Museo Carmen Thyssen

An essential device in artistic training and painters’ and sculptors’ creative processes, in the twentieth century drawing came to be viewed as a form of artistic expression in its own right, independent of academic practices or preparatory sketches. Artists of various disciplines, then open to varied and bold experimentation in pursuit of a new art, and historians, fascinated by a medium that allowed them to discern the most intimate and genuine expressions of the great masters, accorded drawing techniques a leading role on the modern art scene.

For the avant-garde artists, pencils and crayons of all kinds, inks and watercolours were tools for composing – in black and white or in deep, flat colours – works which reflect the solitary and personal experience of the new languages that changed artists’ and viewers’ gaze forever, or helped disseminate their creations through multiple reproductions of their original drawings using printmaking. 

Simple and elegant line drawings, powerful and expressive strokes that attest to their maker’s gestures, and experimental techniques such as collage make up this survey of Spanish and international avant-garde drawings in the Fundación Mapfre collections. This selection of twenty-seven works on paper features foremost names in twentieth-century art and the leading movements they belonged to, such as Cubism, Constructivism, Dada, New Realism and Surrealism. Their drawings illustrate better than any other means of artistic expression the thought process, expectations, and attempts at achieving the desired form that are involved in creating a work of art and present the artist with the fascinating challenge of bringing a simple empty sheet to life through lines and colours.