About exceedingly wide paintings

I recently returned from Madrid, which is full of excellent food and splendid dogs and pedestrian crossings that make pee-yooooo noises like Ring My Bell by Anita Ward.There is also, of course, art. Since 1992, Picasso’s Guernica has resided at the Reina Sofia museum, its monochrome depiction of man-made hell as powerful as ever. At least, I think it is; it’s difficult to tell, under the scrum of selfie-takers, even though its proportions (more than twice as wide as it’s tall) don’t easily fit the iPhone lens. I guess as long as you’ve got a screaming woman or a melting horse sprouting from your ear or shoulder, you don’t need the whole thing. Your proximity to great art has been recorded and that’s what matters.Over at the more staid Prado, cameras are still forbidden, which is possibly why my two favourite paintings there (like Anish Kapoor’s works), define themselves by their dimensional awkwardness. I give you Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath, from the Black Paintingsand The Beheading of…