Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

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One of the main activities of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is the organisation of exhibitions with the aim of making it a lively, changing institution and of fulfilling its purpose of promoting knowledge of the History of Art. The conventional or temporary exhibitions aim to introduce the public to new styles, artistic periods and painters. The context exhibitions seek to provide an in-depth investigation of a work in the permanent Collection and relate it to other works of art.
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Web Page >>	Modern Masters of Drawing 27/11/2007 - 17/02/2008 A selection of around 70 works on paper focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries by artists such as Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Miró, Freud or Warhol, among others.


Web Page >>	Dürer and Cranach. Art and Humanism in the German Renaissance 09/10/2007 - 06/01/2008 Organised by the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid This exhibition centres on German art from the late 15th to the mid-16th centuries with a particular focus on two issues: the artist’s image of his world and the role that these images played in particular areas such as religion, politics and war. It also analyses the relationship between the autochthonous ideas of German culture at this period and exterior influences, principally those of the Italian Renaissance. The two key figures in the exhibition are Dürer and Cranach the Elder but visitors will also see works by other important artists of this lengthy period.


Web Page >>	Richard Estes 19/06/2007 - 16/09/2007 This retrospective devoted to the work of the painter Richard Estes will cover his artistic activities from the 1960s to the present with the aim of analysing the career of the main founder and one of the great figures of American photo-realism. Using photography as a direct visual source, Estes focused on the representations of real landscapes. In contrast to other photo-realist artists who directly transferred the photograph to the canvas, Estes only used it as his starting-point, taking various viewpoints of the chosen location and playing with them until he arrived at the definitive image which he transformed into a kind of optical illusion. Richard Estes will also be shown at the Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy, co-organiser of the exhibition. With the collaboration of the Consorcio Turistico de Madrid


Web Page >>	VAN GOGH. The Last Landscapes. 12/06/2007 - 16/09/2007 Auvers-sur-Oise, May 20th - July 29th 1890 Sponsored by Banco Caixa Geral and Fidelidad Mundial This exhibition is devoted to one of the great names in art: Vincent van Gogh. More specifically, it focuses -for the first time-on the last three months of the Dutch painter’s life in Auvers near Paris. The Auvers period was a brief but remarkably productive one and involved a radical change of direction in Van Gogh’s work which he did not have time to fully develop. With the collaboration of the Consorcio Turístico de la Comunidad de Madrrid.


	PHotoEspaña'07: LYNN DAVIS 29/05/2007 - 29/07/2007 Iceberg and Ancient Persia, two series created in 2000 and 2001 by the American photographer Lynn Davis, are the subject of the exhibition presented at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum as part of the 10th edition of the International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, PHotoEspaña. Following the tradition of American landscape photography, Davis depicts the ruins and monuments of Antiquity and the natural landscapes that she has visited, aiming to capture the beauty of these places and the emotions aroused by their contemplation through her photographic images. Download brouchure (pdf)


Web Page >>	The Mirror and the Mask. The Portrait in the Age of Picasso 06/02/2007 - 20/05/2007 Organised by the Museo Thyssen-bornemisza, Fundación Caja Madrid and the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas) Through works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Salvador Dalí, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol, this exhibition analyses the evolution of portraiture in the 20th century. The exhibition will first be shown at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemmisza and the Fundación Caja Madrid, and then travels to the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (Texas), which is the co-organiser together with the other two institutions. It is the first in-depth study of this traditional genre within European painting, which acquired new importance within international art in the modern era.


Web Page >>	STUDIOLO 1: AVIGDOR ARIKHA 20/12/2006 - 11/03/2007 The first in a new series of annual exhibitions entitled Studiolo will present a group of works from the Permanent Collection selected by a living artist. A studiolo, the diminutive of studio, was a small room in Renaissance palaces in which princes and rulers would read, reflect and contemplate carefully chosen works of art. In this first edition the painter Avigdor Arikha has been commissioned to make the choice of works. Focusing on the idea of “painting from life”, Arikha has assembled a group of paintings by Caravaggio, Titian, Degas, Cézanne and Mondrian along with works by his own hand. Arikha is a painter appreciated by a small but select public, admired by critics and by knowledgeable collectors and artists... Venue: Room 8 of the Permanent Collection.


Web Page >>	Rauschenberg. Express 07/11/2006 - 17/01/2007 Contexts or the Permanent Collection 20 Express, 1963, from the Permanent Collection of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, is one of the first paintings in which Rauschenberg used silkscreen, a technique that allowed the artist to use photographs in his canvases to create large-scale collages. The exhibition focuses on this group of works created in the 1960s, which make repeated use of Rauschenberg’s unique iconography.


Web Page >>	Sargent / Sorolla 03/10/2006 - 07/01/2007 The exhibition will aim to reveal shared artistic preoccupations and look at the occasional encounters between these two very different creative figures. The use of colour and light as expressive devices, the desire to formulate a type of modern painting based on naturalistic tradition, their notable commercial and social success which prevented them from being considered avant-garde painters, and the development of a more personal style in their late years are among the shared characteristics emphasised here.


Web Page >>	From Cranach to Monet. Highlights of the Pérez Simón Collection 20/06/2006 - 10/09/2006 The Pérez Simon Collection is an important private Mexican collection comprising over one thousand works of painting, sculpture, drawing, decorative arts and manuscripts. Until now it has never been presented to the public as a collection. The present exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will focus on the painting collection. A selection of 57 paintings dating from the 14th to the 19th century has been made from the more than 400 masterpieces in the collection. They include outstanding examples of Italian, German, Flemish, Dutch, French and English painting. The section devoted to the 19th century will be particularly important, as it is one of the most significant areas of the collection, notable for its Victorian paintings. The exhibition will include paintings by Bronzino, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Jan and Pieter Brueghel, Van Dyck, Rubens, Canaletto, Giambattista Tiepolo, Goya, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.


