Museo Carmen Thyssen

A keen collector of works full of colour and emotion which captivate viewers with their beauty, Baroness Carmen Thyssen seems to have been concerned with painting light when she assembled her extraordinary holdings of Catalan masters.

Sun-drenched landscapes and melancholic dusks in tranquil countryside settings, resplendent Mediterranean coasts, interiors into which the outdoors seeps, and vibrant artificial lights amid darkness and night, executed in Barcelona, Rome, Paris, Sitges and Mallorca, illustrate the many new avenues explored by Catalan painting between 1850 and 1950.

The chosen works sum up the best of the Carmen Thyssen collection: from a realism that underwent constant transformation for half a century, to the intensely personal and innovative experiments of fin-de-siècle artists, Noucentisme or to the spirit of renewal of the Catalan avant-garde. The exhibition furthermore tells of a diverse pictorial universe shaped by different representational sensibilities. These works chiefly denote a fondness for colourful painting as a playful sensory experience.

As a reflection of an entire collection of which the baroness is particularly fond for sentimental reasons – its closeness to her family’s roots – and where landscape painting is predominant, these canvases are linked by their shared concern with capturing light. They are in tune with developments in contemporary European art, with which Catalan artists were familiar due to their frequent trips and stays in Paris, then the capital of modern art.

Image: Lluís Graner, Girls by the Light of a Lantern, c. 1899, oil on canvas, 90 x 94 cm. Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.

With the collaboration of: