As I mentioned in my San Sebastian post the other day, I had the wonderful opportunity to go to the Guggenheim Bilbao.
From the day it opened in 1997, the Guggenheim Bilbao has been high on my travel destination list and I was excited by finally having the opportunity to see it. We took the pleasant, comfortable bus coach from San Sebastian and arrived in Bilbao in an hour and ten minutes. We hopped a tram near the bus station for the short ride to the museum, and the little we saw of the city was lackluster and architecturally uninteresting.
Posed upon a murky green river against a modern suspension bridge, the museum, a glass and titanium layered behemoth, is a stunner. The gray hues of the building meshed into the gray clouds above, created a perfect neutral palette for photo taking. I slowly walked around the perimeter of the amazing structure, taking pictures from every conceivable angle and every few steps finding another breathtaking shot. The 30-foot Louise Bourgeois steel and marble sculpture Maman, the largest spider I’ve ever seen, loomed over the landscape with a menacing presence. After 20 minutes of clicking away the outside, we were ready to enter the museum but couldn’t find the entrance or even a sign for it. Finally, there was a small, almost undetectable sign pointing to the entrance, which was up a long stairway. After schlepping up the tiring stairway, we had to go down another one to get to the entrance. We were peeved about how un-user friendly the museum was. In between the stairways was the massive and amusing Jeff Koons Puppy of green leaves and planted red, yellow, white, and orange flowers. It looked like a Chia pet experiment gone very wrong.
Once inside, we were so exhausted from trying to find the entrance, we decided to have a nice, long lunch for Rosemary’s birthday in the museum restaurant. The very tasty and well-executed three-course lunch with wine was an excellent food value for 18 euros.
Finally, we were ready to take in the art. Oddly enough the dramatic and strong lines of the outside of the building didn’t translate to the inside. Exhibition spaces were a hodgepodge of disjointed rooms with no flow. The best piece in the museum was Jenny Holzer’s “Installation for Bilboa, 1997”, a mesmerizing electronic sculpture. Going almost from floor to ceiling, the six, narrow message board towers spelled out English and Spanish messages in red on the front and Euskadi messages in blue on the back. The reflection of the blue words against the back wall creates a lunar-like atmosphere.
Jenny Holzer Installation,1997
I love Richard Serra’s sculptures, but like too much of a good thing, too many of them fill a cavernous room and become repetitive, losing their uniqueness.
The current show, Art in the U.S.A.: 300 years of Innovation, was a generic, mish-mosh of American artists (even the title is uninspired) from Sargent to Warhol, and looked like the permanent collection of most decent American county museums.
With all the pomp and circumstance of Richard Gehry’s showy architecture, it seems as though the art in the Guggenheim Bilbao took a major back seat to the design. Like a Hollywood starlet, she’s beautiful on the outside, but much ado about nothing on the inside.
For more photos, click on the Guggenheim Bilbao photo album on the right sidebar
Guggenheim Bilbao
Bilbao, Spain
I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour
includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.
I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com