Web Page >>	Tintoretto. The Paradise 08/06/2006 - 27/08/2006 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 19 The exhibition will look at the two competitions convened in the late 16th century by the Republic of Venice to execute the paintings that would decorate the Sala del Gran Consiglo in the Palazzo Ducale. The leading Venetian artists of the day presented their preliminary designs for these two competitions, of which those by Tintoretto (two preliminary oil paintings, one in the Museum’s collection), Palma Giovane and Bassano have survived. The exhibition reunites these works, which are all of large format. Tintoretto’s The Paradise, in the Museum’s collection, measures 164 x 492 cm, giving an idea of the scale of these works and the exceptional nature of the exhibition. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, where it will be shown until May 2006, and with the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, where the exhibition will be seen following its Madrid showing, in Autumn 2006.


Web Page >>	Bae Bien-U 30/05/2006 - 23/07/2006 PHotoEspaña 2006 The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is participating in the 9th edition of PHotoEspaña, the International Festival of Photography and the Visual Arts, with an exhibition of the work of Bae Bien-U (born Yosu, South Korea, 1950). The 16 photographs on display comprise the two series Pine Tree and Wind of Tahiti. The first consists of images created in the early 1990s and focuses on pine forests, which have been an important source of inspiration for the artist. In these photographs the trees became living creatures that unite earth and sky or represent individuals and social groups. The second series, Wind of Tahiti, created between 2002 and 2003, depicts trees and plants imbued with strength and colour recalling Paul Gauguin’s paintings during his Tahitian period. Bae Bien-U is one of the leading names in young Korean photography. He is a self-taught artist whose work is notably influenced by his study of art. His photography has been exhibited world-wide, from Tahiti to New York, as well as Tokyo, Paris and London


Web Page >>	Fra Angelico. The Virgin of Humility 07/03/2006 - 14/05/2006 Context of the Permanent Collection 18 Fra Angelico. The Virgin of Humility, sponsored by Banco Urquijo, is the 18th in the Thyssen-Bornemisza’s Contexts of the Permanent Collection series. On this occasion the focus of the exhibition is the magnificent panel by the Italian artist normally on display at the Museu d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), but which can be seen in Madrid this spring. The exhibition analyses two types of Virgins that were widely represented in art over the centuries, and of which the collection has particularly fine examples. They are the Virgin of Humility and the Virgin enthroned with the Christ Child. It also looks at precedents for the pose of the Virgin of Humility to be found in scenes of the Adoration of the Magi as well as in other Marian themes which present Mary as Queen of Heaven.


Web Page >>	Russian Avantgardes 14/02/2006 - 14/05/2006 The exhibition offers a survey of the birth and development of Russian avant-garde art during the first third of the 20th century. It begins with an investigation of the quest for a new national art based on Russian folk tradition at the turn of the century. A second section is devoted to early attempts to link up with international European art, in particular Futurism, then moves on to analyse the careers of highly individual artists such as Chagall, Kandinsky and Filonov. The exhibition then looks at post-war organic abstraction and concludes with the most extensive section, devoted to artists’ attempts to go beyond traditional art and convert it into a means of constructing the new man. Painting, sculpture, photography and art in the service of propaganda are among the wide variety of media covered in this exhibition.


Web Page >>	Raphael. Portrait of a Young Man 18/10/2005 - 15/01/2006 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 17 Raffaello Sanzio (Urbino, 1483-Rome, 1520) arrived in Rome from Florence, probably in the autumn of 1508. According to Giorgio Vasari (1550), the young artist was summoned to the court of Pope Julius II (1503-1513) on the recommendation of Bramante, also from Urbino and at that point in charge of the works on Saint Peter's. Once in Rome, Raphael was immediately contracted to take part in the decoration of the Pope's private apartments, located in the north wing of the Vatican complex. He began work on the room known as the Stanza della Segnatura. His astonishingly innovative style, allied to his unprecedented approach to narration was such that the decorations realised shortly before by other artists were destroyed and the entire project awarded to Raphael.


Web Page >>	Mimesis. Modern Realism 1918-1945 11/10/2005 - 08/01/2006 The exhibition Mimesis. Modern Realism 1918-1945, jointly organised by the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Fundación Caja Madrid, focuses on the rise and spread of Realism in the years between the First and Second World Wars, a crucial period for the consolidation of avant-garde modern art. During these years, Realism was a vigorous force within painting and sculpture as well as film and literature, becoming one of the leading trends within modern art.


Web Page >>	Corot. Nature, Emotion, Souvenir 07/06/2005 - 11/09/2005 20th-century art historians chose to concentrate on certain specific aspects of Corot’s extensive œuvre. He was thus seen as either the heir of Neo-classical landscape or as a forerunner of Impressionism, interpreted from the starting-point of his realist landscapes or, in contrast, through his most refined, highly-worked Salon pieces. The present exhibition aims to focus on all these different aspects without opting for any one in particular. In addition, its intention is to act as a point of departure for a revision and reassessment of an aspect of his work which has been relatively passed over by critics but to which Corot owed his fame in the 19th century: the so-called Souvenirs (Recollections).


