Museo Reina Sofía

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia on Calle Santa Isabel in Madrid is Spain's national museum of 20th and 21st-century art and one of the world's foremost modern art institutions. The museum occupies a converted 18th-century royal hospital, the Hospital General de Madrid, designed by Francesco Sabatini, whose severe neoclassical facade remains intact while the interior was entirely transformed for museum use. Jean Nouvel's metallic red and silver building, added to the rear in 2005, provides additional gallery, archive, and library space and is itself a major work of contemporary architecture. The museum's principal work — and one of the most significant paintings of the 20th century — is Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937), displayed in Room 206 on the second floor. The large-format canvas, measuring 3.49 by 7.76 metres, depicts the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi German and Fascist Italian warplanes during the Spanish Civil War on 26 April 1937, commissioned for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. Guernica was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1939 until its transfer to Spain in 1981, following the restoration of democracy. Room 206 presents the painting alongside Picasso's complete series of preparatory sketches and studies, providing extensive context for the work's development. The permanent collection — presented in two sequences, Collection 1 on the second and fourth floors of the Sabatini building (approximately 1900 to 1968) and Collection 2 in the Nouvel Building (1962 to the present) — is particularly strong in Spanish and European avant-garde movements: Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Major holdings include Joan Miro's large format paintings, Salvador Dali's The Great Masturbator (1929), and substantial works by Juan Gris. The museum is named after Queen Sofia and opened in its current form in 1992.