Museo Carmen Thyssen

Avant-garde drawings [1910-1945]

An essential device in artistic training and painters’ and sculptors’ creative processes, in the twentieth century drawing came to be viewed as a form of artistic expression in its own right, independent of academic practices or preparatory sketches. Artists of various disciplines, th...

Zurbarán. Saints

During the Baroque period in Spain the Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation gave rise to an art based on realistic and highly dramatic images whose purpose was to inspire devotion through highly emotionally charged depictions of saintliness. This context, in what was known as the Spani...

The illusion of the American Frontier

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the conquest of the Wild West became more than a historical event in the founding of the United States of America, developing into a universal myth in which legend progressively replaced history.

In the arts, fascination for those majestic unex...