Web Page >>	Memling. Portraits 15/02/2005 - 15/05/2005 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 16 Hans Memling was of German origin and was born in Seligenstadt around 1435. The first reference to the artist dates from 1465 when he is known to have acquired citizenship in Bruges, an essential requirement for practising as an artist in the city, where he arrived already a fully qualified master. Memling is thought to have first trained in his native city, in Germany, then perhaps moved on to Brussels to study with Rogier van der Weyden. In Bruges he worked for the leading families as well as for the large and flourishing community of foreigners who engaged in business activities there. Despite this, he never received an official commission from the city. Memling's first important work was the Last Judgement Triptych commissioned by the representative of the Medici family, Agnolo di Jacopo Tani. Among Memling's most important compositions is the Triptych of the Saint Johns of 1479, painted for the Hospital of Saint John in Bruges and now in the Memlingmuseum in that city. The Moreel Triptych of 1484 is also a significant work, painted for the church of the Apostle James and paid for by the politician and merchant Willem Moreel. In it, Memling included one of the first family group portraits. A major late work is the famous reliquary with scenes from the Life of Saint Ursula, completed in 1489 and featuring views of the city of Cologne.


Web Page >>	Brücke. The Birth of the German Expressionism 01/02/2005 - 15/05/2005 2005 marks the centenary of the constitution of the group of artists called Brücke, founded in June 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who at the time were architecture students in Dresden. Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Cuno Amiet and Otto Mueller were among the most outstanding painters who later joined this association, which broke up definitively in 1913. The eight intensive years of activity of this group witnessed the greatest development of the first period of German expressionism, which went through various stylistic phases marked precisely by the artistic objectives shared by its most important members.


Web Page >>	Gauguin and the Origins of Symbolism 28/09/2004 - 09/01/2005 The exhibition focuses on an analysis of the work of Paul Gauguin and the artists of his day with whom he was associated: the older masters who taught or inspired him, such as Pissarro, Cézanne and Degas, his contemporaries, above all Van Gogh, and other artist that show his influence, such as Bonnard, Vuillard and Picasso. The exhibition spans the period from 1884 to 1891. During these years Gauguin evolved from a secondary Impressionist painter into the leader of the Symbolist movement in painting. His efforts to move on from Impressionism led him to question the entire naturalist tradition of European art as it had developed from the Renaissance onwards. One by one he abandoned all the descriptive devices traditionally used in painting (perspective, shadows, chiaroscuro, local tone) in favour of the pure value of line and colour on the picture plane.


	Andalusian Painting in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection 19/07/2004 - 05/09/2004 Following a period of decline after the death of Murillo and the predominance of foreign artists at the court of the early Bourbon monarchs, the 19th century saw a new flourishing of painting in Andalusia, resulting in one of its most productive eras. From the 1830s onwards, Seville and other capitals of the region witnessed a notable economic revival. More important, however, was the arrival in Andalusia of foreign travellers from England and elsewhere in Europe. These early “tourists” had first started to arrive in Spain in the late 18th century. However, it was in the second quarter of the next century that they appeared in large numbers, the result of the repercussions throughout Europe of the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1813) and the new Romantic taste for the exotic. More than any other region, Andalusia represented for these travellers the “Romantic myth of Spain”. Seville and Granada in particular welcomed writers and painters such as Washington Irving, Richard Ford, Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, David Roberts, John Frederick Lewis, Alfred Dehodencq, Gustave Doré and others, whose work established the image of “picturesque Spain”. This was accompanied by a growing demand abroad for paintings depicting the principal landscapes, monuments and popular customs of southern Spain.


	Catalan Painting from Naturalism to Noucentisme 10/06/2004 - 11/07/2004 The 66 works selected for the temporary exhibition offer the public the opportunity to analyse the origins and development of modern Catalan painting, with works dating from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. The exhibition opens with a section dedicated to the Romantic and naturalist landscape, considered the first chapter in the history of modern art in Catalunya. This movement focused primarily on landscape as its subject and looked to Romanticism as its inspiration. One of the key figures in this movement was Martí Alsina, represented here by four works. According to Tomàs Llorens, Chief Curator of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and responsible for the selection of works in the exhibition, “Interestingly, Romanticism was both the starting point but also the conclusion of this type of naturalist landscape”. Corbera de Llobregat, an important landscape by Llouis Rigalt featured in the present exhibition, is a key example of this relationship between the two movements. Also included in this section are works by his pupil Martí Alsina, Modesto Urgell, and Joaquim Vayreda.


Web Page >>	Gerard David and the Flemish Landscape 10/06/2004 - 22/08/2004 Contexts of the Permanent Collection15 The central work in the exhibition, The Crucifixion, from the permanent collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, is one of the earliest known paintings by the artist and is considered to date from the first part of his career. This is a particularly interesting panel, notably for the treatment of the landscape. The artist represents a scene at evening in which the light takes on a key role, both in the sky and in the tones used to realise the figures. Following the medieval tradition, alongside the central motif (usually scenes from the New Testament or lives of saints), it was common to find invented motifs, such as the Holy Land, Jerusalem or Bethlehem, recreated in the form of medieval cities, with a pleasing and picturesque landscape in the background filled with touching human details. The present work uses such an approach, with a broad setting that includes the city of Jerusalem, seen from outside with its walls and a church and castle standing out among the buildings.


	Willi Baumeister 1889- 1955 30/10/2003 - 22/02/2004 This is the first monographic exhibition in Spain devoted to the entire career of the German painter Willi Baumeister. Along with Paul Klee, Baumeister was one of the leading figures in 20th-century German painting, and one of the most influential for the origins of abstract art in Spain. Jointly organised by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the Fundación Caja Madrid and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, and with the support of the Baumeister family, the exhibition will travel to Munich following its Madrid showing. It can be seen in Munich from March to June 2004. Willi Baumeister was part of the generation of artists who emerged on the German art scene in the years immediately following World War I, along with figures such as Schlemmer, Müller and Siegel. He lived and worked mainly in Germany, although in the 1920s he was linked to the Paris group L’Esprit Nouveau (along with Léger, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant and others) and in the 1930s he formed part of the international movement Abstraction Création. Throughout his life, Baumeister also maintained particularly close links with the Spanish art scene. Like many other European artists of this period, Baumeister has been somewhat overshadowed due to the bias towards North American art criticism in the second half of the 20th century. The present exhibition, which features around 92 works (75 paintings and 17 drawings) aims to offer an overview of his entire career and to situate Willi Baumeister in the position which he merits as one of the great figures of European abstraction. The exhibition also pay particular attention to his links with Spanish art of the period.


