Madrid, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

A thousand works on display – and only great names in the history of art, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century: the splendid collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza family, housed since the 1990s in the end of the 18th century of the Palace of Villahermosa, competes without blushing with that of the Prado, two minutes on foot. They are located on Paseo del Arte. The museum lines up Jan Van Eyck , Caravaggio , Dürer , Canaletto , Paul Gauguin , Vincent Van Gogh , Edgar Degas , Lucian Freud, Edward Hopper , Pablo Picasso. What there is to know The history of the Thyssen family, German industrialists united by alliance with the Hungarian noble Bornemisza, dates back to the end of the 19th century when August founded the Thyssen company and gradually bought out the Gewerkschaft Deutscher Kaiser. Their activity is profitable: coal mines, shipyards, machine factories. At the beginning of the 1930s, the family fell in love with Adolf Hilter, contributed to the rise of the Nazi regime, and supplied the ThirdReich its armament – ​​until Fritz Thyssen resigned just after Kristallnacht, the aftermath of Nazi pogroms in 1938. The art collection was accumulated by August, the father, a great Rodin lover, and by his son Heinrich , who took advantage of the crisis of 1929 to buy Renaissance works from the United States. The grandson Hans-Heinrich will take an interest in the Impressionists, the avant-gardes of the 20th century, and Pop art. Subsequently, the collection was transferred to Spain in 1993, which has since exhibited it in Madrid and (for 200 of them) in Barcelona, ​​at the Museu nacional de Catalunya. Not to miss Gauguin 's Mata Mua (1892), Lucian Freud's sublime Large Interior, Paddington (1968–1969), an intimate representation of his daughter taking a nap under a green plant, a very fine portrait by Domenico Ghirlandaio , Giovanna Tornabuoni (1489– 1490), as well as another by Hans Holbein the Younger , Portrait of Henry VIII of England (1540), or even the singular Girl at a Sewing Machine (1921) by Edward Hopper… And so many others! seen in Beaux Arts, Celius-Lanval video 1 : The museum video 2 : The museum