20th Century Spanish Art

This selection acknowledges the diversity, wealth and importance of the various art movements in Spain during the 20th century, which voluntarily shed practically everything that could be deemed as a legacy from the previous century, starting with the artists of the generation of the Second Spanish Republic and continuing right up to the mid 1990s.

In that regard, we can find a wide repertoire of works bearing testimony to the historical avant-gardes, both by those exponents who developed their practice in Spain—José Caballero, Pancho Cossío, Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja, Benjamín Palencia—as well as those who made their careers outside the country—Joan Miró, Óscar Domínguez, Julio González and Esteban Vicente.

The abstract movement with the greatest impact in Spain, the famous
, is represented in this itinerary by its major players—Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares, Manuel Rivera, Luis Feito, Rafael Canogar and Martín Chirino—alongside other artists who also contributed to the renewal of post-war art in Spain and achieved wide international recognition, such as Antoni Tàpies, Pablo Palazuelo, Eduardo Chillida, Jorge de Oteiza, José Guerrero and Lucio Muñoz, not forgetting the members of the
.

In the 1950s and 60s, in parallel to informalist abstraction, we also saw the rise of constructive and geometric tendencies, represented, among others, by Eusebio Sempere and Andreu Alfaro, and also of a Realism school led by Antonio López and Amalia Avia in Madrid and by Carmen Laffón in Seville.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, by now consecrated artists coexisted with members of new movements, like the
, the followers of
—with a special mention for Eduardo Arroyo and Equipo Crónica—as well as the
and a plethora of unique individual artists, such as Manuel Hernández Mompó, Gonzalo Chillida, Albert Ràfols Casamada, Alfredo Alcaín, Luis Gordillo, José María Sicilia and Miquel Barceló.

The 1980s and following years also brought highly acclaimed individual artists. That is the case of Soledad Sevilla, Nacho Criado, Adolf Schlosser, Eva Lootz, Miquel Navarro, José Manuel Broto, Carmen Calvo, Juan Navarro Baldeweg and Manuel Salinas, to name a few.

Also around this time, some artists decided to leave Spain in pursuit of international success, such as Miquel Barceló, José María Sicilia, Frederic Amat, Víctor Mira, Juan Carlos Savater, Darío Urzay, Francisco Leiro, Darío Álvarez Basso, Ángel Mateo Charris and Sigfrido Martín Begué.