The Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection

Tomàs Llorens
Chief Curator of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

The Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection developed as a natural continuation of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, which has been housed since 1992 in the Museum of the same name in Madrid. Its beginnings could be dated around the middle of the 1980’s, the period in which Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza was formalising an agreement with his children in order to prevent the future dispersion of the collection his own father had started in the first decades of the 20th century and that he himself had considerably enlarged. The main body of the historical collection was then commended to a trust that was to safeguard its future. In order to guarantee the task of that trust, he entered into negotiations with governments and institutions in different countries including, in 1986, with the Spanish government. In 1988 he signed an initial agreement with it for the creation of the future Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, an agreement which culminated in 1993 with the final acquisition of the Collection for the kingdom of Spain. In the meantime, the Baron and the Baroness continued to buy paintings and this led to the division, within the Collection, between the works acquired before and after the creation of the trust. The latter, bought initially for the personal enjoyment of the Baron and Baroness, were assigned to their heirs, among whom was the Baroness herself. This is the initial nucleus of what would later be known as the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.

Thus the Collection was endowed, right from the beginning, with an important group of works, among which some of excellent quality, such as Constable’s The Dam, one of the most salient masterpieces by this English artist. The painting, acquired in 1991 on the British market and temporary left on loan by the Baron and Baroness at the Victoria and Albert Museum, came, also on loan, to the new Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid when it was opened in 1992. The aforementioned initial set included other paintings, such as Gauguin’s Comings and goings, Martinique, which the Baron and Baroness had initially intended to keep in their private residence but that eventually were left on loan at the Museum.

It was precisely in this Museum that, in 1996, the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection as such was first shown to the public. It was a partial presentation, since—thanks to the Baroness’ stimulus—the collection had grown so much during the first half of the 1990’s that it became impossible to include it within the limits of a temporary exhibition. Under the title From Canaletto to Kandinsky, a selection of works was gathered with the aim of attempting to illustrate the main thematic guidelines of the Baron and Baroness’s artistic inclinations. Following a rather uncommon trend among modern collectors—though interwoven in family traditions—, those inclinations were selective as regards the quality of the works but very ample in terms of their chronological and historiographical span. Therefore, within the chronology indicated by the title itself, in the exhibition From Canaletto to Kandinsky one could see samples of historiographic trends as different as 18th century vedutism, 19th century naturalist landscapes, Impressionism, Post-impressionism and the first avant-gardes of the 20th century.

Following the example of the historical collection, the new Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection had since its beginnings an extraordinary vocation to travel. Immediately after the 1996 exhibition in the Madrid Museum was closed, a different set of 63 works was on show in China. On that occasion the famous Shanghai Art Museum was inaugurated with an exhibition of those paintings. In the first months of 1997 the same group of works was exhibited at the National Art Gallery of China. That was just the beginning of a series of 28 different exhibitions that, from 1996 to 2004, have enabled the public of cities as varied as Bilbao, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, New York, Lugano, Barcelona, Malaga, Valencia, Tokyo, Mexico, Brussels and Bonn to admire the works in the Collection. Most of them were conceived as thematic exhibitions, as this made it possible to show different aspects of the Collection as it increased with the acquisition of new works. Some of those exhibitions, such as the one held in Lugano in 1997 on the occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the Gallery of Paintings of Villa Favorita, showed a wide range of masterworks from the Collection. At the same time, another selection of masterpieces was on show at the Frick Collection, New York, under the title The Spirit of the Place. A similar driving force was behind the exhibition organised in 1998 at the Metropolitan Museum of Tokyo and in three other Japanese towns. But, as previously mentioned, most of the exhibitions through which the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection has been divulged dealt with specific historical-artistic subjects. The vedute, very highly appraised in the Collection, were the subject of a monographic exhibition held from December 1997 to April 1998 in the Pedralbes Monastery, in Barcelona. In 1999 another important exhibition took place at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela; its subject was French painting from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, another chapter of art history very well represented in the Collection.

The temporary exhibitions successfully offered the opportunity to deal with many other aspects of Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza’s activity as a collector. Thus, beside the aforementioned exhibitions, we should also underline the one dedicated to paintings from the beginning of the 20th century in the Collection, held in April 2000 at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, the exhibition of old masters organised in 2001 in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Castellón and that which opened that same year in the Ausstellungshalle in Bonn with the title Landscapes from Brueghel to Kandinsky, an exhibition organised in Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s honour and which offered a splendid overview of the history of landscape painting, a genre particularly well represented in the Collection. New international success was obtained in the spring of 2002, when the Fondazione Memmo presented in Rome another selection of the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection which, under the title The Triumph of colour, analysed the significant transformation undergone by modern art from Impressionism to fauve painting. Unfortunately, that exhibition coincided with Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s death, on 27 April 2002.

In spite of its rapid growth, the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection has maintained its coherence within the historiographic lines already announced in the first exhibition in 1996. These lines are those befitting what can be considered as the natural continuation of the historical collection, constituted throughout the 20th century by the Thyssen-Bornemisza family. Seventeenth century Dutch painting, 18th century vedutism, 19th century naturalist landscape painting—both French and American—, Impressionism, Post-impressionism, and the first avant-gardes of the 20th century, with a special emphasis on German expressionist painting, form its main body; they offer the public the possibility of enjoying some chapters of art history poorly represented in other Spanish public collections. Next to this substantial international collection, the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection also came to include 19th century Spanish painting and other artistic expressions. Since 1994 the Baroness has acquired a great number of works which illustrate, as we have said before, a great affinity between her taste and preferences and those that had marked her husband’s activity as a collector. But the continuity and coherence in terms of those decisive factors has led her not only to reinforce some sections of art history better represented in the historical Collection, but also to explore other aspects, like post-impressionist painting, which were not as substantial. To this drive we should also add the interest in 19th and early 20th century Spanish painting, which has gradually enriched the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in this last decade. This aspect of the Collection is only briefly touched upon in this catalogue. It responds to a collecting impetus which deserves to be analysed on its own and treated separately from a museographic point of view. Since 1998 several exhibitions on particular aspects of the Collection have been organised; for example, the one held that same year at the Palacio de Sástago in Zaragoza or the one organised immediately afterwards at the Museo Civico Castello Ursino in Catania and in the Spanish Academy in Rome with the title Fortuny and Spanish Preciosist Painting. For its part, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum has programmed for 2004 two temporary exhibitions that will analyse in depth this aspect of the Collection: Catalan Painting from Naturalism to Noucentism and Andalusian Painting in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.

The complementarity of the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection as regards the historical collection of the family, acquired in 1993, soon brought up the convenience of consolidating the strong links it had with the Museum from its beginning; in view of the size of the Collection, this project required the extension of the Palacio Villahermosa. This is the reason why in 1999 Mr Mariano Rajoy, then Minister of Education and Culture as well as President of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, publicly announced the project of enlarging the Museum and the agreement reached with Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza to deposit her collection in it for a period of 11 years. The extension works having been concluded, this catalogue is published to mark the occasion of the first complete and stable presentation of the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.