Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza | |
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Established | 1992 |
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Location | Palace of Villahermosa Paseo del Prado, 8. Madrid, Spain |
Coordinates | 40°24′58″N3°41′42″W / 40.41611°N 3.69500°W Coordinates: 40°24′58″N3°41′42″W / 40.41611°N 3.69500°W |
Collection size | 1,600 |
Visitors | 1.052.014 (2017) [1] |
Founder | Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon |
Director | Guillermo Solana (Artistic Director), Evelio Acevedo (Managing Director) |
Website | www.museothyssen.org |
The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum (in Spanish, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (pronounced [muˈse.o ˈtisem boɾneˈmisa] ), [2] named after its founder), or simply the Thyssen, is an art museum in Madrid, Spain, located near the Prado Museum on one of the city's main boulevards. It is known as part of the "Golden Triangle of Art", which also includes the Prado and the Reina Sofia national galleries. The Thyssen-Bornemisza fills the historical gaps in its counterparts' collections: in the Prado's case this includes Italian primitives and works from the English, Dutch and German schools, while in the case of the Reina Sofia it concerns Impressionists, Expressionists, and European and American paintings from the 20th century.
With over 1,600 paintings, it was once the second largest private collection in the world after the British Royal Collection. [3] A competition was held to house the core of the collection in 1987–88 after Baron Thyssen, having unsuccessfully sought permission to enlarge his Museum in Lugano (Villa Favorita), searched for a better-suited location elsewhere in Europe.
The collection was started in the 1920s as a private collection by Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon. In a reversal of the movement of European paintings to the US during this period, one of the elder Baron's sources was the collections of American millionaires coping with the Great Depression and inheritance taxes. In this way he acquired old master paintings such as Ghirlandaio's portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni (once in the Morgan Library) and Carpaccio's Knight (from the collection of Otto Kahn). [3] The collection was later expanded by Heinrich's son Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921–2002), [4] who assembled most of the works from his relatives' collections and proceeded to acquire large numbers of new works (from Gothic art to Lucien Freud).
The collection was initially housed in the family estate in Lugano in a twenty-room building modelled after the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. In 1988, the Baron filed a request for building a further extension designed by British architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford, but the plan was rejected by the Lugano City Council.
In 1985, the Baron married Carmen "Tita" Cervera (a former Miss Spain 1961) and introduced her to art collecting. Cervera's influence was decisive in persuading the Baron to relocate the core of his collection to Spain where the local government had a building available next to the Prado. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum officially opened in 1992, showing 715 works of art. A year later, the Spanish Government bought 775 works for $350 million. [5] These pieces are now in the purpose-built museum in Madrid. After the museum opened, in 1999, Cervera loaned 429 works of her own art collection to the museum for 11 years. The loan has been renewed annually since 2012. [5]
The Baroness remains involved with the museum. She personally decided the salmon pink tone of the interior walls and in May 2006, publicly demonstrated against plans of the Mayor of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón to redevelop the Paseo del Prado as she thought the works and traffic would damage the collection and the museum's appearance.
The Old Masters were mainly bought by the elder Baron, while Hans focused more on the 19th and 20th century, resulting in a collection that spans eight centuries of European painting, without claiming to give an all-encompassing view but rather a series of highlights.
One of the focal points is the early European painting, with a major collection of trecento and quattrocento (i.e. 14th and 15th century) Italian paintings by Duccio, Luca di Tommè, Bernardo Daddi, Paolo Uccello, and his contemporaries, and works of the early Flemish and Dutch painters like Jan van Eyck (Diptich of the Annunciation), Petrus Christus, Rogier van der Weyden, Gerard David and Hans Memling.
Other highlights include works by leading Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo painters, including Antonello da Messina ( Portrait of a Man ), Bramantino ( Christus Dolens ), Fra Bartolomeo, Giulio Romano, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Jacopo Bassano, Sebastiano del Piombo (Portrait of Ferry Carondelet ), Bernardino Luini, Agnolo Bronzino, Domenico Beccafumi, Albrecht Dürer ( Christ among the Doctors ), Hans Baldung Grien, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein (Portrait of Henry VIII), Caravaggio (Saint Catherine), Guercino, Sebastiano Ricci, Rubens, Van Dyck, Murillo, Rembrandt, Frans Hals ( Family Portrait in a Landscape ), Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Tiepolo, Giambattista Pittoni, Watteau, François Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, Gainsborough and Pompeo Batoni, as well as two famous portraits by Domenico Ghirlandaio ( Giovanna Tornabuoni ) and Vittore Carpaccio (Knight in a landscape).
The Museum houses a display of North American paintings from 18th and 19th centuries, including Copley, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent.
The display of the European 19th century starts with works by Francisco Goya, Thomas Lawrence, Delacroix, Géricault, Corot and Courbet. There are Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by the artists Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Pierre Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh. The large collection of twentieth century modern art includes Cubist works by Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris, as well as paintings by Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, James Ensor, Kandinsky, Salvador Dalí, Paul Klee, Chagall, Magritte, Piet Mondrian, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem De Kooning and Francis Bacon. The selection of German Expressionism is extensive, and includes Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, and Otto Dix.
A collection of works from the museum (Fra Angelico, Cranach, Titian, Canaletto) is housed in Barcelona in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.
