MADRID.- On Thursday, 31 January, Fundacion Mapfre presented the exhibitions Lights of Bohemia. Artists, Gypsies and the Defining of the Modern World and Impressionists and post-Impressionists. The birth of modern art. Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. Both exhibitions can be visited at Salas Recoletos (Pº de Recoletos, 23. Madrid) up to 5 May.

The exhibition Lights of Bohemia. Artists, Gypsies and the Defining of the Modern World, organised by FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE in collaboration with Réunion des Musées Nationaux - Grand Palais de Paris, presents the origins of artistic bohemianism and the depiction of gypsies in art.

Some one hundred masterpieces by artists such as Goya, Watteau, Gainsborough, Boucher, Teniers, Corot, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Sorolla, Sargent, Signac, Van Gogh and Picasso, among others, tell the story of the creation of an artistic bohemia, and of how that story intermingled with the artistic prestige of gypsies and vagabonds.

The exhibition has works on loan from the most prestigious international institutions, including notably the Art Institute (Chicago), the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum and the Hispanic Society (New York), the State Hermitage Museum (St Petersburg), the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée du Louvre and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid), the Museo Picasso (Barcelona), the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam) and the Tate Gallery (London).

The exhibition Impressionists and post-Impressionists. The birth of modern art. Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, organised by FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE with the scientific collaboration of and exceptional loans from the Musée d’Orsay, presents for the first time in Spain a selection of 78 masterpieces that trace the history of the birth of modern art.

This exhibition is a continuation of the major exhibition that FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE devoted in 2010 to the birth of the Impressionist movement. This new exhibition explains what happened after that great revolution, when the plastic contributions of Impressionism were assimilated and developed through various pictorial languages — called post-Impressionist — which opened the way towards the vanguard movements of the 20th century.

The exhibition starts with the first series by Monet (Haystacks at the Summer End and Wind Effect — the haystacks sequence —The Cathedrals of Rouen, London, the Parliament and Water Lilies, green harmony), and ends with the decorative works of Vuillard, Public Gardens.

Between those landmarks comes the work of Renoir, the development of neo-Impressionism, with works by Seurat, Signac and Pissarro; Cézanne’s constructivism; low-life portraits by Toulouse-Lautrec; the flight of Gauguin and his friends to Brittany; the creation of the Nabis Group with Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Bonnard and Vallotton, and Van Gogh’s madness in Arles.

The press conference was attended by Alberto Manzano, Chairman of FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE; Pablo Jiménez Burillo, General Manager of the FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE Culture Institute; Guy Cogeval, Chairman of the Musée d’Orsay and L’Orangerie; Caroline Mathieu, Chief Curator of the Musée d’Orsay; and Sylvain Amic, Director of the Rouen museums.