"ALL OUR ART CATALOGUES SINCE 1973" Online.

[Exhibitions and catalogues since 1973]

Since it began its work in the field of the visual arts, the Fundación Juan March has conceived and organized, independently or in collaboration with other national and international institutions, nearly 600 exhibitions presented at its venues in Madrid, Cuenca and Palma as well as in other venues in Spain and abroad. Some of these exhibitions have centered on the Fundación’s own collections, and the immense majority has included loans from other institutions. In January 1975, the Fundación presented its first exhibition, Arte ’73, devoted to Spanish abstract art, in its recently inaugurated building on Calle Castelló in Madrid, after which the exhibition traveled to other institutions in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.

Since 1975 the Fundación has presented numerous artists and contemporary movements for the first time in Spain, in an era when, in Valeriano Bozal’s words, “contemporary art was a mirage that rarely became a reality.” For over two decades the Fundación was the first and one of the few Spanish institutions to organize exhibitions of the leading figures of modern and contemporary art. This initiative brought to light a kind of art that was utterly unfamiliar in a country that lagged behind the prevailing cultural trends abroad and that had almost no collections or museums of its own devoted to modern and contemporary art.

To the present day, the Fundación has continued its pioneering work, with a succession of individual and group exhibitions focusing primarily on twentieth-century masters and the avant-gardes. Noteworthy among them are the exhibitions on Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky organized between 1977 and 1980. No less significant are the exhibitions on modern French and Belgian artists (Bonnard, Redon, Rouault, Braque, Léger, Delvaux, Magritte, Delaunay), British artists (Turner, Bacon, Nicholson and Hockney), Austrians and Germans (Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Corinth, Beckmann, the Die Brücke group, Klee and Schwitters), Russians (Malevich, Popova and Rodchenko), and Americans (Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Rothko, de Kooning, Stella, Warhol, Cornell, Hopper, O’Keeffe and Durand). Nor has the Fundación devoted exclusive attention to modern painting over the course of its existence: Its exhibition galleries have also accommodated sculpture, printmaking and photography.

[Exhibitions and research]

After almost forty years of groundbreaking endeavors, the Fundación now combines a reflexive cultivation of that tradition with a firm commitment to exhibitions based on the most current research. The resulting monographic catalogues are also published in English and distributed internationally. They include exhibitions built around a central argument, such as The Abstraction of Landscape: From Northern Romanticism to Abstract Expressionism (2007) and Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow, 1960–1990 (2008); exhibitions devoted to figures, periods and little-studied issues pertaining to modern history and culture, such as Tarsila do Amaral (2009) and Wyndham Lewis, 1882–1957 (2010); and exhibitions that adopt unconventional approaches to canonical figures and movements, such as Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End (2008), Caspar David Friedrich: The Art of Drawing (2009), Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America, 1934–1973 (2011), and Aleksandr Deineka (1899–1969): Avant-Garde for the Proletariat (2011).

[The Fundación Juan March’s museums: exhibitions and catalogues]

In 1981 Fernando Zóbel donated his art collection to the Fundación Juan March. From the moment the Fundación assumed responsibility for Zóbel’s Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, located in the Casas Colgadas or ‘Hanging Houses’ of Cuenca, exhibitions were organized in its gallery spaces. The same is true of the Fundación’s third venue, in Palma, which opened as the Col·leció March in 1990 in what had been Juan March Ordinas’s family home, at number 9, Calle Sant Miquel, a building that has since been remodeled and expanded in stages until it became what is now the Museu Fundación Juan March. In addition to preserving and exhibiting the two museums’ collections, the Fundación has also presented exhibitions on international artists and movements at both venues, including Frank Stella: Graphic Work, 1982–1996 (1997), Rodchenko: Geometries (2001) and Vladimir Lebedev, 1891–1967 (2012), as well as exhibitions focusing on artists represented in the collection such as Millares: Paintings and Drawings on Paper, 1963–1971 (1996), Chillida: In Praise of Hands (2003), and Pablo Palazuelo: Paris, 13 rue Saint Jacques, 1948–1968 (2010).