She did have gloves with her. They insisted on walking to the bus station and set off fairly early to catch their mid-morning bus. It would get them there about noon. It was even cooler in Granada, which is right below the Sierra Nevada mountains. Snow was not out of the question.

This was my birthday. O joy! I’m 67, officially now in my late sixties. We did little with the day. We got out for a walk around the old city. And in the afternoon, we visited the Jorge Rando Museum, which is just up the street from us.

New street art spotted on our walk today

It’s a museum run by a foundation devoted to the work of the contemporary Malagueno artist, a painter of expressionist and abstract pieces. Rando trained and lived in Germany for many years, but came back and settled here in the mid-1980s. He’s in his seventies now.

Rando has won important international prizes and his work is exhibited all over the world. Still, I’m curious how an artist this challenging – his work will not be to everyone’s taste – can be so well off that he can afford to support such a lovely little jewel of a museum. Admission is always free, and the place also offers studio space and networking opportunities for other artists, and free concerts and lectures. I looked for information on the web about how much his paintings sell for, but couldn’t find anything. Tens of thousands euros, I’m guessing.  

It’s not just his own work on display. He has exhibits of other artists’ work that change about every six months. Right now it’s a show called Encounter Jore Rando - Carlos Ciriza, juxtaposing paintings by Rando with rusty metal abstract sculptures by Ciriza, a friend of his. The Ciriza sculptures I found only mildly interesting. The Rando paintings are arresting.

He has two styles. One is what I think of as expressionist, a little bit reminiscent of early 20th century German expressionism, representational but with gross distortions of colour and form. In this mode, he tackles big subjects such as violence and poverty in Africa – he’s been there more than once on painting expeditions apparently – and prostitution. The paintings can be dark and harrowing, not always easy to look at.

In his other style, he’s a pure colourist, with a palette that reminds me a little of Wassily Kandinsky, but with a much more gestural approach – seemingly random, overlapping daubs of bright luminescent colour. It’s Rando in a joyful mood, quite different from the dark pessimism of the African paintings.

I had spent some time on the web searching for a good restaurant for my birthday, but being Spain on a Monday, many were closed, including most of the highest rated by TripAdvisor. Late in the day, I realized I didn’t have energy or stomach for a fancy meal anyway. So we went back to Ciao, the Italian restaurant down on Calle Carreteria that we’d gone to with Shelley. And I had a pizza again. Karen had something a little more festive, but it’s not a fancy restaurant.

We’d taken umbrellas because it was threatening rain when we set out. I left mine on the table at the restaurant, so had to run back for it while Karen continued on home. When the waiter handed me the umbrella, I asked him, ‘Como se dice umbrella en espagnol?’ (How do you say umbrella in Spanish?) He looked at me for a second like a deer in headlights, then shrugged and said, in English, grinning, ‘I don’t know – umbrello?’ Then he called out to one of his colleagues, who gave us the right word – paraguas. So I asked him if he was Italian, which of course he was. ‘We all are,’ he said, grinning again.

The next day, the Tuesday, when Pat and Helen were touring Alhambra, it rained all day in Málaga. Karen and I didn’t budge from the apartment. I think there may have been Scrabble – I’m now way ahead in the season series – and I know there was time spent processing photos.

Pat and Helen got back a little before nine. I had been worried about Pat. I remembered our day at Alhambra as fairly strenuous, but that was a lovely sunny day, and I wasn’t sick. Pat seemed fine – tired, naturally, but no worse. It hadn’t rained very hard in Granada, they said, so they didn’t get wet. They did get cold, however. Much of Alhambra is outdoors or open to the outdoors. And I don’t think it got above 8C in Granada that day. It was quite a bit warmer here. In fact, it was still warmer here – about 14C – when they got off the bus.

The next day was Pat’s and Helen’s last in the city. They were leaving for the airport first thing the next morning. They went out souvenir shopping in the morning. Pat came back with cool T-shirts for Mike and Rob from one of the little boutiques down an alleyway on our usual route into the city. Nothing for Dave or Ralph or Jack? I don’t remember seeing what Helen bought.

Their only request was to go for a walk down to the seaside again. They had been there briefly the first day, but not since. So down we went, via the usual circuitous path through the historic centre. Karen and I are beginning to know the fastest routes to get where we want to go, and rarely use a map anymore, but it’s fun to meander.

The day was much warmer, in the high teens, with some sun, but hazy. The sea was all roiled, and very high on the beach, presumably the aftermath of the weather we’d had over the last few days. Nobody was in the water today, except a gaggle of brave surfers, none of whom seemed able to get up on their boards for long, or most of them, at all. This was probably as rough seas as we’ve seen on the Meditteranean coast.

We walked along the beach a way, then cut back up near the big renovated white hotel on the front, past the bullring and through the City Hall rose garden. We stopped in at a bar next to El Pimpi and a had a drink. Then the ladies went off for a visit to the Museo de Málaga, the big new museum housing the province’s historic art and archaeology collections. Karen and I went home to do housework, drudges that we are.

Pat and Helen were lukewarm on this museum too. They didn’t do well on museums here. They liked the space, which is apparently beautifully renovated, but the art collection wasn’t up to much, which was perhaps to be expected. With a few obvious exceptions, pre-20th century Spanish art – which most of this was – is not exactly full of great names or great masterpieces. When we go, perhaps we’ll concentrate on the archaeology first. Pat and Helen didn’t get to the relics.

We had a very nice dinner at home, courtesy of Karen, and the ladies spent the evening packing, and turned in early as they needed to be up betimes the next day. Their plan was to grab a cab at the taxi rank up the street by about 8:15.

Everybody was up in plenty of time the next morning. I walked up the street and saw them off the premises. There were lots of cabs at the rank – contrary to my fears that this would be one of the rare times there were none.

Hasta la vista, Pat y Elina. Buen viaje, y muchas gracias.