From post-impressionism to the avant-gardes

The Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection was first shown to the public in Madrid in 1996. Since then more than 15 exhibitions have been held, in Spain and in other countries, with various selections of works from the collection. To a large extent, any private collection expresses the tastes and preferences of its owner, a principle that certainly applies in the case of this collection. Despite its panoramic nature -extending over a time span that ranges from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, with examples of almost all the Western schools- it shows particular interest in placing Spanish art on the level of international art. Another notable feature is the interest taken by the Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza in the genre of landscape -which was called upon to play a very important part in the genesis of modern art- and the attraction she finds in movements connected with the study of light and colour. This latter aspect is possibly the most palpable characteristic in the selection of works presented here, devoted for the first time to illustrating the development of art in the first half of the twentieth century. The first group of works exhibited focuses on Gauguin and the Nabis, in what was the most important attempt made at the close of the nineteenth century to reorient artistic output beyond the strict confines of naturalism. Both Gauguin and Bernard and, somewhat later, Sérusier, Denis and Le Sidaner paid particular attention to colour and line as means for suggesting emotions and spiritual contents to the viewer. Apart from the more literary symbolism of artists such as Moreau or Puvis de Chavannes, the work of the artists selected here laid the basis for the art that followed. Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, Manguin and Camoin -all represented in the second room, devoted to Fauvism- took the work of Gauguin and the Nabis as a starting-point and moved towards the use of flat areas of arbitrary colour. Their example was followed by the first generations of German Expressionist painters, such as the members of Die Brücke -Kirchner, Heckel, Pechstein and Nolde- in Dresden; Kandinsky and Münter in Munich; and Tappert in Berlin. However, instead of making use of colour from an aesthetic viewpoint, as in the case of the Fauve artists, they all laid emphasis on its dramatic and expressive qualities. Whereas Fauvism brought about the first great breakaway from the traditional system of representation by freeing colour from its visual reference, Cubism called into question the very system of perspective that had prevailed since the Renaissance. The desire of artists such as Picasso, Braque and Gris to reconcile the material quality of objects with the two-dimensionality of the picture support opened up the way to abstraction. Nevertheless, even before artists such as Mondrian or Malevich progressed along that path, Delaunay created his “Orphic” compositions with contrasting colour planes considered in terms of their rhythmical and musical qualities. His example was followed by Kupka and Léger. Later, in the thirties, abstraction incorporated various formal novelties from the Surrealism of Miró in biomorphic compositions such as those by Baumeister. Returning to the period after the First World War, the trauma caused by the fighting brought about a widespread mistrust of novelty and progress in art. Various “calls to order” emerged, in an attempt to reconcile avant-garde art with the past and to eliminate the excess of subjectivism that had persisted in the panorama of art since the turn of the century. Picasso, Derain and Matisse in France, De Chirico, Carrà, Severini and Morandi in Italy, and Beckmann, Dix and the other members of Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany reverted to a moderate, objective style of painting which also had representatives such as Hopper and Marsh in the United States.