Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in the context of Madrid Metro


Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in the context of Madrid Metro

⭐ Core Definition: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía ("Queen Sofía National Museum Art Centre"; MNCARS) is Spain's national museum of 20th-century art. The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992, and is named for Queen Sofía. It is located in Madrid, near the Atocha train and metro stations, at the southern end of the so-called Golden Triangle of Art (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 collections of Spain's two greatest 20th-century masters, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. 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 museums for modern and contemporary art. In 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic 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 in the world.

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Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in the context of Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum (Spanish: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, pronounced [muˈseo ˈtisen boɾneˈmisa]; named after its founder, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza), or simply the Thyssen, is an art museum in Madrid, Spain, located near the Prado Museum on one of the city's main boulevards. It is known as part of the "Golden Triangle of Art", which also includes the Prado and the Reina Sofía national galleries. The Thyssen-Bornemisza fills the historical gaps in its counterparts' collections: in the Prado's case this includes Italian primitives and works from the English, Dutch and German schools, while in the case of the Reina Sofía it concerns Impressionists, Expressionists, and European and American paintings from the 20th century.

With over 1,600 paintings, it was once the second largest private collection in the world after the British Royal Collection. A competition was held to house the core of the collection in 1987–88 after Baron Thyssen, having unsuccessfully sought permission to enlarge his museum in Lugano (Villa Favorita), searched for a better-suited location elsewhere in Europe.

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Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in the context of Guernica (town)

Guernica (/ɡərˈnkə, ˈɡɜːrnɪkə/, Spanish pronunciation: [ɡeɾˈnika]), officially Gernika (pronounced [ɡernika]) in Basque, is a town in the province of Biscay, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain. The town of Guernica is one part (along with neighbouring Lumo) of the municipality of Gernika-Lumo (Spanish: Guernica y Luno), whose population was 16,224 as of 2009.

On April 26, 1937, Guernica was bombed by Nazi Germany's Condor Legion and Fascist Italy's Aviazione Legionaria, in one of the first aerial bombings. The attack inspired Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica, depicting his outrage at the attack.

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