Museo Carmen Thyssen

This exhibition takes an extensive look at a chronologically short but creatively intense period in which the first truly determined drive towards artistic renewal (and even the avant-garde) and a break with nineteenth-century art emerged in Spain in the form of a realist figurative art.

At the start of the 1900s, the historical avant-gardes questioned all the certainties of the previous art and their revolution also extended to realistic representation, which retained its figurative concept and changed in all other aspects. This transformation took place in interwar Europe in reaction to the isms and as the continuation of a modern movement which, ever eager for novelty and a break with the past, aimed to ‘return to [visual] order’. In Spain, where the influence of the European avant-garde arrived late, at the end of the 1910s these new realisms ushered in a renewal championed from Barcelona and Madrid but traceable in many other places. This promising outlook lasted barely two decades, as these future hopes and dreams of change were abruptly interrupted by the Spanish Civil War.

The figurative universe, real at first sight, displayed in the 86 works on show has been divided into traditional genres – SPACES (landscapes, indoor scenes), SUBJECTS (portraits and nudes) and OBJECTS (still life) – but it also encourages viewers to search for a new way of looking, one that befits a newly created reality that in this case emerged from the avant-garde upheaval. City and factory environments and rural or idyllic settings are the silent backdrops, with sharply defined atmospheres that seem devoid of air, to a world populated by figures with frozen gestures, as if trapped beneath a layer of wax that turns them into mannequins, and where objects are exasperatingly tactile.

Image:
Salvador Dalí, Retrato de Anna Maria, 1924, óleo sobre lienzo, 102 x 76 cm.
Ars Casacuberta Marsans. © Salvador Dalí, Fundación Gala-Salvador Dalí, VEGAP, Málaga, 2022

With the collaboration of: