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Pisarro ◆ Giacometti ◆ Amrita Sher-Gil ◆ Dalí Shangri-La ◆ PhotoEspaña ◆ Frantisek Drtikol

Alberto Giacometti. Hombre que camina I, 1960 183 x 26 x 95,5 cm. Bronce, Fonte de 1963, Susse fondeur Fondation Marguerite y Aimé Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence. AGD 1448 © Alberto Giacometti Estate / VEGAP (España), 2013

FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE SALAS RECOLETOS

Paseo de Recoletos, 23. Madrid

13 JUNIO – 4 AGOSTO

Exposición coproducida por FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE y la Kunsthalle de Hamburgo

www.fundacionmapfre.org

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Director Jesús Tablate Miquis Editorial director Joaquín Lledó Editorial staff: Ana Rimblas Joaquín Arnáiz Carlos G. Olalla Carlos Villarrubia Federico Echevarría Deputy Advertising Director: Beatriz García-Jimenez Digital Edition Director: Ricardo Serra Segura Design: Julio Molina

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Exhibitions Dennis Hopper Captive Beauty Flowers. Copenhagen Amrita Sher-Gil Shangri-La Pisarro Dalí Giacometti Seduced by Art PhotoEspaña František Drtikol

© Images by VEGAP Prepress Preim Degradé Printing Artes Gráficas Palermo S.L. Distribution SGEL Legal Deposit: M-42261-1985 ISSN: 1131-6411 Edited by Album Letras Artes, S.L. C/ Juan Álvarez Mendizabal, 58 Tel. 91 547 97 42 Tel. 91 559 90 27 E-mail: album@albumletrasartes.com

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Sphinx, glazed ceramic, 1909,

Durrio´s workshop, 1908, Federico Sáenz Venturini

donation by Flora Pié 2012

FRANCISCO DURRIO In the footsteps of Gauguin Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. BBK Gallery

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or the first time, the exhibition brings together almost all the catalogued work by sculptor, precious metal worker and potter Francisco Durrio (1868–1940). More than 150 pieces: oil paintings, sculptures, ceramics, watercolors, engravings and works in precious metal, explore from several viewpoints Durrio’s preferred themes and artistic techniques but also takes a look at the relationships he formed in Montmartre, where he lived for more than 50 years.

The exhibition kicks off with the presentation of Durrio through his portraits by Pablo Picasso, Juan de Echevarría or Pierre Girieud, among others.

Then follows the creation of the artist in the early years of his career, represented by the academy-friendly busts in marble and bronze.

The exhibition continues with the image of the turn-of-the-century Montmartre, through a selection of works by several artists and continues with a monographic section on Paul Gauguin, with more than 20 works. The next space displays more

than 40 pieces in metal, embossed silver, bronze or brass and ceramics embodying through a world of enigmatic beings, Durrio’s most personal and creative side.

The exhibition continues with a section on memory and death which includes the testimony of the two most important pieces produced for the never-completed burial vault for the Echevarrieta family: an iron gate with influences of the orientalizing symbolism and the sculpture of Saint Cosme.

Two videos are also screened: one on the highly-praised Monument to Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga (1906-1932) and another on the project for the Temple of Victory (1919-1920), for which Durrio was appointed chevalier of France’s Legion of Honour, although the Temple was never actually built. The exhibition ends with the jewellery he produced as a goldsmith. In a modernist art-nouveau language, he explores through them and with the eyes of a sculptor and despite their small sizes, the myths and fantasies he would later develop.

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The Beautiful Otero, 1914, PRASA Collection

JULIO ROMERO DE TORRES Between Myth and Tradition Carmen Thyssen Museum Málaga

J

ulio Romero de Torres has already become, undoubtedly a legendary painter. Rumour has it that as a painter par excellence of the woman, he was able to harmonize with exquisite talent the sacred and the profane, the symbolic and the sensual, tradition and classicism.

Although his great fame caused his oeuvre to be simply associated with popular and folk trends, the truth is that Romero de Torres is an outstanding painter of great creativity. Connected with artists and writers of the first decades of the 20th century, he created his own aesthetic trend of symbolism. The figures in his paintings, mostly female, are often accompanied by elements that are repeated, such as water, packs of cards, fruit and household copperware, always imbued with allegorical meanings.

