When Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921-2002) acquired a watercolour by the German painter Emil Nolde in May 1961, he marked the beginning of a change in the collecting of the Thyssen family. While during the interwar period his father, Heinrich Thyssen (1875-1947), had amassed an extraordinary collection of Old Masters, between the 1960s and 1990s he developed an intense collecting activity of the main artistic movements of the 20th century, among which Expressionism would occupy a primordial place.
In 1993, when the Spanish State acquired the majority of the Thyssen collection, a significant selection of German Expressionist works came to belong to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, an art form that until then had not been found in Spanish collections. But it is worth remembering that a select group of Expressionist paintings remained in the hands of his wife, Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, and his children. Now the exhibition German Expressionism in the Collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza brings them together again, for the first time in several decades, and this publication gives an account of it.
The presentation offered here abandons the chronological distribution with which Expressionism is normally shown in the Museum's galleries and offers a renewed vision that is fundamentally articulated around three concepts that have always interested collectors: the process of creating the paintings, the evolution of the public and critical echo they received through successive exhibitions and, finally, the relationship between Hans Heinrich Thyssen and the dealers who helped him to shape his collection and the exhibition projects he organized, guided by his desire to disseminate it in an international context.
Texts: Paloma Alarcó (curator) and Guillermo Solana.
Chronology: Juan Angel Lopez-Manzanares and Leticia de Cos Martin
Language: Spanish with annex with texts in English
Paperback binding.
ISBN: 9788417173487
Dimensions: 22 x 28 cm (width x height)