Web Page >>	Ribera. The Pietà 20/02/2003 - 11/05/2003 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 14 The Pietà was painted by José de Ribera in 1633 and is considered one of the most successful treatments of this subject by the artist who represented it in several works. The exhibition sponsored by Caja de Ahorros de Mediterráneo, looks at the iconography of the Pietà in this painting and more specifically examines Ribera’s significant contribution to the representation of this episode from the Passion. With this end in mind, the exhibition brings together a select group of works produced at different times in the artist’s career.


Web Page >>	Musical Analogies. Kandinsky and his Contemporaries 11/02/2003 - 25/05/2003 The exhibition aims to demonstrate the active role of the musical model in painting with specific reference to the development of abstract art. It covers the years between 1908 and 1925, with particular reference to the decade starting in 1910 when the first moves were made towards abstraction. To illustrate how the different means by which the idea of synesthaesia (meaning the correspondence between different sensory perceptions such as, in the case of music and painting, hearing and sight) gave rise to abstract art, the exhibition will include works by a total of 48 artists. All were contemporaries of Wassily Kandinsky, the key figure in the development of abstraction.


Web Page >>	Robert and Sonia Delaunay (1905-1941) 09/10/2002 - 12/01/2003 The exhibition’s main aim is to demonstrate the important contributions of Robert and Sonia Delaunay to modern painting between 1907, the date of their first meeting, and 1941, the year in which Robert died. Around 70 works loaned from museums and private collections feature in the exhibition. Light was the main motif within Robert Delaunay’s pictorial language. Following a detailed study of colour theory, the artist reached the conclusion that the force and paradoxical reality of light its omnipresence, its infinite energy and its inmateriality could only be represented pictorially through colour. The artist himself gave his method of representing light through colour the name of Simultanisme. This was his unique artistic principle from 1912 onwards, the year in which he published Light, a text which was to have a major influence on leading contemporary artists and which was translated into German by Paul Klee. At around this time Apollinaire invented the word “Orphism” or “Orphic Cubism” to defines his friend Delaunay’s work. Delaunay himself defined his move towards abstraction with these words: “… those reminiscences of objects, of residues of objects in my paintings, appeared to me as harmful elements. I intended to fuse those objective images into coloured rhythms, but those images were of a different nature… Then I had the idea of discarding images seen in reality: objects which interrupted and corrupted the coloured work. I attacked the problem of formal colour.”


Web Page >>	Tiziano /Rubens. Venus in front of a Mirror 24/09/2002 - 26/01/2003 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 13 Rubens' inspiration was a canvas by Titian which was lost during the 19th century but which previously belonged to the Spanish royal collection. It was copied by Rubens during his period at the Court of Madrid and is known through other surviving versions. The best, and the one considered closest to the lost version, is the oil in the National Gallery of Washington (cat. nº. 2). Having the two compositions displayed side by side at the exhibition allows us to examine the different interpretative and stylistic approaches of the two artists.


Web Page >>	Sysley. Poet of Impressionism 08/06/2002 - 15/09/2002 The exhibition includes more than 70 works and aims to offer an overview of Alfred Sisley’s entire career, covering the different countries and areas which he visited and painted in the course of his life. Perhaps less famous than the other members of the group – Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Degas – Sisley is however, considered to be one of the purest exponents of Impressionism; his way of life, working methods and his art represent the essence of this movement, to whose founding principles he remained faithful throughout his career. One of the principal aims of the exhibition is to rediscover and highlight the figure of Sisley in the context of the Impressionist painters, but also as one of the great landscapes painters in the history of art, gifted with an exceptional sensitivity for colour and an innate sense of composition. At the same time, it will investigate some little-known but no less important themes in order to re-evaluate his art, including his links with English Romantic painting, and the until now relatively unstudied period at the end of his career from 1880-1899.


Web Page >>	Dalí: Gradiva 21/05/2002 - 08/09/2002 Conexts of the Permanent Collection 12 Gradiva rediscovers the anthropomorphic ruins (retrospective Fantasy) of 1931-32, a key work in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum’s 20th-century collection. Dalí based his painting on the heroine of a novel by Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva (published in Germany in 1903) which the Surrealists used as a source of inspiration, particularly through Sigmund Freud’s 1907 interpretation of the book entitled Delirium and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva”.


Web Page >>	Braque (1882-1963) 05/02/2002 - 19/05/2002 The main objective of the exhibition is to provide a complete overview of Braque’s artistic career as well as to convey his role as one of the key painters of the 20th century. To achieve this aim, a group of 50 paintings and 6 sculptures have been loaned from museums and private collections around the world: the Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen), the Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart), the Tate Gallery (London), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Musée de Grenoble, the Musée Picasso (Paris), the Paule and Adrien Maeght Collection, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber, the Menil Collection (Houston), the Fondation Margerite et Aimé Maeght, the Collection of M. and Mme. Claude Lorens, etc. Among the key events of Braque’s career was undoubtedly the co-invention of Cubism together with Picasso, representing a key chapter in the history of modern art. Alongside Picasso, Braque’s creation of new techniques and pictorial devices such as papier collé and painted words, his unique interpretation of the traditional genres of painting, in particular landscape and still life, his constant rethinking and investigation of the representation of space, volume and colour, and the solutions he formulated in his works have all become landmarks in the history of 20th-century art. In addition, their influence on numerous contemporary artists is both an obvious and extremely important one.


