Museo Carmen Thyssen

In collaboration with:

With this exhibition the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga wishes to pay tribute to Francisco Iturrino (Santander, 1864‒Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1924), one of the leading artists represented in our permanent collection, and to help settle a historical debt: the unfair silencing of a pioneer in Spanish avant-garde art of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The pieces on show – works of varying provenance carefully selected for their quality and relevance to the exhibition’s argument – reveal the richness and variety of Iturrino’s painting. A singular, cosmopolitan artist very well connected to the modern art and intellectual scene of his time, he was, as Ramón Gómez de la Serna put it ‘deeply paradoxically, the man from the North who is the most southern painter’.

The Fury of Colour is a nomadic artist’s pictorial diary that tells chiefly of his decisive contact with the light and colour of the south. This joyful discovery led him to shun the bohemian and symbolist aesthetic of his early years in Belgium and Paris for original paintings which, despite depicting motifs drawn from Spanish folklore, are notable for their vibrant and expressive use of colour in tune with Fauvist painting. Iturrino’s main contribution as an artist is this powerful palette in unrestricted paintings of monumental female nudes, exquisite still lifes and exuberant landscapes. His emotive idealisation of the south reached a height in the prodigious depiction of the gardens at La Concepción in Málaga.  

Lastly, the exhibition shows Iturrino’s work from a new perspective as it establishes dialogues with the paintings of some of his main contemporaries and friends – Matisse, Derain, Zuloaga and Regoyos. Besides highlighting the interesting affinities between like-minded artists, this comparison refutes the myth of the artist as a loner who swam against the tide of his time.

Images:
Francisco Iturrino.
1. The Bath (Seville), c. 1908. Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza
2. Female Nude, 1910. Private collection, Madrid
3. Still Life, 1910‒11. Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (on deposit from the Zorrilla Lequerica Collection)
4. Young Women with Flowers, c. 1916‒17. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid