Madrid and its museums shelter countless splendid masterpieces by artists from Spain and other countries, dating from all periods in the history of art.
The Prado Museum is celebrating its bicentenary with a special programme. Until August, ‘Rubens, Painter of Sketches’ displays 82 works by the greatest painter of oil sketches in the history of European art in addition to some 20 paintings, drawings and other works that help to contextualize the sketches. From June to September, El Prado and the National Gallery, London are devoting the exhibition ‘Lorenzo Lotto. Portraits’ to one of the most fascinating and unique artists of the Italian Cinquecento. Because of the variety of typologies and the symbolism used in his portraits, Lotto is considered one of the foremost portrait painters of the Renaissance.
Also until September, the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum is presenting ‘Monet/Boudin’, a show on the relation between the Impressionist painter Claude Monet and his mentor Eugène Boudin, a prominent representative of mid 19th-century French plein air painting. The exhibition highlights Monet’s formative period and the careers of both artists as well as the origins of the Impressionist movement. From October to January, the monographic exhibition‘ Max Beckmann, Figures of Exile’ is devoted to one of the most important German artists of the 20th century. The first part of the show covers the artist’s period in Germany from before World War I to the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, when he was expelled from the Frankfurt art school where he taught and was banned from displaying his work in public. The second part deals with the years Beckman spent in Amsterdam and the United States after being forced to leave Germany.
At Madrid’s Recoletos Hall, the Mapfre Foundation is displaying until September the work of ‘Brassaï’, a key member of the group of European and American photographers who succeeded in redefining photography’s identity and in enriching its potential as an art form in the 20th century. At ‘Rediscovering the Mediterranean’, visitors can enjoy until January a panorama of the many motives drawing artists to the Mediterranean coast. And likewise until January, the exhibition ‘Humberto Rivas’ at the Bárbara de Braganza Hall shows the impact of this artist’s creative photography on the Barcelona of 1976.