	The Three Kings from the West. History of a Tradition 12/12/2001 - 17/02/2002 The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and the Museum of Pedralbes Monastery present the exhibition The Three Kings from the East. History of a Tradition, a new look at the depiction of figures that are part of the collective imagination. Through the works of great masters like Ferrer Bassa, Pietro de Rimini and Luca di Tommè, this exhibit is an evocative journey through the history and the iconography of the Three Kings from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth.


Web Page >>	Kokoschka: Max Schmidt, Adolf Loos and their Friends 06/11/2001 - 17/02/2002 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 11 The portraits of Max Schmidt (1914) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, and Carl Leo Schmidt (1911) from the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, constitute two of three fragments of the Triple Portrait of the Schmidt Brothers which was cut up in the 1950s (the third fragment, depicting Hugo Schmidt is now lost). The two surviving elements have now been brought together for the first time in fifty years and are the subject of the next in the Contexts of the Permanent Collection exhibition series.


Web Page >>	Forma. The classical ideal in modern art 09/10/2001 - 13/01/2002 This exhibition proposes a new interpretation of the relationship between classicism and modern art in the first half of the 20th century. The key to this interpretation is the notion of form. Formalism, a theoretical position which placed greater emphasis on form over content in the work of art, was fundamental to the birth of the new, avant-garde art of the 20th century and to its break with the art of the previous century. In addition, formalism encouraged one key trend of modern art, which was the quest for a new classicism in the 1920s and 1930s.


	Corot. The Park of the Lions at Port-Marly, 1872 26/06/2001 - 21/10/2001 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 10 An outstanding painting by Camille Corot, The Park of the Lions at Port-Marly, is the subject of the 10th exhibition this summer in the Contexts series, based on the permanent collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. Corot painted this canvas in August 1872 during the ten days that he spent in the house of his friend and pupil Georges Rodrigues-Henriques in Port-Marly. The exhibition aims to study in depth the relationship between Corot and the Rodrigues-Henriques family. With this end in mind, it features the three paintings that the 76-year-old Corot executed during that summer during his stay at Port-Marly, as well as some of his paintings which belonged to the family and paintings by Georges Rodrigues-Henriques himself realised during the same period. The exhibition brings together a unique group of works for the first time and also looks into various issues related to a little-known episode in the life of the great French painter.


Web Page >>	Canaletto. An imaginary Venice 29/05/2001 - 02/09/2001 The exhibition Canaletto. An imaginay Venice sets out to reassess the traditional interpretations of the work of one of the greatest eighteenth-century painters. The paintings and prints on show convey the image of a city wohse fame is universal, an icon which has remained unchanged over the passing of time. For this reason, some art historians have seen Canaletto as a painter who mechanically reproduced the reality of his surroundings. The present exhibition analyses his work from a different perspective: that of an artist capable of changing the image of his city, to the extent that it is difficult to separate the fiction of his paintings from the truth of the city`s architecture.


Web Page >>	The Renaissance Mediterranean 31/01/2001 - 06/05/2001 The aim of the present exhibition is to trace the movement of works of art, ideas and artists in the Mediterranean region in the fifteenth century. The first third of that century saw the abandonment of Gothic modes and the dissemination of new artistic theories and forms which were developed in the Netherlands and Northern Italy. More than one hundred paintings and objects have been brought together here with the aim of examining the routes by which these new ideas were spread, the artists involved in this process and the centres where they developed. The exhibition will make it possible to examine some key works in the development of the Renaissance figurative idiom within the cultural context in which they were created. In addition, it will bring together paintings which have been separated for many years, such as Rogier van der Weyden's Saint George from the National Gallery, Washington, and his Virgin and Child from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.


Web Page >>	Exploring Eden. 19th Century american landscape painting 29/09/2000 - 14/01/2001 Exploring Eden is an exhibition which looks at 19th-century American Landscape painting, a chapter of art history which is very little known in Europe despite the important contribution which it made to the tradition of landscape painting in the west. The exhibition, which is structured chronologically from Romanticism to Realism, begins with the figure of Thomas Cole, the father of North American landscape painters, and ends with Winslow Homer, a painter whose work heralds the beginnings of modern art.


Web Page >>	Michael Andrews. Lights 20/06/2000 - 01/10/2000 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 9 Michael Andrews (1928-1995) was an artist whose roots were firmly established within the British figurative tradition and who is normally linked with the so-called School of London, a mixed group of artists who shared an interest in the depiction of the human form as well as a complete rejection of academic realism. In addition to Andrews, all the other artists in the group - Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff - are well represented in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.


Web Page >>	Victor Hugo, Drawings: "Chaos in the brush..." 02/06/2000 - 10/09/2000 Victor Hugo (1802-1885), one of the great figures of world literature, was also an important visual artist whose work in this area has been little known until now. This exhibition, which will subsequently be shown at the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris, comprises a sizeable group of works on paper and a group of objects, the products of his inexhaustable creative imagination. With this exhibition, the Thyssen-Bornemisza is contributing to recent initiatives which are making Hugo's pictorial art - somewhat eclipsed, perhaps, by the great fame of his literary work - better known. These efforts aim to introduce the public to a surprisingly innovative artist with regard to form and technique.


Web Page >>	Spanish paintings of the Meadows Collection 10/05/2000 - 27/08/2000 Born in Vidalia, Georgia, Algur Hurtle Meadows (1899-1978) was the founder of the General American Oil Company. Meadows travelled to Spain for business reasons in the 1950s, spending lengthy periods in Madrid. As a result of his numerous visits to the Museo del Prado, which was just near his hotel, and the enormous interest which he developed in seventeenth-century Spanish painting, Meadows decided to build up his own collection of Spanish art. His first acquisitions were of works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: later he broadened the chronological scope of the collection to include works from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. The new museum, founded in memory of his first wife, Virginia Garrison Stuart (1901-1961), reflected Meadows’s desire to establish a museum of Spanish art in Texas. In 1967, with the help of William B. Jordan, the collection was revised and refined while new works of indisputable quality were added to it. Algur H. Meadows took an active part in this process of revision and acquisition which still continues today.


