Masterworks from Budapest From the Renaissance to the Avant-Garde
18 February to 28 May 2017 Curators: Guillermo Solana and Mar Borobia
Opening in February at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is Masterworks from Budapest. From the
Renaissance to the Avant-Garde, an exhibition which, for the first time in Spain, presents an
important selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures from the collections of the Museum of
Fine Arts in Budapest and the Hungarian National Gallery. In total the exhibition features 90
works from the 15th to the 20th centuries representing artistic schools such as the Italian,
German, Flemish and Spanish and including great names from the history of art such as Dürer,
Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, Velázquez, Tiepolo, Cézanne and Manet, in addition to interesting
works by Hungarian artists, together offering visitors a comprehensive idea of the collections
housed in these institutions.
Curated by Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the Museo Thyssen, and Mar Borobia, head of its
Department of Old Master Painting, the exhibition is organised in collaboration with the
Museum of Fine Arts, which is closed for renovation until March 2018, and the Hungarian
National Gallery, where part of the Museum of Fine Arts’s collection is temporarily exhibited. To
be accompanied by a range of activities, this is the first event in the Museo Thyssen’s exhibition
programme for 2017, the year that marks the 25th anniversary of its opening to the public.
Masterworks from Budapest. From the Renaissance to the Avant-Garde is divided into seven
sections: The Renaissance in the North, which focuses on 16th-century German painting
through the work of artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Baldung
Images, from left to right: Lucas Cranach the Elder. Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1526-1530. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Édouard Manet. Lady with a Fan, 1862. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; József Rippl-Rónai. Woman in a White Polka-Dot Dress, 1889. Hungarian National Gallery. More information and images: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza – Press Office: Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014 Madrid. Tel. +34 914203944 / +34 913600236. Fax +34 914202780. [email protected]; http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/prensa/2017/Budapest/index.html
Grien; The Renaissance in the South, with works by
Leonardo da Vinci, Lotto, Raphael and Bronzino; The
Baroque in Flanders and Holland, a room that
includes works by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van
Dyck; The Baroque in Italy and Spain, with canvases
by Annibale Carracci, Alonso Cano and Velázquez; The
18th century, with an excellent representation of the
Venetian school led by Sebastiano Ricci and
Giambattista Tiepolo, magnificent works by Central
European artists who are little known in Spain,
including an exceptional group of sculptures by Franz
Xavier Messerschmidt; a monographic room devoted to The New Image of Women, with works
by artists from Manet to Kokoschka; and finally, From Impressionism to the Avant-Garde,
which presents international art from the 19th century to World War I.
The Renaissance in the North
Grouped around Dürer, the most celebrated artist of the German Renaissance, represented here
by Portrait of a Young Man (ca.1500-1510) and Lancer on a Horseback (1502), this opening
section displays the work of other leading northern European artists such as Lucas Cranach the
Elder with Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (ca.1526-1530), an example of the
artist’s finest style; Albrecht Altdorfer with The Crucifixion (ca.1518-1520); Jan Gosseart with
The Mocking of Christ (1527); and Hans Baldung Grien, with The Virgin of Sorrows (Mater
dolorosa) (ca.1516). The section is completed with a magnificent landscape drawing by Wolf
Huber and a work by the Mannerist artist Bartholomeus Spranger.
The Renaissance in the South
The second room focuses on leading names of the Italian
Renaissance, with important examples of the Florentine, Venetian
and Lombard schools. Outstanding among them are two works by
Leonardo da Vinci: a drawing of Studies of Horses’ Legs (ca.1490-
1492) and a small equestrian sculpture of a Mounted Warrior
(1500-1505). Other exquisite creations include the Esterházy
Madonna (ca.1508) by Raphael, a celebrated work from the artist’s
mature period; The Adoration of the Shepherds (ca.1539-1540) by
Bronzino, a masterpiece of fully developed Mannerism; and Mary
Magdalene in Penitence by El Greco (ca. 1576), which reveals the
influence of Italian art on the Cretan artist’s painting.
The Baroque in Flanders and Holland
A large-format canvas by Rubens, one of the greatest representatives of Baroque painting, opens
the next section, dedicated to this artistic tendency in Flanders and Holland. Rubens’s canvas,
which depicts Mucius Scaevola before Porsenna (ca.1618-1620), reveals how the painter made
use of all his artistic resources to reflect this episode with enormous intensity, demonstrating a
masterly synthesis of the Flemish and Italian schools. It is very likely that the canvas was painted
with the collaboration of Rubens’s most gifted pupil, Anthony van Dyck, also represented here
by Saint John the Evangelist (ca.1620), an elegant canvas that was part of an Apostles series.
Canaletto. The Lock at Dolo, ca. 1763. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Leonardo da Vinci. Studies of Horses’s Legs, ca. 1490-1492.
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Other Flemish painters present in this section are Jacob
Jordaens, with his canvas of Adam and Eve (1630-1640), and
Jacob Grimmer, with a set of four canvases on the Seasons.
The Baroque in Italy and Spain
The most important representatives of Spanish Golden Age
painting are brought together in this space. They include
Francisco de Zurbarán, with a late Immaculate Conception
(1661), and Diego Velázquez with Tavern Scene with two Men
and a Girl (The Luncheon) (ca.1618-1619), an early work that
offers a simple presentation of an everyday subject. This
section also includes works by Alonso Cano, Bartolomé Murillo
and Mateo Cerezo, represented by splendid canvases on
religious subjects. Alongside them are outstanding examples of
Italian Baroque painting: Christ and the Samaritan Woman (ca.1596-1597) by Annibale Carracci,
one of the most important works within the early classicising Baroque current; Diana and
Actaeon (ca.1603-1606) by the Mannerist painter Giuseppe Cesari, which depicts an episode
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and a colourful Annunciation (ca.1640) by Bernardo Strozzi.
