The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Shows Retrospective of Berthe Mirosot

Written by Carlos Rodriguez Friday, 11 May 2012 23:23

Madrid.- The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is proud to present "Berthe Morisot: The Impressionist Painter", on view at the museum through February 12th 2012. For the first time in Spain, the public will be able to see a retrospective of the work of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot. As the result of an important loan agreement, the exhibition will include more than thirty works from the collection of the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, shown alongside others from the Thyssen collections. The result will be to reveal Morisot's luminous and elegant approach to painting, expressed in the form of landscapes, scenes of daily life and intimate female portraits.

Married to Eugène Manet, brother of the painter Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot (Bourges, 1841-Paris, 1895) was the first female painter to join the Impressionists, who constituted the most avant-garde art group of the day. Morisot participated in the now legendary First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 and in other subsequent ones held by the group. Berthe Morisot is exceptional within the history of 19th-century art history in her position as a woman from upper middle-class French society who forged an important career as an artist and who was associated with an innovative, ground-breaking movement that provoked scandal and aversion at the time. Morisot was particularly interested in effects of luminosity and colour and shared her fellow Impressionists' concern for reflections of light. Her independent, some what rebellious nature is evident in her work, which also provides the basis in this exhibition for an examination of the role of women in late 19th-century France.

So all-pervading was the depiction of female sentiments and emotions in Morisot's work that her friend the poet Paul Valéry used to say that she "lived her painting" and "painted her life". Morisot was born on January 14, 1841 was a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. In 1864, she exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Sponsored by the government, and judged by academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the "rejected" Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, which included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. It was held at the studio of the photographer Nadar.


The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Spanish), is one of the three Madrid museums that make up the "Golden Triangle of Art", which also includes the Prado and the Reina Sofia (modern and contemporary) galleries. The collections’s roots lie in the privately owned Thyssen-Bonremisza collection, once the second largest private art collection in the world (after the British Royal Collection). The collection started in the 1920s as a private collection by Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon (1875–1947). In a reversal of the movement of European paintings to the United States during this period, one of the Baron's sources was the collections of American millionaires coping with the Great Depression and inheritance taxes, from which he acquired such exquisite old master paintings as Ghirlandaio's ‘Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni’ (once in the Morgan Library) and Carpaccio's ‘Knight’ (from the collection of Otto Kahn). The collection was later expanded by Heinrich's son Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921–2002), who re-assembled most of the works from his relatives' collections (distributed after his father’s death) and proceeded to acquire large numbers of new works. In 1985, the Baron married Carmen Cervera (a former Miss Spain 1961) and introduced her to art-collecting. Carmen's influence was decisive in persuading the Baron to decide on the future of his collection and cede the collection to Spain. When Baron Thyssen decided to open his collection to the public, he initially tried to have his museum in the Villa Favorita in Switzerland expanded, when this proved impossible, a Europe-wide search for a new was home started. The competition was won in 1986 when the Spanish government came to an agreement to provide a home for the collection (the 19th century Villahermosa Palace close to the Prado in Madrid) and fund the museum in return for the loan of the collection for a minimum of nine and a half years. Pritzker prize winning Spanish architect, Rafael Moneo was employed to redesign and extend the building and the museum opened in 1992.

However, so impressed were the Thyssen-Bornemiszas with the building and Spain’s commitment to the collection, that even before it opened, they were negotiating with the Spanish government to make the museum permanent. In 1993, the Spanish government agreed to buy the collection (valued at up to 1.5 billion dollars) for $350 million and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum became a permanent fixture in Madrid. The museum currently houses two collections from the Thyssen-Bornemiszas, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, acquired by the Spanish government from Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza on permanent display since the museum opened in 1992 and the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, owned by the baron’s widow and held by the museum since 2004 on loan. These two collections comprise over one thousand works of art (mostly paintings), with which the museum offers a stroll through the history of European painting, from its beginning in the 13th century to the close of the 20th century. The Baroness remains involved with the museum, deciding the salmon pink tone of the interior and in May 2006 campaigning against plans to redevelop the Paseo del Prado as she thought the works and traffic would damage the collection and the museum's appearance. A collection of works from the museum is housed in Barcelona in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.museothyssen.org

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~