Museo Carmen Thyssen

Through more than sixty paintings, mostly from the Telefónica Collection, this exhibition tells the story of an episode in Spanish art that was largely shaped by the historical period to which it belongs. The hopes aroused by the signs of an emerging avant-garde before the Civil War (1936ꟷ39), fuelled above all by the new art of the 1920s and 1930s, were abruptly dashed by the establishment of Franco’s regime (1939–75), and modernity was plunged into a long period of lethargy. Nevertheless, a resilient figurative art kept alive the flame of renewal, which from the 1950s onwards, after the postwar and autarkic periods, sparked off other innovative movements such as the abstract Art Informel.

In the early 1900s, Spanish artists began experimenting with different ways of breaking with nineteenth-century tradition. The most adventurous of them went to Paris in their youth. There Picasso developed Cubism – the most revolutionary and influential of the historical avant-garde movements – which was steered in an important new direction by Gris and Blanchard in the 1910s. Throughout the 1920s, the foremost representatives of Spanish Art Nouveau (Bores, Cossío, Peinado, Viñes and González de la Serna) also moved to Paris and explored other artistic avenues ranging from Neo-Cubism to lyrical figurative painting.

Echoes of the Paris-based isms also gradually influenced artists committed to renewal in Spain, where the most original forms of expression were the realist movements of the ‘return to order’ of the 1920s and 1930s. Figurative art, as the most powerful example of that modernity, was also the most enduring artistic trend following the disruption caused by the war.

Despite censorship, exile and the regime’s absolute control of culture, there was no shortage of artists who exercised their individual freedoms through landscape and still life. This innovative and heterogeneous painting scene developed on different fronts: the (mainly individual and moderate) artistic initiatives that challenged the established taste inside the country (Zabaleta, Díaz-Caneja); the followers of the avant-garde experiences of the Republic who carried on working after the war, either in Paris or on Spanish soil (Viñes, Peinado, Ángeles Ortiz, Cossío); and the more advanced approaches of the leading artists in exile in Paris (Picasso, Óscar Domínguez, Bores).

In Spain, renewal took the form of the achievements of the Vallecas School. Their aesthetic attached to the land was revived by one of its founders, Benjamín Palencia, and it was the seed of the so-called Madrid School – Martínez Novillo, San José, Menchu Gal – and the sui generis landscape painting of Beulas and Ortega Muñoz. Spain’s modern visual art and its structures began to recover somewhat in the 1950s, in line with the country’s economic development plans, and in the following decade there was a closer link with the urban way of life, albeit from a lyrical and nostalgic perspective (Antonio López, Carmen Laffón).

Images:
Juan Gris, La Chanteuse (La cantante), 1926. Óleo sobre lienzo, 92 x 65 cm. Depósito comodato Colección Telefónica, MNCARS
Godofredo Ortega Muñoz, Alcornoques, c. 1970. Óleo sobre lienzo, 30,5 x 37,5 cm. Colección Telefónica