Bilbao Guggenheim 1

Gaudi in the morning, the Bilbao Guggenheim in the afternoon. It was a pretty good day of art and architecture. And not unrelated, too. From the organic structures of brick and tile and iron and wood and color of Gaudi, more than a century ago, we pass to the glass, titanium, limestone, colorless, huge, billowing, “organic,” hardly a straight line except for floors and elevator shafts, lines of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. Memories of the Sydney Opera, the Ba'Hai Lotus Temple in New Delhi, both of which I disliked. But the Bilbao Guggenheim grows on you, particularly when you consider the contemporary art it is intended to contain. In fact, its major defect is that the “building” itself overshadows anything it could contain. Not a good thing for a museum. Well, almost anything. The Bilbao aire is on a hill overlooking the valley and city from the west. Buses run to the city center and its tram and metro systems every 20 minutes. We checked in in the early afternoon, temperatures already in the 90s, and quickly took the bus down to see the Guggenheim and a bit of the city. The Bilbao Guggenheim is by no means the most wonderful thing we have seen, though it's nothing less than a must-see. It is perhaps the most difficult to render into a post or two or three that tells any sort of coherent story. So I'll just present a number of pix, in two posts, that reflect our experience there. In chronological order, more or less. The David Hockney exhibit is about the largest one-person show I have seen--five or six different halls--and only the last 10 years of his work. Anyhow, if you visit this area, do visit the Guggenheim, and particularly Richard Serra's A Matter of Time exhibit, which required its own very large building. Getting some sense of what the Guggenheim has done for Bilbao--a formerly very gritty industrial city--is worth a visit too.