Web Page >>	The time less eye. Drawings, paintings and sculptures from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski collection 02/02/2000 - 14/05/2000 The Geneva-based collection of Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski was initiated in the late 1960s with the acquisition of a drawing by the French artist Georges Seurat. Since that first purchase thirty years ago, the Krugier-Poniatowski collection has grown to include more than 400 drawings. The collection, which is well known to experts in the field, has been an active force in the art world since its beginnings, with specific works lent to important exhibitions. However, it is only now at the turn of the century that the collection's owners have decided to make a large selection of drawings available to the public for the first time.


	Pechstein en Nidden, 1909 26/10/1999 - 23/01/2000 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 8 The eighth edition of the Contexts exhibition series is organised around the presentation of the picture Haff (Inlet), by the German expressionist artist Max Pechstein, acquired by the Ministry of Education and Culture for the Museum Collection. It is the first time a new picture join the collection and the acquisition also add to the already very extensive group of works by the expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge) in the Permanent Collection. This event, together with the importance of the work, was considered to be a great opportunity to organise a new show in the Contexts series. To accompany this picture, the exhibition also included a group of twelve oil paintings and watercolours that Pechstein made in the summer of 1909 during his fruitful stay in Nidden, a small fishing village on the Baltic. This was a key moment in his artistic development, as he affirmed himself and acquired the necessary expressive resources to fully develop his unique and personal style.


Web Page >>	Painting nature from Brueghel to Van Gogh 01/10/1999 - 16/01/2000 Naturalism was an imprecisely defined artistic tendency which left its mark on western painting for almost three centuries, reaching its culmination in the nineteenth century. In the face of history and portrait painting, traditionally considered as the leading artistic genres, naturalism sprang from pictorial achievements within the realms of landscape paintings, scenes of daily life and habits -also known as "genre" paintings- and the field of still-lifes. It was precisely because these were considered minor genres that none of them were subject to the strict rules which governed the painting of mythological, religious and allegorical paintings, which were obliged to improve upon reality in order to represent "the ideal". Naturalism took advantage of a direction observation of nature and a progressive abandoning of workshops conventions.


	Morandi. A Retrospective Exhibition 01/06/1999 - 05/09/1999 Through an ample selection of his works, including oils, drawings and watercolours, the exhibition Morandi. A Retrospective Exhibition offered a complete chronological overview of the career of the Italian artist, whose work, in spite of being little known, stands out for its quality and degree of refinement. Morandi is a timeless artist, with a totally personal language, whose work reflects, as few others do, the essence of modernity. Giorgio Morandi was an isolated artist, not easily placed into any of the great movements of contemporary art. Nonetheless, his work clearly illustrates the fundamental ideas which enable us to understand 20th century art.


	El Greco. Identity and Transformation 04/02/1999 - 16/05/1999 In Madrid, the exhibition included a group of 78 highly important works lent from various museums, institutions and private collections from all over the world, many of which had never before been loaned to an exhibition. The main novelty was the presentation of an extraordinary set of works from his Cretan years, the most unknown period for the Spanish public. The hanging arrangement was organised according to an order which combined a chronological itinerary with the thematic grouping of the works; some of the most important and largest paintings were placed in the Museum’s central hall, including one of his most emblematic works, The Martyrdom of St Maurice, left its habitual home at El Escorial for the first time.


	Picasso. Bullfight (1934) 15/01/1999 - 02/05/1999 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 7 For the second time since its inception, the Contexts programme of exhibitions presented an analysis of a work by Pablo Picasso from the Permanent Collection; on the first occasion it was Harlequin with a Mirror, which opened the series in 1995, and this time it is the turn of Bullfight. Alongside this work was exhibited a marvellous group of fifteen works by the artist on the same theme, the bullfight, which Picasso produced during the mid-1930s, and which can be considered in some respects the precursor to Guernica. The main aim of the exhibition, curated by Tomàs Llorens and sponsored by the Caja Madrid Foundation, is to show the most profound interpretation of the world of the bull that Picasso ever produced, an interpretation that goes beyond the shock, the pain or the physical violence which seems to have made Picasso consider the rite of bullfighting as a parable of love and death.


	Sorolla and the Hispanic Society 04/11/1998 - 17/01/1999 The aim of this exhibition is to present the set of works Joaquín Sorolla made for the Hispanic Society of America in New York, the most important project of his life and to which he dedicated his greatest efforts. In 1911, the founder of the Hispanic Society, Archer M. Huntington, entrusted the Valencian painter with the decoration of a large hall in its New York premises. The result was a series of large-sized paintings, known as The Regions of Spain, which synthesised the vision of Spain at that time seen through Sorolla’s eyes. The exhibition, which will travel to the Fine Arts Museum in Valencia after its presentation in Madrid, shows a complete set of studies and sketches made by Sorolla for the above-mentioned panels, as well as some portraits of illustrious Spaniards, also requested by Huntington to decorate the library of the same institution.


	Kupka. Positioning of Mobile Graphics Elements 1912-1913 15/10/1998 - 10/01/1999 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 6 The general idea of this type of exhibition was really exemplified by this show, which reassembled one of the intense and extensive series produced by Czech artist Frantisek Kupka, a painter whose chief method of working was to deal repeatedly with the same subject through a whole series of studies. The exhibition presented the two main oil paintings of the series, Positioning of Mobile Graphic Elements I, which belongs to the permanent collection of the Museum, and Positioning of Mobile Graphic Elements II, from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, together with a group of numerous sketches on paper from several museums and collections. This exhibition, sponsored by MoviStar with the collaboration of the Grupo Ruiz Nicoli, enabled the public to come close to the work of an artist who may be little-known and undervalued in our own time, but who was a pioneer in the field of abstraction.


