Museo Reina Sofía

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened on 10 September 1992, named in honor of Queen Sofía of Spain, and was established as the country's national museum dedicated to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. It occupies a former general hospital, the Hospital General de Madrid, originally designed in the 18th century by José de Hermosilla and Francisco Sabatini; the building was closed as a hospital in 1969 and underwent major renovation beginning in 1980, with architect Ian Ritchie adding the museum's now-iconic exterior glass circulation towers and elevators in 1988-89. In 2005, French architect Jean Nouvel completed a major expansion, adding roughly 8,000 square meters of new exhibition halls, an auditorium, library, and administrative space at a cost of about €92 million. The museum is best known as the permanent home of Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica' (1937), which arrived in Spain in 1981 after decades at the Museum of Modern Art in New York per the artist's wishes that it not return until Spain achieved democracy. Together with the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Reina Sofía anchors Madrid's 'Golden Triangle of Art,' and its collection charts the great Spanish avant-garde movements — Cubism, Surrealism, and beyond — through Picasso, Dalí, and Miró, alongside a growing program of international contemporary art.