Museo Carmen Thyssen

In conjunction with the temporary exhibition Summer Days. From Sorolla to Hopper, the Museum is offering three gallery talks in the exhibition space, which provides the ideal setting for appreciating the topics to be discussed. 

4 June
Javier Viar
Director, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao

The northern sun
From the time when painting outdoors started to prevail over the creation of works in the studio, capturing the effects of natural light became the principal concern of artists. Every location, however, had its own, unique light. Accustomed to the intensity and relative uniformity of the Mediterranean sun, painters from southern and eastern Spain approached their art in a way different to that of the northern masters, who faced the challenge of a constantly changing light that moved from grey and cold to warm and white from one instant to the next.

11 June
María de los Santos García Felguera
Professor, Universidad Pompeu Fabra

Sea bathing and photography
From the mid-19th century onwards and in conjunction with the emergence of the new middle-class custom of summer holidays on the coast, sea bathing for health and leisure reasons became increasingly popular. The beaches of Spain and other European countries were now filled with sea spas, beach huts and bathing machines, bathers wearing their fashionable new costumes, lifeguards who supervised hesitant swimmers and many others new features that contemporary photographers recorded from the very outset of that medium.

18 June
Francisco Javier Pérez Rojas
Cátedra Pinazo. IVAM-Universidad de Valencia

Pinazo and the charms of the beach
Ignacio Pinazo was one of the best European painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the creator of a modern, experimental oeuvre characterised by its markedly free technique. He frequently focused on a new type of genre scene, of which particularly notable examples are his numerous beach scenes, some of which consist of little more than rapid sketches of a passing moment of sunlight. All of them are, however, highly expressive and characterised by impressive and striking effects of light and atmosphere.