Carmen Thyssen Museum, Málaga, Spain

The Carmen Thyssen Museum is an art museum in the Spanish city Málaga. The main focus of the museum is 19th-century Spanish painting, predominantly Andalusian, based on the collection of Carmen Cervera, third wife of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. The Permanent Collection of the Museum comprises an outstanding collection of works that offers a coherent and comprehensive survey of the principal genres within 19th-century Spanish painting, with a particular emphasis on Andalusian painting.

The museum is housed in the palace of Villalón, taking advantage of several contiguous buildings such as exhibition spaces, rooms and offices, and was inaugurated on March 24, 2011. The facilities include, in addition to the exhibition halls dedicated to the Thyssen Collection, Of its foundation, a library, rooms for temporary exhibitions, teaching room, auditorium, museum shop, restoration section and an archeological exhibition hall, the latter waiting to be open to the public.

The Renaissance-style building, dating from the 16th century, was destined after its restoration to house the collection that the baroness widow Carmen Cervera had agreed to cede to Málaga after a series of conversations with the City council of the city. This restoration took a period of four years from 2007 to 2011, which also included the rehabilitation and inclusion of two other buildings to the principal. The central construction resulted in a main internal courtyard structure with double floor, adding another of reduced dimensions from which the tower of the annexed church of Santo Cristo de la Salud starts.

The museum has 285 works that are part of the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, and takes a tour of the different genres of nineteenth-century Spanish painting, a pictorial period framed chronologically between the figures of Francisco de Goya and Pablo Picasso, giving special Attention to the Andalusian painting. The initial agreement requires the institution to have the paintings available until 2025. However, a possible extension of the loan was contemplated.

Since 1992 the Thyssen family's art collection has been on display at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. However, Carmen Thyssen has been an art collector in her own right since the 1980s, and her personal collection is shown separately. In 1999, she agreed to display many items from her collection in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum for a period of twelve years. Meanwhile, a home for her collection was sought in Málaga. This museum, a conversion of a sixteenth-century building, opened to the public on 24 March 2011.

It is divided into four sections:
Old masters, as an introduction in which was the chapel of the palace of Villalón, with works that go back to the seventeenth century, with Francisco de Zurbarán and Jerónimo Ezquerra, at the head.

Romantic landscape and costumbrismo, that reflects the vision that the romantic travelers had of Spain, of its past, the Moorish architecture, the gypsies, the bullfights, the festivals, the flamenco, etc. Fritz Bamberger and his 'Coastal landscape of Estepona' open this space, which is made up of works by Genaro Pérez Villaamil, Rafael Benjumea, José García Ramos and Guillermo Gómez Gil, among others.

Preciousness and naturalistic landscape, which shows the profound evolution that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, suffered Spanish painting towards small format works, colorful and careful in the small details, the so-called "preciosista" painting, and on the other, the transformations since The romantic subjectivist landscape towards the more realistic landscape of naturalism. Here are works by artists such as Mariano Fortuny, José Benlliure, Raimundo de Madrazo, José Moreno Carbonero or Emilio Sala, and landscape artists such as Carlos de Haes, Martín Rico and Sánchez Perrier.

End of century, which reveals how Spanish painting at the end of the 19th century began to openly dialogue with international painting. Joaquín Sorolla, Aureliano de Beruete, Dario de Regoyos, Ramón Casas, Ricard Canals, Francisco Iturrino or José Gutiérrez Solana are some of its exponents. Apart from this period, Ignacio Zuloaga and Julio Romero de Torres deserve special mention.

The museum dedicates its fourth plant exclusively to organize temporary exhibitions ranging from the 17th to the 20th centuries, with preference for the 19th and 20th centuries, completing the predominant themes of the permanent collection.

The gallery has hosted fourteen temporary exhibitions. The first exhibition was held three months after the opening of the museum and was held until November 2011. It was titled The Modern Tradition in the Carmen Thyssen Collection. Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Miró, obtaining high numbers of visitors. Of these exhibitions only two have been of contemporary works: Mercedes Lasarte in the Carmen Thyssen Collection, and Carteles de artista. From Toulouse-Lautrec to Jeff Koons which remained open until February 2016.

However, his most visited temporary exhibition until 2016 has been Courbet, Van Gogh, Monet, Léger.