Ophelia de Vere

  Four American tourists came to see Bilbao’s most famous museum. What they found, perhaps, was something closer to home. New York enters the Room? By the third gallery, one of the four American women on the private tour was still talking about everything she had seen last time she visited the Guggenheim in New York.  The spiral rotunda. Frank Lloyd Wright. Kandinsky, abstract painting, European modernism, later modern and contemporary works, such as  Marc Chagall's, Paris Through the Window, or  Pablo Picasso's, Woman with Yellow Hair, or  Jackson Pollock's, Enchanted Forest.  This felt somewhat déplacé as we stood in front of  El Anatsui's Rising Sea ,  the Guggenheim Bilbao. But then again, the Ghanaian artist often deals with themes of memory and loss. Many works suggest fragments of history are being stitched back together, so there may not have been a more apropos location within Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim to discuss works of other artists in...