THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA MUSEUM

Description

Essentials about the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in brief

Along with the Museo del Prado and the Museo Reina Sofía, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum) is one of the three major museums on Madrid’s Art Mile. A visit to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is a walk through art history from the 13th to the 20th century. With more than 1,000 works on display, visitors can trace the major periods of European and American art history, from Renaissance to Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Avant-Garde, and Pop Art.

The history of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is housed in the Palacio de Villahermosa, just a short distance from the Museo del Prado. The museum’s collection consists of the artworks of Hungarian-German entrepreneur and collector Heinrich Thyssen and his son, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon. The collection was acquired by the Spanish state in the early 1990s and opened to the public in the museum in 1992. Since 2004, an extension to the museum has housed the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, assembled by the last wife of Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.

The exhibition in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

The museum is organized on the basis of art eras. Visitors can thus easily pick out those periods and art movements that interest them the most. Those interested in the Late Middle Ages and the Pre-Renaissance will find outstanding works by Italian and Old Dutch masters in the museum. This is followed by the important collection of Renaissance portraits from the 15th century. Most visitors are drawn to the rooms with works from the 16th and 17th centuries, featuring such masters as Caravaggio, Dürer, Frans Hals and Rubens.

Landscape and genre painting of the 17th-century Dutch schools and 19th-century American are also well represented in the collection. Also part of the collection are works by Impressionists such as Monet and Degas, and Post-Impressionists Gauguin and Van Gogh. Finally, the last rooms of the museum give an overview of the avant-garde movements of the 20th century: fauvismo, expressionism, surrealism, abstract art and pop art. Here you can admire works by Chagall, Dalí, Hopper, Kandinsky, Lichtenstein and Picasso, among others.