1. Home

Untitled (detalle). Pablo Palazuelo. 1956. FMCMP Collection
© Pablo Palazuelo, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025
© de las fotografías Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson. Author: Marcos Morilla

Drawing is the first step in expressing an idea in art, making it the most direct means of gaining a glimpse of the artist’s thoughts. Given the fragility of works on paper, it is nothing short of a miracle that images conceived in the privacy of the artist’s studio and sometimes not intended to be publicly viewed, despite their obvious artistic quality, have survived to the present day.

The growing sensitivity towards drawing, which greatly helps us understand how images are created, has been reflected in collecting in recent decades. This fact is dispelling misunderstandings such as the purported scarcity of drawings by Spanish artists of the past, which art studies prior to the 20th century used to attribute to the widely held cliché about the Spanish artistic personality: the national temperament was too passionate to abide by the discipline of drawing. In the first half of the 20th century, when an analytical spirit in the approach to representing reality gave rise to Cubism, and Surrealism encouraged the generation of images beyond the control of reason, drawing became an ideal means of experimentation for achieving artists’ aims.

The Masaveu collections contains works on paper – drawings, collages and other media – by some of the foremost 20th-century artists. They are being shown in rotation as part of the exhibition Masaveu Collection. Spanish 20th-Century Art. From Picasso to Barceló due to the conservation requirements of paper supports. The first selection, on view from October 2024 to April 2025, included pieces executed in the first half of the 20th century by Pablo Picasso, Julio González, Luis Fernández, Benjamín Palencia, Nicolás de Lekuona, Ángel Ferrant, Salvador Dalí, Adriano del Valle, Alfonso Buñuel, Josep Renau and Maruja Mallo. The second, on display from April to October 2025, featured Esteban Vicente and José Guerrero, who produced much of their work in the United States, as well as early pieces by Luis Feito due to his special sensitivity towards the American continent.

This third display brings together pieces by artists who pursued most of their careers in the second half of the 20th century. The selection now on view explores a complex period chiefly from two approaches. The first charts the traces of Surrealism in postwar avant-garde art through works by Antoni Tàpies and Joan Ponç, who were associated with the Dau al Set group, and by the El Paso group headed by Antonio Saura. The works representing these three artists are characterised by a particular vision of the figure, as is the piece by Zush, which can also be classed as subjective. The second approach surveys a form of analytical abstraction beginning with a series of gouaches by Eusebio Sempere from 1960, in which a kinetic tendency can be intuited, and ending with pieces by Pablo Palazuelo dating from between 1956 and 1968. While Aurèlia Muñoz’s model, entitled Anchored Star, completes the poetic sense of the first group, the idea of gravitation conveyed by Chillida’s piece and the musical allusion in Elena Asins’s work to an extent follow in the wake of the suggestive aspect of Sempere and Palazuelo.