Twenty-three years ago, I spent my junior year abroad in Madrid. For half the year, I lived in a small apartment just off El Paseo de Recoletos, a short and pleasant walk to the Museo del Prado, one of the world’s great art museums.
At the time, I knew very little about art—a fact that really hasn’t changed much since then—but in just one day, the Prado changed my mind about the importance of art, museums, and a certain kind of education.
I had not taken an art-history class, but several of my Spanish-history professors had shown me works by Picasso. They told me his work was important, but the reasons they gave never registered with me. I don’t think this was their fault; I just wasn’t ready to hear them. In my teenage wisdom, I thought Picasso’s work was childish, poorly done, and not very interesting. If you’ve tried to draw or paint, you have some experience by which to judge the technical merit of representational art: It’s hard to draw well, so it’s easy to see when a trompe l’oeil or a facsimile of a human face is well done.
With that as my main (and admittedly philistine) criterion, I discovered some other painters I liked in the Prado, especially Hieronymus Bosch (because he was entertaining in his weirdness) and Diego Velázquez (who is easy to look at, and whose paintings rewarded repeated viewings with new insights). To some degree, I also came to admire Goya. Although I thought his work was a little cartoonish, his paintings conveyed human feeling that I could relate to.
But the Picasso I knew through my history books and through slides shown in the classroom left me cold and unimpressed. Was that really the best he could do? Did the man not know how to draw a face? Or a horse? His images were jumbled like fever dreams, hard to focus on, hard to follow. My eyes sought a resting place, a vanishing point, something to ground the perspective and bring everything into focus, but I could find none.
So when I walked to the Prado, I always skipped the building nearby where Picasso’s alleged masterpiece “Guernica” was kept. Still, as the semester drew to a close, I thought I’d better go have a look, so that I could say I’d seen it and so that when I pronounced Picasso to be a fraud, as I certainly would, I could speak with the authority of someone who knows what he’s talking about.
The Casón del Buen Retiro is not a big building. I thought I’d slip in, glance at the painting, then pop back out and head home for lunch.
The first challenge to my plan was the building’s architecture. As I recall, I had to choose one of two dimly lit hallways leading straight ahead, one slightly to the right, one to the left. “Guernica” was nowhere in sight.
I chose the left and took off at a steady pace. Let’s get this over with, I thought. But immediately a sketch on my right, in a lighted box, caught my attention. I slowed to glance at it, then stopped at the next, and the next. The hallway was short, but it took me 10 minutes to walk its length, as I paused to take in Picasso’s studies. Here was a horse, a very recognizable horse. Here, in the next study, was that same horse, but this one was contorted in fear. The next study was not a particular horse, but a picture of what horses look like when they are afraid. The next was an icon of holy equine terror.
I’d had no idea. This museum apparently was not a locked space for storing images; it was a classroom in which I could watch Picasso labor over this painting. I had thought him a hack who couldn’t draw; here I saw the artist at work. As I watched the horse transform, I began to tremble. This was something new, something I had not anticipated.
Just ahead I could see that the hallway ended, and I would have to turn to the right to face the painting. I was afraid of what I would see. I took a breath, and walked briskly into the room, intending to keep my jaw firm, my spine straight, my knees steady. I turned and looked.
And then I fell down.
The memory is hard to pull up now. Not because it lacks vividness, but precisely because it is so vivid and powerful. When I turned that corner and saw “Guernica,” I had the feeling I was standing in front of something holy—holy in the way that only the sudden violence of the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion dropping predawn hell from the sky can be. Holy as in terror, the sudden rift as incendiary bombs tear the darkness, and homes, and bodies, in half. Holy as in the bright, terrifying end of peace.
Which is to say that Picasso knocked me to my knees by transporting me to a distant time and place where I could glimpse what I never, ever wanted to see.
There’s a good chance you had a better art-history education than I did. You know the story of the Spanish Civil War and of Hitler’s role in the predawn bombing of the Basque village of Gernika in 1937. You know about Picasso’s own development and his place in art history. If so, much of what I say might seem trite and juvenile, which I freely own. My point is not about art history but about the importance of a certain kind of experience in education.
I doubt very much that any faculty committee drawing up a general-education plan would say, “Oh, and it’s important that everyone go see ‘Guernica’ in Spain.” This encounter was unplanned, and it couldn’t have been forced, but it was one of the most important parts of my education.
As I look back on it from my present position as a college professor, I am reminded how much teaching is like gardening. I cannot make the seeds grow, but there is a lot I can do to prepare the soil to be fertile. Education can’t be prepackaged, and in the end it has far less to do with transmitting information than with cultivating openness to unanticipated, transformative experiences.
My college urged me to learn a foreign language and practically insisted that I go abroad to do it. My professors made me study widely and lectured to me about paintings and painters that I really did not need to know about to get a job or be a good Spanish teacher. They told me about what moved them to study, and when we were in Spain, they pointed out the Prado and other places I shouldn’t miss. Some of them even walked to the Prado with me and helped me to see what they saw. Then they urged me to go back again, on my own. Because they knew that as important as lectures and books may be, there is no substitute for bright, lived experience.
And because they knew that while they couldn’t bring me to my knees in holy awe (and probably didn’t want to), there were places and paintings—indeed, a whole world—out there that could.
David O’Hara is an associate professor of philosophy and classics at Augustana College, in South Dakota.
