Museo Carmen Thyssen

Over the centuries the relationship between writers and painting has been a close one, while the collaboration between word and image has given rise to mutual enrichment, reaffirmation, exaltation and a common hoard of ideas. On occasions the boundaries are transgressed, in the case of writers who painted or painters who were poets. The encounter between art and literature continues to occupy a prominent position in the Museo Carmen Thyssen’s educational activities. This year a new group of writers will be narrating images from their particular perspectives, recreating the possible instant in which they were created from a fictional viewpoint or through historical documentation.

Martes 21 October
Luis Alberto de Cuenca
Nymphs Bathing
Located mid-way between Symbolism, Historicism and Art Nouveau, the work of Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840-1924) is notable within late 19th-/early 20th-century Spanish painting for its originality and cosmopolitanism. Nymphs Bathing of around 1915 is a good example of the artist’s style. 

Tuesday 28 October
Aurora Luque
Sea View by Emilio Ocón, or Instructions for capturing the mysteries of the sea
Emilio Ocón’s Sea View evokes a journey, a digression and a story. A journey through seas that inspire writers, painters and musicians with poetry and mysteries. A digression on the Flemish masters and on plein air painting. The story of a character who travelled from Ocón’s painting to another one by Eugeen van Mieghem.

Tuesday 4 November
Álvaro García
Writing and painting to defeat time
Night like the protective wrapping around a being who is not totally a being, like a uterus: the night is about to end in the ultimate disappointment or irony that awaits the masked ball - light. The painting and the poem redeem something of those who choose the night, the real and the interior, so that time does not hinder the essential: vision, love, futility, life’s transformation through bewitchment.

Tuesday 11 November
Ada Salas
When I look at you Marina, who or what is looking at me?
This talk will aim to analyse why this painting by Zurbarán exercises such a fascination on all those who look at it. What is the basis of its almost hypnotic appeal: what “grips” the viewer; why do we feel so attracted to the composition’s forms, which seem to emerge from the darkness; what is unreal and hyperreal about this work; how does it combine still life and portraiture; why is a saint in some way a “temptation”, in the sense that her magnetic appeal on the viewer makes us want to approach her; what makes this painting stop us in our tracks.

Thursday 20 November
Juan Manuel Bonet
Córdoba the dead
The Poem of Córdoba represents the culmination of Julio Romero de Torres’s Symbolist work. Focusing on that polyptych and on its preparatory study, which is in the Museum’s collection, this talk will reflect on a vision of the city that owes much to Belgian Symbolism, both in the visual arts and literature. This pre-Metaphysical Córdoba is notably comparable to the city extolled by Georges Rodenbach in his novel Bruges la Morte