On our second day in Madrid we visited the Museo Reina Sofia located across from the Atocha train station. There were many artists that contributed to Spain’s famous art works from the 20thcentury, for instance: Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Joan Miro and Salvador Dali.  But, today we focused on Pablo Picasso. His work varied from different techniques and theories, and he is perhaps most famous for pioneering the Cubist movement.However, I was struck by this sculpture of his from 1933 entitled, "Woman with Vase". Her features are not defined at alland her face is devoid of any human qualities. She almost looks birdlike to me. 
With his cubist paintings there were more sharp edged shapes in them, along with distorted body parts so it wasn't always obvious which what the painting was depicting. A painting of his that impressed me was "La nadadora" (the swimmer), also of a woman. She could be swimming or she could be drowning. Her face, feet and breasts were the only aspects of the human body that were easy to point out. In the majority of Picasso’s painting that portrayed women, their face, feet, arms and breasts were the easiest parts of the body to distinguish.

The piece below, "Woman Dressing her Hair" is a clear example of the sharp edges I mentioned earlier that are found in cubism. But notice also how her feet, breast and arms were pronounced andand easily distinguishable although her torso is more abstract and less human. 

The main focus of the exhibit we saw was Picasso's "Guernica", painted in 1937.  Here Picasso portrayed the gruesome event of the Guernica bombing in the Basque Country of Spain that killed many civilians during the Spanish Civil War. Painted during his surrealist period, it conveys the distress felt by the people as can be seen in the faces of both the humans and the animals in the painting. And since he painted fragmented rather than full bodies, this distortion only further intensifies the image and emotions around such an event.