Kunsthalle Masterpieces at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao   25.10.2019 – 16.02.2020

Kunsthalle Bremen Masterpieces at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. From Delacroix to Beckmann

Presenting the "Icons" exhibition, the entire area of the Kunsthalle Bremen will play host to a single exhibition for the first time ever. Therefore the collection is not visible. From 25 October 2019 to 16 February 2020, a selection of masterpieces from the Kunsthalle will be guest at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. For the first time, 130 masterpieces from the picture gallery in Bremen, the sculpture collection, and the collection of prints and drawings will be presented to a Spanish audience. In several sections, the works of German and French artists will engage in an artistic discourse ranging from the Romantic era to Impressionism, Late Impressionism, the artist colony at Worpswede, and Expressionism.

In the show, paintings by the Romantic artists  Caspar David Friedrich and Eugène Delacroix confront each other. Works by French Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir will be seen alongside the so-called "triumvirate" of German Impressionism: Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Max Slevogt. Vincent van Gogh’s Field with Poppies recalls the major dispute that rocked Bremen in 1911. Painters at the artist colony Worpswede and the Bremen artist Paula Modersohn-Becker spearheaded the move toward modernism in German art. The grand finale is formed by the artists of "Der Blaue Reiter", "Die Brücke", and the maverick Max Beckmann. Their counterparts were primarily french artist André Masson and Pablo Picasso – the Spaniard who played such a major role in French art.

 

(Fig. above: Eva Gonzalès, Girl Awakening, um 1877/78 (Detail) | Fig exhibition overview: Vincent van Gogh, Field with Poppies, 1889; both: Kunsthalle Bremen – Der Kunstverein in Bremen)