	Paul Klee 24/06/1998 - 18/10/1998 The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the IVAM Centre Julio González in Valencia have worked together to organise what was to be the first important retrospective exhibition in Spain of the Swiss artist Paul Klee. The project, curated by Tomàs Llorens and Emmanuel Guigon, was first presented in Valencia, and later travelled to Madrid. The exhibition brought together an extensive selection of works, which offered a complete overview of the artistic career of Paul Klee, who was considered as one of the most original and influential creators of the 20th century. This exhibition is perfectly in line with the Museum’s aim of presenting exhibitions centred on movements, artists or periods especially well represented in the Permanent Collection, thereby enriching the Spanish art scene; in fact, with a few exceptions, Spanish museums lack works by Paul Klee, whereas the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum has four masterpieces belonging to different periods and styles of his artistic career.


	Schommer. The Living Museum 18/06/1998 - 06/09/1998 Photography exhibition The second photography exhibition that took place at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum presented, during the summer months, a group of twenty works produced in the rooms of the Villahermosa Palace by Alberto Schommer. The images, in black and white as is usual in Schommer’s work, showed the artist’s personal view of the visitors to the Museum and of the works of art on display. The gaze and the work interrelate producing in turn a new and different work in which there is room for the play of light, for magic and for mystery. The show, which was exhibited in the central hall of the Museum, and which was free, was part of the first International Photography Festival, organised by PhotoEspaña, which took place in several cultural spaces around the Castellana area.


	Willem Kalf. Original and Copy 31/03/1998 - 14/06/1998 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 5 The exhibition, sponsored by Caja Madrid Foundation, is devoted to the study of the work of Willem Kalf, one of the most significant and influential 17th century Dutch still life painters. On this occasion, the aim is to highlight an aspect of this artist’s work that is not often studied, his technique, together with that of many followers who literally copied his work. With this aim, six works have been brought together, representing both originals and copies, either contemporary or from a later period. The exhibition also presents a selection of the information obtained in the study for the restoration that was carried out before the exhibition, as well as the results of this study. The conclusions of the analysis have been also the subject of several essays included in the catalogue, edited by the curator of the exhibition, Sam Segal, who is a specialist in 17th-century Dutch still life painting, and by Ubaldo Sedano, chief restorer of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.


	August Macke (1887-1914) 18/03/1998 - 31/05/1998 Sponsored by Banco Urquijo, the exhibition August Macke (1887-1914) opened on 18 March, organised in collaboration with the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster, where a few months before a selection of one hundred watercolours by the artist had been presented. Next to these works, the Spanish public could admire a group of oils from the different creative periods of the painter: this made the exhibition the first important one dedicated to August Macke outside Germany. As one of the leading members of the German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), Macke, whose career was prematurely truncated by the First World War, centred his attention mainly on the expressive value of pure colours and their relation with musical values. His pictorial work shows the influence of the French post-impressionism, and especially of fauvism and of Picasso and Braque’s analytical cubism, as well as of the dispersion of shapes typical of Italian futurism and the “simultaneous contrasts” of Delaunay’s orphism.


	The Triumph of Venus. The Image of Woman in 18th Century Venetian Painting 19/11/1997 - 22/02/1998 This exhibition, sponsored by Barclays Bank, gather a selection of eighty works from various museums and collections, having as a thread the subject of qualities, metaphors and figures associated with women and feminity in the Venetian taste and pictorial imagination of the 18th Century. The itinerary of the exhibition, the commissioner of wich was Tomàs LLorens, has been conceived as an analysis of the evolution in taste and pictorial language from the late Baroque period to Neoclassicism. One of the gratests attractions of this exhibition is the presentation in Spain of the masterpiece by Antonio Canova, The Three Graces.


	Joan Miró. Catalan Peasant with a Guitar, 1924 01/10/1997 - 11/01/1998 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 4 Following the usual pattern for this type of exhibitions, the painting selected on this ocasion, Catalan Peasant with a Guitar, is show surrounded by other works directly related to it; in this case all the oil paintings by Miró on the subject of the Catalan peasant, as well as their preparatory drawings or those related to the series. The aim of this exhibition, and idea and project of Tomàs LLorens, is to shed new light on the discussion regarding the sequence followed by Miró when painting the series of the Catalan peasant, a topic still not completely clear, and wich would help to define more clearly Joan Miro´s artistic evolution.


	George Grosz. The Berlin Years 28/05/1997 - 28/09/1997 During the spring ans summer months it is possible to visit the exhibition George Grosz. The Berlin Years. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where it was on show before coming to Madrid. Its presentation in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is possible thanks to the sponsorship of the Banco Central Hispano. For this exhibition, twenty oil paintings, some hundred works on paper and several sketchbooks, illustrated books and portfolios from several museums and private collections, as well as from the Grosz Legacy, have been selected. The exhibition is centred around the the work and activity of the German artist during the years he lived in Berlin (1893-1933), his most influencial period for 20th Century art, from wich the foundation owns some of his most significant paintings, particularly Metropolis.


	El Greco 29/04/1997 - 29/01/1997 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 3 The main objetive of this exhibition is to propose a joint analysis of thee versions on the subject of the Annunciation painted by El Greco in his mature years: the final work, which was a part of the altarpiece of the Doña María de Aragón College, at present in the Prado Museum, and two smaller replicas of sketches, belonging one to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and the other to the Permanent Collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Two other paintings were also included: The Baptism of Jesus and The Adoration of the Shepherds, belonging to the Palazzo Barberini Collection in Rome, which are versions of two larger works belonging to the same altarpiece. The visitors would also observe the results of the scientific study carried out mainly on the occasion of the restoration of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum´s Annunciation.