The repetitions found in paintings of this kind –generally large works– hold a particular significance for the painter, who makes them a hallmark.

The Carmen Thyssen Museum Malaga now 6

presents an interesting temporary exhibition titled Julio Romero de Torres.

Between Myth and Tradition that surveys the creation of the famous artist from Cordoba with thirty of his work, among which The Gypsy Muse, the first important female nude produced by the painter and Trini’s Granddaughter, the last nude painted in 1919, and Fuensanta, one of Julio Romero de Torres’s emblematic paintings. This painting, which was featured on the 100 Peseta bank notes coined by the National Coinage and Stamp Factory and was issued from April 1953 to pay tribute to Julio Romero de Torres, its whereabouts remained unknown until 2007.

The painting is the portrait of a young brunette with black eyes sitting sideways, but gazing at the viewer. It was displayed for the first time in the Pavilion of Cordoba at the Ibero-American Exhibition of Seville in 1929 and, mysteriously disappeared shortly after. It was only known through a black and white photograph which was used to reproduce the painting on the 100 Peseta notes, which were in circulation until 1978 (more than 900,000,000 copies were reproduced all through 25 years). Following its display at the exhibition Arte en el Dinero. Dinero en el Arte [Art in Money. Money in the Art] at the Casa de la Moneda Museum in Argentina, the painting was found in the property of an Argentinean citizen who acquired it in 1994 and got in touch with the Municipal Museums of Cordoba for authentification. Finally, the painting was knocked down to an anonymous buyer at Sotheby's in London in November 2007 for almost 1.2 million Euros.

The curator of the exhibition, Lourdes Moreno, also notes the importance of displaying together for the first time the Sketch of the Poem of Cordoba, belonging to the Carmen Thyssen Collection and the painting of the same name.

During his early period Julio Romero de Torres combined the influence of modernism, pre-Raphaelitism and symbolism. Although he began by cultivating a very luminous palette and a loose technique, showing his concern for colour and the study of nature, he soon abandoned this style. His palette progressively darkened and he turned away from naturalism to embrace themes of social protest with more intense, melancholic

The Consecration of the Couplet, 1912, PRASA Collection

figures. Around this time he began to explore the mystical and dreamy concept of woman which he later imbued with sensuality, creating a personal style and iconography and producing truly distinctive paintings.

The painter immortalized female figures from different sociocultural environments, both elegant bourgeois women and traditional working-class women. They all wished to be part of his repertoire and through his models he established the characteristics of a defined style, making them symbols of womanhood. The figures are visibly imbued with melancholy while conveying unease and their elegance is underlined by his concern with female fashions of the day. Altogether they display the salient characteristics of his oeuvre, chiefly technical precision and soft highlights on the drapery and flesh; these features contrast with the strangeness of the settings or background landscapes through which he turns reality into allegory.

Through his female nudes Julio Romero de Torres raised the image of the Andalusian woman to the category of erotic symbol of a culture.

Without abandoning his particular practice of including allegorical elements, he chiefly cultivated the reclining female nude, possibly influenced by Titian. The women he portrays go beyond mere sensuality and are brimming with an eroticism that creates tension and lends his works a very special enigmatic nature. This effect is heightened by the women’s direct gaze at the viewer, sometimes disturbing, sometimes more innocent, but always seductive.

From April 27 to September 8 7

Sack from the Bronze Age made of untanned cowhide. Can carry up to 30 kilos of salt thanks to deveral reinforcement systems

ARCHAELOGICAL MUSEUM OF ALICANTE The Kingdom of Salt. 7,000 Years of Hallstatt History

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he MARQ has become a first-class cultural reference that deserved the European Museum of the Year Award in 2004. The MARQ stages a series of temporary exhibitions with the aim to display in Alicante emblematic pieces and materials of the universal culture as well as establishing bonds with the main European and worldwide museums. An example is this exceptional exhibition presented now with the collaboration of the Museum of Natural History of Vienna. The Prehistoric Department of this museum owns one of the greatest collections in this specialty, including pieces of universal value like the exceptional Paleolithic sculpture known as the Venus de Willendorf.

Likewise, it should be noted their researches on the iron Age and, especially, the Project on the salt mines of Hallstatt, one of the

Votive axe-head from the cementery of Hallstatt 8