The Guggenheim and Around Bilbao

Anish Kapoor's The Tree & The Eye

 BILBAO--Day two, and we walked by 4 PM over 13,000 steps!  There's a lot of walking on our trips in smaller cities, including those with highlights such as the Guggenheim Museum.  It's magnificent, set along the river and towering over its park setting.  The sails of its profile make it soar over the city.  

Richard Serra's steel structure

1934 Czech modernist design Tatra

The collection is good.  We enjoyed a couple of abstract impressionists including Yves Klein, who used naked women as his paint brushes to create the blue blotchiness of his works.  There was no Jackson Pollock on display although we learned that the reason he flung paint around to create his pieces was that he did not believe his hands should ever touch the work or the canvas.    A show on auto design brought the 1934 Tatra that we have always admired from a Modernist show a few years ago, and a Richard Serra "The Matter of Time," a huge steel maze-like structure completed our excellent time at the museum.

Basque flags everywhere

Our tour through the city included an hour's walk through the Old Town, which dates in part from the 14th century when Bilbao was given its charter to establish a port.  We learned that the city has rebuilt itself since the 1980s when its shipyard and steel industries collapsed in the fashion of Pittsburgh and Manchester.  They are two cities we know a great deal about.  Ben was born in Pittsburgh and John was born in Manchester.  Bilbao has done a wonderful job--of course our view is definitely helped by the five star hotel we are staying in and the nearby parks and deco architecture.  In some ways, too, it is similar to Recoleta in Buenos Aires. 

The importance
 of transition

While we were at the Akzuna Zentroa, a civic center building, we picked up a brochure for a show about trans and non-binary people, with work by and produced by Cabello/Carceller (one person whom we assume is gender fluid).  We appreciated the effort of this difficult-to-undersand view of non-binary people.  The main value of it was bringing the issues non-binary people to public awareness.  

Tonight we stayed in the hotel, with an early night unlike last night when we retired at a fashionable 23:30!