One painting, Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain by Camille Pissarro, belonged to a Jewish woman, Lilly Cassirer who was compelled by a Nazi official to exchange it under duress for an exit visa to escape Nazi Germany [6] shortly after Kristallnacht in 1939. [7] By 2015, her descendants had filed a lawsuit against the museum, on the grounds that it was looted by the Nazis. [7] [8] On May 1st 2019, a California judge determined that the museum held the right to keep the painting, despite international agreements to the contrary. [9]
In 2011 due to "a lack of liquid funds", Cervera decided to sell The Lock by the English artist John Constable. [10] [11] The painting, which belonged to her private collection, was sold in London the following year for £22.4 million, more than doubling the price paid for it in 1990. [12]
Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas. His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.
Hans Henrik Ágost Gábor, Baron von Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva, an industrialist and art collector, was a Dutch-born Swiss citizen with a Hungarian title and heir to a German fortune, a legal resident of Monaco for tax purposes, with a declared second residency in the United Kingdom, but in actuality a long-time resident of Spain, and son of a German father and a Hungarian and English American mother. His fifth and last wife, Carmen "Tita" Cervera, is a former Miss Spain titleholder.
Maximilien Luce was a prolific French Neo-impressionist artist, known for his paintings, illustrations, engravings, and graphic art, and also for his anarchist activism. Starting as an engraver, he then concentrated on painting, first as an Impressionist, then as a Pointillist, and finally returning to Impressionism.
Giovanni Paolo Panini or Pannini was a painter and architect who worked in Rome and is primarily known as one of the vedutisti. As a painter, Panini is best known for his vistas of Rome, in which he took a particular interest in the city's antiquities. Among his most famous works are his view of the interior of the Pantheon, and his vedute—paintings of picture galleries containing views of Rome. Most of his works, especially those of ruins, have a fanciful and unreal embellishment characteristic of capriccio themes. In this they resemble the capricci of Marco Ricci. Panini also painted portraits, including one of Pope Benedict XIV.
Vittore Carpaccio was an Italian painter of the Venetian school, who studied under Gentile Bellini. He is best known for a cycle of nine paintings, The Legend of Saint Ursula. His style was somewhat conservative, showing little influence from the Humanist trends that transformed Italian Renaissance painting during his lifetime. He was influenced by the style of Antonello da Messina and Early Netherlandish art. For this reason, and also because so much of his best work remains in Venice, his art has been rather neglected by comparison with other Venetian contemporaries, such as Giovanni Bellini or Giorgione.
Musée Marmottan Monet is located at 2, rue Louis Boilly in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and features over three hundred Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, including his 1872 Impression, Sunrise. It is the largest collection of his works.
Jan Provoost, or Jean Provost, or Jan Provost was a Belgian painter born in Mons.
Heinrich Thyssen, after 22 June 1907 Heinrich Freiherr Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva, was a German-Hungarian entrepreneur and art collector.
A private collection is a privately owned collection of works. In a museum or art-gallery context, the term signifies that a certain work is not owned by that institution, but is on loan from an individual or organization, either for temporary exhibition or for the long term. This source is usually an art collector, although it could also be a school, church, bank, or some other company or organization. By contrast, collectors of books, even if they collect for aesthetic reasons, are called bibliophiles, and their collections are typically referred to as libraries.
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is an art museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The Brooks Museum, which was founded in 1916, is the oldest and largest art museum in the state of Tennessee. The museum is a privately funded nonprofit institution located in Overton Park in Midtown Memphis.
Young Knight in a Landscape, or Portrait of a Knight, is a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Vittore Carpaccio, now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid. Dated 1510, this is the earliest full-length portrait in Western painting—on the assumption that it is a portrait, as seems likely. It is characteristic of Carpaccio that apart from this important innovation, the style of the work seems in other respects to look back to the previous century. From some date until the 20th century the painting had been given the monogram of Albrecht Dürer, and Carpaccio's signature overpainted. The realism and detail of Carpaccio does in fact show Northern influence.
Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, formerly Francesca von Habsburg-Lothringen, is an art collector. She is the former wife of Karl von Habsburg, current head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.
Jonathan Petropoulos is an American historian who writes about National Socialism and, in particular, the fate of art looted during World War II. He is John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. Before his 1999 appointment to Claremont McKenna College, Petropoulos taught at Loyola College in Maryland.
The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is an art museum on the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman, Oklahoma.
María del Carmen Rosario Soledad Cervera y Fernández de la Guerra, Dowager Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva, popularly known as Carmen "Tita" Cervera or Carmen "Tita" Thyssen, is a Spanish socialite, and art dealer and collector.
The Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni is a painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, executed in 1488 and located in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. The portrait was commissioned by Lorenzo Tornabuoni after his wife's death in 1488 and includes many symbolic details.
Carlos Sebastián Pedro Hubert de Haes was a Spanish painter from Belgium. He was noted for the Realism in his landscapes, and was considered to be the "first contemporary Spanish artist able to capture something of a particularly Spanish 'essence' in his work". He was cited along with Jenaro Perez Villaamil and Aureliano de Beruete as one of the three Spanish grand masters of landscape painting, the latter of which was his pupil.
The Carmen Thyssen Museum is an art museum in the Spanish city Málaga. The main focus of the museum is 19th-century Spanish painting, predominantly Andalusian, based on the collection of Carmen Cervera, fifth wife of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Joachim Pissarro is an art historian, theoretician, curator, educator, and director of the Hunter College Galleries and Bershad Professor of Art History at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Since 2002, Pissarro has served as the Editorial Director of Wildenstein Publications. His latest book, authored with art critic David Carrier, is called Wild Art. Pissarro was curator at the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Painting and Sculpture from 2003 to 2007.
Rudolph J. Heinemann, also known as Rudolf J. Heinemann, was a German-born American art dealer and collector of Old Masters. He was an advisor to Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who established a museum in Lugano, Switzerland with his help. Heinemann and his wife donated works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum.
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