The Paseo del Arte

It is fortunate that the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, facing Estación de Atocha at the end of Paseo del Prado, keeps slightly different opening hours and days to its neighbours. For this leading exhibition space and permanent gallery of modern Spanish art – its centrepiece is Picasso’s greatest picture, Guernica – is another essential stop on the Madrid art circuit, and one that really mustn’t be seen after a Prado–Thyssen overdose.

The museum, a vast former hospital, is a kind of Madrid response to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with transparent lifts shuttling visitors up the outside of the Sabatini building to the permanent collection. Like the other two great art museums, it has also undergone a major extension programme – the French architect Jean Nouvel has added a massive state-of-the-art metal-and-glass wing behind the main block. If the queues at the main entrance are too long, try the alternative one in the new extension on the Ronda de Atocha. You can also buy tickets in advance via the website.

It is for Picasso’s Guernica that most visitors come to the Reina Sofía, and rightly so. Superbly displayed, this icon of twentieth-century Spanish art and politics carries a shock that defies all familiarity. Picasso painted it in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Gernika by the German Luftwaffe, acting in concert with Franco, in the Spanish Civil War. In the fascinating preliminary studies, displayed around the room, you can see how he developed its symbols – the dying horse, the woman mourning her dead, the bull, the sun, the flower, the light bulb – and then return to the painting to marvel at how he made it all work.

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza occupies the old Palacio de Villahermosa, diagonally opposite the Prado, at the end of Plaza de las Cortes. This prestigious site played a large part in Spain’s acquisition – for a knock-down $350 million in June 1993 – of what many argue was the world’s greatest private art trove after that of the British royals: seven-hundred-odd paintings accumulated by father-and-son German–Hungarian industrial magnates. The son, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen, died in April 2002 aged 81. Another trump card was the late baron’s fifth wife, Carmen Cervera (aka “Tita” Cervera), a former Miss Spain, who steered the works to Spain against the efforts of Britain’s Prince Charles, the Swiss and German governments, the Getty foundation and other suitors.

The museum had no expense spared on its design – again in the hands of the ubiquitous Rafael Moneo, responsible for the remodelling of Estación de Atocha and the extension at the Prado – with stucco walls (Carmen insisted on salmon pink) and marble floors. A terribly kitsch portrait of Carmen with a lapdog hangs in the great hall of the museum, alongside those of her husband and King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía. Pass beyond, however, and you are into seriously premier-league art: medieval to eighteenth–century on the second floor, seventeenth-century Dutch and Rococo and Neoclassicism to Fauves and Expressionists on the first floor, and Surrealists, Pop Art and the avant-garde on ground level. Highlights are legion in a collection that displays an almost stamp-collecting mentality in its examples of nearly every major artist and movement: how the Thyssens got hold of classic works by everyone from Duccio and Holbein, through El Greco and Caravaggio, to Schiele and Rothko, takes your breath away.

Carmen has a substantial collection of her own (over 600 works), which has been housed in the new extension, built on the site of an adjoining mansion and cleverly integrated into the original format of the museum. It is particularly strong on nineteenth-century landscape, North American, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work. The ground floor is home to a large temporary exhibition space, which has staged a number of interesting and highly successful shows.

There’s a handy cafeteria and restaurant in the new extension; there’s also a shop, where you can buy a wide variety of art books, guides to the museum, postcards and other souvenirs. In July and August the museum opens a restaurant on the top-floor terrace: El Mirador. Advance tickets for the museum, a good idea in high season, are available via the website.