The ''Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía'' ("Queen Sofía National Museum Art Centre"; MNCARS) is Spain's national museum of
20th-century art
Twentieth-century art—and what it became as modern art—began with modernism in the late nineteenth century.
Overview
Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism (Les Nabis), Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century ...
. The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992, and is named for
Queen Sofía
Queen or QUEEN may refer to:
Monarchy
* Queen regnant, a female monarch of a Kingdom
** List of queens regnant
* Queen consort, the wife of a reigning king
* Queen dowager, the widow of a king
* Queen mother, a queen dowager who is the mother ...
. It is located in
Madrid
Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the Largest cities of the Europ ...
, near the
Atocha train and
metro stations, at the southern end of the so-called
Golden Triangle of Art
The Paseo del Prado is one of the main boulevards in Madrid, Spain. It runs north–south between the Plaza de Cibeles and the Plaza del Emperador Carlos V (also known as Plaza de Atocha), with the Plaza de Cánovas del Castillo (the locati ...
(located along the
Paseo del Prado and also comprising the
Museo del Prado and the
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza).
The museum is mainly dedicated to Spanish art. Highlights of the museum include excellent collections of Spain's two greatest 20th-century masters,
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
and
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol (; ; ; 11 May 190423 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in ...
. The most famous masterpiece in the museum is Picasso's 1937 painting ''
Guernica''. Along with its extensive collection, the museum offers a mixture of national and international temporary exhibitions in its many galleries, making it one of the world's
largest
Large means of great size.
Large may also refer to:
Mathematics
* Arbitrarily large, a phrase in mathematics
* Large cardinal, a property of certain transfinite numbers
* Large category, a category with a proper class of objects and morphisms (o ...
museums for
modern and
contemporary
Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. Contemporary history is either a subset of the late modern period, or it is o ...
art. In 2021, due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
restrictions, it attracted 1,643,108 visitors, up 32 percent from 2020, but well below 2019 attendance. In 2021 It ranked eighth on the
list of most-visited art museums
This article lists the most-visited art museums in the world in 2021. The primary source is '' The Art Newspaper'' annual survey of the number of visitors to major art museums in 2021, published 28 March 2022.
Total attendance in the top one hu ...
in the world.
It also hosts a free-access library specializing in art, with a collection of over 100,000 books, over 3,500 sound recordings, and almost 1,000 videos.
Collection
The museum is mainly dedicated to Spanish art. Highlights of the museum include excellent collections of Spain's two greatest 20th-century masters,
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
and
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol (; ; ; 11 May 190423 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in ...
. Certainly, the most famous masterpiece in the museum is Picasso's painting ''
Guernica''. The Reina Sofía collection has works by artists such as
Joan Miró,
Eduardo Chillida
Eduardo Chillida Juantegui, or Eduardo Txillida Juantegi in Basque (10 January 1924 – 19 August 2002), was a Spanish Basque sculptor notable for his monumental abstract works.
Early life and career
Born in San Sebastián (Donostia) to P ...
,
Pablo Gargallo
Pablo EmilioorPau Emili Gargallo (5 January 1881 – 28 December 1934), known simply as Pau or Pablo Gargallo, was a Spanish sculptor and painter.
Life and career
Born in Maella, Aragon, he moved to Barcelona, with his family in 1888, where ...
,
Julio González,
Luis Gordillo,
Juan Gris
José Victoriano González-Pérez (23 March 1887 – 11 May 1927), better known as Juan Gris (; ), was a Spanish painter born in Madrid who lived and worked in France for most of his active period. Closely connected to the innovative artistic ge ...
,
José Gutiérrez Solana,
Lucio Muñoz,
Jorge Oteiza,
Julio Romero de Torres,
Pablo Serrano, and
Antoni Tàpies.
International art represented in the collection include works by
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...
,
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( , ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy. He was a founder of a provocative art mov ...
,
Pierre Bonnard,
Georges Braque,
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and hi ...
,
Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941) was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstra ...
,
Max Ernst
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealis ...
,
Lucio Fontana,
Sarah Grilo,
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst (; né
Brennan; born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingd ...
,
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism (a term he nonetheless stridently disavowed).Tate Modern websit"Tate Modern Past Exhibitions Donald Judd" Retrieved on February 19, 2009. In ...
,
Vasily Kandinsky,
Paul Klee
Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented ...
,
Yves Klein,
Fernand Léger,
Jacques Lipchitz
Jacques Lipchitz (26 May 1973) was a Cubist sculptor. Lipchitz retained highly figurative and legible components in his work leading up to 1915–16, after which naturalist and descriptive elements were muted, dominated by a synthetic style of ...
,
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte (; 21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and bound ...
,
Henry Moore,
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.
Life and work ...
,
Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco (born April 27, 1962) is a Mexican artist. He gained his reputation in the early 1990s with his exploration of drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. In 1998, Francesco Bonami called Orozco "one of the most influentia ...
,
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super h ...
,
Man Ray
Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to eac ...
,
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the ...
,
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko (), born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, link=no, lv, Markuss Rotkovičs, link=no; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Lat ...
,
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel (born October 26, 1951) is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been ...
,
Richard Serra
Richard Serra (born November 2, 1938) is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, Urban area, urban, and Architecture, architectural settings. Serra's sculptures are notable for their material q ...
,
Cindy Sherman
Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.