	Surrealist Games 29/11/1996 - 23/02/1997 This exhibition presents to the public a wide selection of over a hundred works representing the best of what is known as cadavres exquis, collective drawings made by members of the Surrealist Group. The promoter of this procedure was André Breton, as he was interested in exploring the mechanisms of the unconscious by means of a collective activity. The aim of this exhibition and of the catalogue published on this occasion was to present, not only a particular set of works of art, but also a real and original type of artistic production, as well as to deep in the public´s knowledge of the Surrealist movement.


	Spanish Carpets from the National Museum of Decorative Arts 02/11/1996 - 08/12/1996 For this exhibition, organised in collaboration with the Spanish National Museum of Decorative Arts, seven carpets have been selected from its collection. This set of carpets, coming from the two most important and renowned production centres in Spain and abroad, Alcaraz (Albacete) and Cuenca, is exhibited in the "Villahermosa Gallery", on the second floor of the Museum. The exhibition also includes seven paintings from the Permanent Collection in wich different types of carpets from that time are represented, to illustrate the everyday use of these objets.


	Kirchner. Fränzi in front of a Carved Chair, 1910 29/10/1996 - 26/01/1997 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 2 The second show of the series Context is dedicated to one of the Expressionist painters best represented in the Permanent Collection, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and precisely to one of his most important works, Fränzi in front of a Carved Chair, considered to be a masterpiece of the German Expressionism of the beginning of this century. Other works from different museums and collections on the same subject and belonging to the same period are exhibited in the same room. The exhibition has been organized with the contribution of Lufthansa and of the German Embassy. Its commissioner is Dr. Magdalena Moeller, director of the Brücke Museum in Berlin and author of the study published in the catalogue of the show.


	From Canaletto to Kandinsky. Masterworks from the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection 21/03/1996 - 08/09/1996 Curated by Tomàs LLorens, this exhibition offers a selection of 85 works from the almost 400 that made up then the Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza's private Colecction. It was dedicated to the period going from from the 18th Century to the begining of the 20th Century, and more specifically to landscapes and genre painitngs. The itinerary designed led from views of Venice patinted by Canaletto and Guardi, or works by the great masters os Spanish genre ans realist painting -from Goya to Sorolla or Joaquin Mir-, to landscapes by the main exponents of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (Monet, Pisarro, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.), including an important selection of the 19th Century North American school. The itinerary ends in a room dedicated to art and the turn of the century, showing important works by Picasso, Kandinsky and Nolde, amongst others. Of great relevance is the chance to admire for the first time four marble sculptures by Rodin, commissioned from the French sculptor by August Thyssen, the grandfather of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.


	Picasso in 1923. Harlequin with a Mirror and The Pipes of Pan 24/11/1995 - 18/02/1996 Contexts of the Permanent Collection 1 The painting selected for the first exhibition of Contexts of the Permanent Collection is Picasso's most important work in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Harlequin with a Mirror dated in 1923 and considered to be one of the best examples of the artist's neoclassical period. Next to it we show for the first time in Spain the painting The Pipes of Pan, from the Picasso Museum in Paris, the masterwork of Picasso's classical period, also dated in 1923. Together with these two main works, the exhibition also presents two other oil paintings and various drawings and sketches, illustrating and explaining the close link between them and their creative process.


	Cualladó. Points of View 19/11/1995 - 14/01/1996 The Thyssen Bornemisza Museum presents it first exhibition of photographs showing the work carried out by the prestigious photographer from Valencia Gabriel Cualladó (Masanasa, 1925), winner of the 1994 National Photography Prize, in the galleries of the Museum itself, and on the subject of the public which visited them. The photographs were set up in the Temporary Exhibitions Gallery, following mainly a stylistic criterion and a rhythm in accordance with their particular characteristics. They were shown mostly in pairs, reproducing the arrangement and the order which they had in the exhibition's catalogue.


	André Derian (1880-1954) 05/04/1995 - 23/07/1995 Between the months of April and July, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid open its temporary exhibition rooms to a retrospective show of works by André Derain, dubbed as "the painter of modern malaise". This is an adaptation, carried out by Tomàs LLorens, of the anthological exhibition organized the previous Autumn by the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris. A selection of 55 paintings are presented in Madrid, which attempts to show the career of this versatile artist. Thus, the Derain fauve is presented first, the young Derain who was the heir to Gauguin and Van Gogh, the subsequent rejection of Post-Impressionism and the approximation to the work of Cézanne and the artistic manifestations of primitive people, his claim of traditional painting genres -still life, landscape and portrait-, the inclusion of the nude after the First World War, and the sombre vision that inundates the art of his final period.


	The Golden Age of Dutch Lanscape Painting 11/11/1994 - 12/02/1995 This is the first monographic exhibition organised in Spain about this pictorial genre of the 17th century Dutch School. The Temporary Exhibitions Gallery was specifically designed for this occasion, and its interior spaces were re-distributed in order to adapt them to the characteristics of the paintings and to the criteria of the exhibition. This was carried out following a clear chronological run through the twelve spaces destined for this ocasson, starting with the so-called transition artists between the 16th and the 17th century, to conclude with those masters whose work reveals the origin of new pictorial tendenceis.


	From Impressionism to the Avant-garde: Works on Paper 15/11/1993 - 16/01/1994 This first temporary exhibit has been organised to coincide with the first anniversary of the inauguration of the Museum, with works from the Collection that, due to their fragility, can only be exposed for short periods of time. The works on paper in the Museum form a group 79 works and are part od the Modern Master´s section, which cronologically covers the 19th and 20th century, although the majority of the works date from the begining of Modern Art.


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