The Thyssen Part I

The overseer of this collection is ― and I shit you not ― Maria del Carmen Rosario Soledad Cervera y Fernandez de la Guerra Dowager Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszon et Imperfaiva. You can call her Carmen, or if you're on especially good terms, "Tita." She was Miss Spain in 1961 and today her job is that of a "socialite," not to mention a member of the board of directors of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Her husband, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who died in 2002, collected paintings like pimple-faced kids in the '90s collected Pogs.

The Thyssen's collection is an encyclopedic panorama of the history of painting, but here's the thing ― I don't allow myself to spend more than 1 hour and 45 minutes in any museum, so my focal point on this visit was on French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, German Expressionism, Fauvism, a few American masters and some other -isms that escape me right now.

There is a temporary exhibit of Rene Magritte's paintings currently on the ground floor, but I honestly think they let too many people in to this area. If I do catch the germ, I will be compelled to point Madrid's COVID trackers in this direction. Below, Magritte's "Philosopher's Lamp" from 1936.

Magritte is like that smart kid you befriend in school, and he invites you over to his house, and it smells funny and it turns out he's interested in stuff you hate, like Pogs, say. Take the "Promenades of Euclid," one of his many "picture within a picture" paintings. The edge of the canvas, the window, the easel, the curtains are all supposed to erode your confidence in what you're seeing. The conical roof and the road look the same! Whoa! This played well in 1955 but doesn't even qualify as a parlor trick in this age of deep fakes and Photoshop.

I can't believe it took me six decades to figure out that the cover art to the Rascals album "See" (1969) (and its still-amazing title track) was swiped from Magritte's "The Great Family," painted just six years earlier.

I can think only of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" when I see Magritte's "The Listening Room" (1958). Alice drinks a potion and grows and grows until her head touches the ceiling and she has to poke her arm through the window because "there's no room to grow up anymore here." Similarly, I think I've outgrown this too-clever Belgian.