The 18th Century
Within the outstanding collection of paintings housed in the
Museum of Fine Arts, the representation of the Venetian school is
particularly notable in terms of both quality and number of works.
This section, the largest in the exhibition, presents a selection from
these holdings, including the oil on canvas Bathsheba at Her Bath
(ca.1724) by Sebastiano Ricci and The Virgin with Six Saints (1749-
1750) by Giambattista Tiepolo, in addition to a number of city views
by the famous vedute painters Canaletto, Guardi and Bellotto. The
section is completed with three canvases by Francisco de Goya: a
portrait of Ceán Bermúdez’s wife (1792-1793), The Water Carrier
(1808-1812), and The Knife Grinder (1808-1812); a group of works
by the German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, notably his
series known as the Character Heads, constituting a repertoire of
grotesque facial expressions; and a selection of works by Hungarian
artists including Jakab Bogdány, Ján Kupecký y Ádám Mányoki.
The New Image of Women
Symbolism, one of the artistic movements that characterised the last quarter of the 19th century,
placed a renewed emphasis on emotions, states of mind, dreams and fantasy through the female
figure. Artists affiliated with this movement include Puvis de Chavannes from France, Arnold
Böcklin from Switzerland, Franz von Stuck from Germany and János Vaszary from Hungary.
Their work is to be seen in this section alongside various powerful and expressive paintings by
Oskar Kokoschka and Lady with a Fan (1862) by Édouard Manet, who was associated with
Baudelaire, the poet and precursor of Symbolism.
Peter Paul Rubens y Anton van Dyck. Mucius Scaevola before Porsenna, ca.
1618-1620. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. The Water Carrier, 1808-1812. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts
From Impressionism to the Avant-garde
This final room presents a selection of works from different
artistic movements spanning the final decades of the 19th
century to the start of World War I. They range from Claude
Monet’s rapid, spontaneous brushstroke in Plum Trees in
Blossom (1879) to Camille Pissarro’s manner of capturing the
effects of light in The Pont Neuf (1902), the new ideas on pure
colours introduced by Paul Gauguin in Black Pigs (1891), or
Cézanne’s characteristic volumes in The Buffet (1877-1879).
This section also focuses on several great Hungarian painters,
including Károly Ferenczy, Adolf Fényes, Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba,
Sándor Ziffer and Sándor Bortnyik, whose work reveals the
influence of the new pictorial languages that emerged in France,
from Impressionism and Neo-impressionism to the Avant-Garde.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Hungarian National Gallery
The holdings of Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest are the result of the amalgamation of various
old collections, principally that of the Estherhazys, which was acquired by the Hungarian State in
1870 and was soon expanded with others such as those of the lawyer Miklós Jankovich and
Archbishop Lászlo Pyrker, in addition to acquisitions and private donations, in all totalling more
than 100,000 works today. In addition to the collection of Old Master paintings, which is the
most outstanding, the museum houses extremely important examples of works on paper,
sculptures, classical Greek and Roman art, ancient Egyptian art and modern works.
The Museum of Fine Arts was established in 1896 to mark the celebration of the 1000th
anniversary of the founding of Hungary although it did not open to the public until ten years
later, in 1906. By around 1913 its collection already included modern Hungarian art as a
separate category and this area continued to grow until in 1957 it was decided to separate it
from the other holdings of European art, leading to the founding of the Hungarian National
Gallery. From that point on the Museum of Fine Arts
focused on European art from antiquity to the present,
while Hungarian art came under the preserve of the new
National Gallery. In 1975 the Museum of Fine Arts also
transferred its holdings of art by Hungarian artists from
the Middle Ages to the Baroque as well as works by 17th-
and 18th-century national artists, and a contemporary
section was established for Hungarian art post-1945.
A new institutional structure has recently been implemented that does not separate the
collections according to national schools. One of the aims of this reunification is to group
together in the Museum of Fine Arts the Old Master paintings by both Hungarian and
international painters and the medieval altarpieces, for which reason the building is currently
being remodelled. The 19th- and 20th-century Hungarian and international collections will be
housed in the Hungarian National Gallery’s new building, the construction of which is about to
begin.
Sándor Bortnyik. The New Adam, 1924. Galería Nacional de Hungría
Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts
EXHIBITION INFORMATION:
Title: Masterworks from Budapest. From the Renaissance to the Avant-Garde
Organisers: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, and the Hungarian
National Gallery
Venue and dates: Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 18 February to 28 May 2017
Curators: Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Mar
Borobia, head of the Department of Old Master Painting at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Technical curator: Dolores Delgado, Department of Old Master Painting at the Museo Thyssen-
Bornemisza
Number of works: 90
Publications: Catalogue with texts by Gábor Bellák and Adriána Lantos; educational guide; and
digital publication on the Thyssen Kiosk app.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Address: Paseo del Prado 8. 28014 Madrid.
Opening times: Tuesdays to Fridays and Sundays, 10am to 7pm; Saturdays, 10am to 9pm
Single ticket: Permanent Collection and temporary exhibitions:
- Standard ticket: 12 Euros
- Reduced price ticket: 8 Euros for visitors aged over 65, pensioners, students with proof of status
and Large Families
- Free entry: children aged under 12 and officially unemployed Spanish citizens
Advance ticket purchase at the Museum’s ticket desks, from its website and on tel: 902 760
511
More information: www.museothyssen.org
Audio guide: available in various languages
PRESS INFORMATION
http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/prensa/2017/Budapest/index.html