Her breakthrough work is often co ...
,
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately follow ...
,
Yves Tanguy, and
Wolf Vostell.
Gallery
History of the building
Hospital
The building is on the site of the first General Hospital of Madrid.
King Philip II centralised all the hospitals that were scattered throughout the court. In the eighteenth century,
King Ferdinand VI
, house = Bourbon-Anjou
, father = Philip V of Spain
, mother = Maria Luisa of Savoy
, birth_date = 23 September 1713
, birth_place = Royal Alcazar of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
, death_date =
, death_place = Villavici ...
decided to build a new hospital because the facilities at the time were insufficient for the city. The building was designed by architect
José de Hermosilla and his successor
Francisco Sabatini who did the majority of the work. In 1805, after numerous work stoppages, the building was to assume its function that it had been built for, which was being a hospital, although only one-third of the proposed project by Sabatini was completed. Since then it has undergone various modifications and additions until, in 1969, it was closed down as a hospital.
Art museum
Extensive modern renovations and additions to the old building were made starting in 1980. The central building of the museum was once an 18th-century hospital. The building functioned as the Centro del Arte (Art Centre) from 1986 until established as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 1988. In 1988, portions of the new museum were opened to the public, mostly in temporary configurations; that same year it was decreed by the Ministry of Culture as a national museum. Its architectural identity was radically changed in 1989 by
Ian Ritchie with the addition of three glass circulation towers.
Expansion
An 8000 m
2 (86,000 ft
2) expansion costing €92 million designed by French architect
Jean Nouvel
Jean Nouvel (; born 12 August 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of ''Mars 1976'' and '' Syndicat de l'Architecture'', France’s first labor union for architects. He has o ...
opened in October 2005. The extension includes spaces for temporary exhibitions, an auditorium of 500 seats, and a 200-seat auditorium, a bookshop, restaurants and administration offices.
ducks scéno was consultant for scenographic equipment of auditoriums and Arau Acustica for acoustic studies.
Other facilities
Reina Sofía has other two places where several exhibitions usually take place. There are the
Crystal Palace
Crystal Palace may refer to:
Places Canada
* Crystal Palace Complex (Dieppe), a former amusement park now a shopping complex in Dieppe, New Brunswick
* Crystal Palace Barracks, London, Ontario
* Crystal Palace (Montreal), an exhibition building ...
and the
Velázquez Palace, both in
Retiro Park.
File:Reina Sofía front gate.jpg, Front entrance
File:Museum Reina Sofía Madrid Spain Espana this is a front photo close up at the Queen Sofia Museum in 2011 month of June.jpg, Close up of the front of the Reina Sofía in Madrid Spain.
File:Ampliación del Reina Sofía (2).jpg, Reina Sofía Museum
File:Reina Sofía interior.jpg, Interior gallery photo inside the Reina Sofía Museum
File:MNCARS ampliación 10.jpg, Inside the Reina Sofía Museum
File:Palacio de Cristal, Retiro, Madrid.jpg, Crystal Palace in the Retiro Park, a Reina Sofía exhibition centre
Notable works
*''
Guernica'' by
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
*''
The Great Masturbator'' by
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol (; ; ; 11 May 190423 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in ...
*''
Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi'' by
Richard Serra
Richard Serra (born November 2, 1938) is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, Urban area, urban, and Architecture, architectural settings. Serra's sculptures are notable for their material q ...
*''
6 TV Dé-Coll/age'' by
Wolf Vostell
Popular culture references
The museum features, as a major protagonist, in
Jim Jarmusch's ''
The Limits of Control'' (2009).
In the 2003 Spanish film ''
Noviembre'', the school entrance scenes and some performance scenes were shot in the square in front of the museum.
See also
*
List of most visited art museums
This article lists the most-visited art museums in the world in 2021. The primary source is ''The Art Newspaper'' annual survey of the number of visitors to major art museums in 2021, published 28 March 2022.
Total attendance in the top one hun ...
*
Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre de Alcalá de Henares
References
;Informational notes
;Citations
External links
*
Virtual tour of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofíaprovided by
Google Arts & Culture
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Arte Reina Sofía
Reina Sofia
Reina Sofía
Reina Sofía
Reina Sofia
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Museo may refer to:
* Museo, 2018 Mexican drama heist film
*Museo (Naples Metro)
Museo is a station on line 1 of the Naples Metro. It was opened on 5 April 2001 as the eastern terminus of the section of the line between Vanvitelli and Museo. ...
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Museo may refer to:
* Museo, 2018 Mexican drama heist film
*Museo (Naples Metro)
Museo is a station on line 1 of the Naples Metro. It was opened on 5 April 2001 as the eastern terminus of the section of the line between Vanvitelli and Museo. ...
Defunct hospitals in Spain
Art museums established in 1992
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Museo may refer to:
* Museo, 2018 Mexican drama heist film
*Museo (Naples Metro)
Museo is a station on line 1 of the Naples Metro. It was opened on 5 April 2001 as the eastern terminus of the section of the line between Vanvitelli and Museo. ...
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Museo may refer to:
* Museo, 2018 Mexican drama heist film
*Museo (Naples Metro)
Museo is a station on line 1 of the Naples Metro. It was opened on 5 April 2001 as the eastern terminus of the section of the line between Vanvitelli and Museo. ...
Buildings and structures in Embajadores neighborhood, Madrid