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. prensa@museothyssen.org; 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