Museo Carmen Thyssen

Engaging in dialogue with the paintings from the Carmen Thyssen collection on display in the second floor of the permanent collection, these five guest works from the Museo Unicaja Joaquín Peinado of the Fundación Unicaja Ronda show one of the many avenues that emerged from the formal revolution of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century.

The painter Joaquín Peinado (Ronda, 1898−Paris, 1975) embarked on this path, spurred by the encouragement received during his youth in Madrid from artists such as Pla, Romero de Torres and Sorolla; the yearning for renewal that gave rise to the so-called new art in Spain; and, above all, his contact in Paris with Picasso and other young Spanish painters of his generation, who, like him, were introduced to modern art through Cubism.

Residing in the French capital from 1923 until his death, Peinado embraced various avant-garde trends. Neo-Cubism based on a reinterpretation of Picasso and Juan Gris, the new realist movements of the interwar period, a number of forays into Surrealism and abstraction, and the lyrical figurative style of the Spanish School in Paris are found in his art of the 1920s. These trends shaped the highly personal style of his mature period, which he attained in the 1940s and 1950s after a decade-long break in his artistic activity.

The works on view date from this period and attest to the constant presence of the teachings of Cézanne and Cubism, which the painter never abandoned, in a constructive language of geometric forms, colour planes and lines, albeit combined with clear figurative references and lyrical evocations. In short, an art that is free and devoted to exalting purely expressive values.

Joaquín Peinado. Still Life with Chinese Vase, c. 1945 / Cubist Still Life, 1955 / Barges on the Seine, 1948 / Industrial Landscape, 1959 / Portrait of Inger [the painter’s wife], 1952
Museo Unicaja Joaquín Peinado, Ronda, Málaga
© Joaquín Peinado, VEGAP, Málaga, 2021