The story
Spain's national museum of modern art fills a huge 18th-century building in Madrid that was raised as a general hospital under King Charles III. In the 1980s it was converted for art, and glass lift towers designed by Ian Ritchie were bolted to the old stone front, running visitors up the outside of the building.
One painting is why many people come. Picasso made Guernica in 1937 for the Spanish Republic's pavilion in Paris, a mural in black, white and grey answering the bombing of a Basque town during the civil war. He refused to let it go to Spain while Franco ruled, so it spent decades in New York, and only in 1981, after the return of democracy, did it reach Madrid. Since 1992 it has hung here, in a room usually crowded.
Around it the museum holds the century's Spanish art, the dreamlike canvases of Joan Miró and the meticulous surrealism of Salvador Dalí, including his Girl at a Window, along with a strong international collection.
