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.