Museo Carmen Thyssen

In collaboration with:

This exhibition aims to encourage visitors to discover one of the most fascinating moments in 20th-century art: the redefinition of Cubism following the period 1907 to 1914 when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the movement’s founders, developed their revolutionary artistic proposal that would change the way of seeing the world through a work of art forever.

From the onset of World War I to the late 1920s other artists thus took up the baton from the movement’s two founders, giving Cubism a “second life” of an intense, highly creative nature. The protagonists were Juan Gris, a key figure for understanding the transformation of Cubism during this period, Maria Blanchard, whose prominent role in the movement is emphasised in the exhibition, and a number of others with whom both shared friendship and creative empathy, such as the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, the painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger and the poet Vicente Huidobro.

With its new and innovative argument, the exhibition examines this artistic panorama through more than 60 exhibits of paintings, sculptures, drawings and documentary material. Organised into three sections, the exhibition opens with a dialogue between Gris and Blanchard through a large selection of outstanding examples of their flat, geometrical and synthetic painting. The second section provides a context for their work by juxtaposing it with that of other great 20th-century masters with whom they shared creative horizons. Finally, the third section includes a representation of artists from the first generation of the Spanish avant-garde – Dalí, Moreno Villa, Palencia, Peinado, Ángeles Ortiz and Cossío – who were first introduced to modern art through Cubism, particularly that of Juan Gris.

Image:
Juan Gris, Seated Woman, 1917 (detail), oil on canvas, 116 x 73 cm
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza