Handpicked experience · Madrid
Madrid, Spain
A mural painted in a fortnight for a world's fair, kept out of Spain until 1981, and photographed by Dora Maar at eight stages as it changed.
Experience the beauty of Spain's awe-inspiring 20th-century art at the famous Reina Sofia Museum.
Explore the museum's various permanent collections and temporary exhibitions at your own pace and time.
Picasso's Guernica, in its own room within the modern collection
Access to the galleries and everything on display during your visit
A location beside Atocha station, easy to pair with Madrid's other museums
A visit as short or as long as you like, from ninety minutes upward
A dated entry ticket to the Reina Sofía, Spain's national museum of modern art and the building that holds Guernica. Entry is on your own terms: no guide, no audio commentary, no fixed route. Most people give it ninety minutes and the ones who plan properly give it three hours.
You arrive for the slot on your ticket and go in. The collection runs across several floors of the old hospital and its glass extension, and Guernica sits in the middle of it with its own room. Nothing else is scheduled — you set the order and the pace, and you can stay as long as the museum is open.
In 1937 the Spanish Republic asked Picasso for a mural for its pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. He had done nothing for months. Then German and Italian aircraft bombed the Basque town of Gernika on a market afternoon, and he began painting within a fortnight. It went up in Paris a few weeks later, in a pavilion visitors walked through on their way to the German and Soviet ones facing each other outside.
Picasso left the canvas in the care of the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a condition attached: it was to go to Spain when public liberties were restored there, and not before. He died in 1973 without seeing that happen. The painting crossed the Atlantic in 1981, six years after Franco, and for its first fourteen years in Madrid it hung behind bulletproof glass with armed guards on the door.
What surrounds the canvas is more interesting than most visitors realise: roughly sixty preparatory studies, and a sequence of photographs taken by Dora Maar as the work progressed. She recorded it at eight separate stages, which means you can stand in front of the finished mural and then watch it argue with itself — figures raised, dropped, turned, a clenched fist painted out, the horse changing position entirely.
The mural is three and a half metres tall and nearly eight long, and there is not a single colour in it. Picasso worked from newspaper reports and press photographs of the bombing, and the black, white and grey of the finished thing carries that directly; one section is painted to imitate the halftone dots of a printed page.
The two collections split at 1881 — the year Picasso was born. Anything earlier belongs to the Prado down the road; anything later is here. That single decision is why you find Dalí, Miró and Juan Gris in this building rather than the other one, and why walking between the two museums is a walk through a single national collection cut in half by a date.
Entry runs to the time printed on your ticket. Large bags go to the cloakroom before you go up. Photography is restricted in the Guernica room and enforced. Cancellation is not free on this booking.
Open it to pick a date and work out the price.
What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
No. This is a dated entry ticket and the visit is self-directed, so the order and the pace are yours from the moment you go in.
Ninety minutes covers Guernica and the rooms immediately around it. Three hours lets you take the collection across both buildings without hurrying.
It was commissioned for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, and Picasso began it within a fortnight of German and Italian aircraft bombing the Basque town of Gernika on a market afternoon.
Picasso left it with the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the condition that it go to Spain only once public liberties were restored. He died in 1973; the painting arrived in 1981 and hung behind bulletproof glass for fourteen years.
About sixty preparatory studies and Dora Maar's photographs of the canvas at eight stages of work, so you can watch figures being raised, dropped, turned and painted out.
Because Picasso worked from the press coverage rather than from life, and kept the mural to the tones a newspaper could print. Look closely and one passage imitates halftone dots outright.
They divide at 1881, the year Picasso was born: earlier work is at the Prado down the road, later work is here, which is why Dalí, Miró and Juan Gris hang in this building.