An autumn of art and exhibitions

Autumn is here, and with it a new season packed with major exhibitions in Spain. The undisputed star is going to be Renoir, since the Thyssen Museum and the Fundación Mapfre are opening the season with the Impressionist painter. We can also point to the exhibitions devoted to Clara Peeters and Marcel Broodthaers, to the Fauves at the Fundación Mapfre, or to the celebrated photographers Robert Doisneau and Robert Capa.

Renoir this autumn

The Thyssen Museum is giving him the first retrospective ever held in Spain, and at the Fundación Mapfre venue in Barcelona you'll be able to see one of his most legendary artworks, Bail du Moulin de la Galette, as part of the show that looks at his relationship with women.

The Thyssen Museum opens the exhibition "Renoir. Intimacy" on 18 October, and it can be visited until 22 January 2017. The exhibition examines the central role that tactile sensations occupy in the canvases of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, sensations that can be perceived across the different stages of his career and in a wide variety of genres, in group scenes, portraits and nudes as much as in still lifes and landscapes. The show takes us through more than 70 artworks by the French artist, on loan from museums and collections all over the world. It focuses on how he used tactile suggestions of volume, matter or texture as a vehicle for conveying intimacy. Curated by Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the Thyssen Museum, the show is sponsored by Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and will afterwards be shown at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, between 7 February and 15 May 2017.

From 17 September until 8 January you can visit the temporary exhibition Renoir among women “From the modern ideal to the classical ideal. Collections of the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie” at the Fundación Mapfre in the Casa Garriga i Nogués. This exhibition has been organised and put together with the scholarly collaboration and exceptional loans of the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie. Throughout his life, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Limoges 1841, Cagnes-sur-Mer 1919) portrayed women again and again. The painter made them the undisputed protagonists of his own particular artistic universe. His wife, his lovers, his friends, his models, all of them were immortalised on canvas. This exhibition includes around 60 pieces and presents the evolution of Renoir's work from a new point of view, based on the different interpretations he made of the female image throughout his artistic production. It brings out the prominence of the modern Parisienne in his Impressionist canvases, the more intimate vision of the maternal image and the timeless beauty of the nude set within nature, so characteristic of his final years.

Big autumn exhibitions

One of the most eagerly awaited exhibitions of the autumn is the one the Prado Museum will devote in October to the Flemish painter and still life specialist Clara Peeters. The Flemish painter, daughter of Jan Peeters, was a precocious artist, since her earliest signed artworks date from 1608 and 1609. Her mature works have things in common with the still life painting of the Dutch Haarlem school. A painter of still lifes and flower pieces, her compositions are characterised by the display of precious objects, in metal or ceramic, alongside delicacies and flowers. The objects are arranged simply, one next to another, barely overlapping. Her exquisite skill can be seen in the way she slipped her self-portrait into the reflection of the silverware goblets she included in several of her still lifes.

At the Museo Reina Sofía the season opens with a retrospective devoted to the artist Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924 - Cologne, Germany, 1976), who was then living in Paris, where he worked as a fledgling writer and art critic. Broodthaers' body of work, brought together almost in its entirety for this anthological exhibition, takes us close to a singular personality who managed to construct a complex but coherent poetic and visual discourse while at the same time building himself into a character within his own creation. His production examines the limits of art, of the public's experience and of the social construction of the museum as a public institution, and to do so it overflows the traditional categories of artistic genres. Objects, poems, multiples, projects and installations are the devices and supports of pieces saturated with references, quotations and allusions to contemporary literary and visual culture.

Broodthaers' work, in which the methodological and conceptual legacy of Stéphane Mallarmé can be seen, is organised mainly around three themes. The first is language as a visual instrument, which includes his practice of extending language: Pense-Bête (1963), Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967), Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé (1969), Miroir (La signture de l´artiste) (1971). The second is the object as commodity, questioning the reification of the artwork and the aura of the original, as can be seen in Jaula con huevos (1965-1966) or Tabac belge (1975). The third theme is the critical revision of the museum as an institution, exemplified by his great project Musée d´Art Moderne. Département des Aigles (1968-1972).

As for painting exhibitions, the standout is the one on the Fauves, with a special presence of Henri Matisse and André Derain, in the Sala Recoletos of the Fundación Mapfre. On 22 October the exhibition "Los fauves. La pasión por el color" opens. The show runs through the first of the historical avant-gardes that radically transformed art during the first half of the 20th century. The Fauves group, led by Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, shook the foundations of the art of its time with its innovative treatment of colour, its energetic handling and its freedom of execution, putting colour at the centre of artistic debate for the first time in history. This is the first exhibition in Spain to tackle Fauvism as a whole and in depth. To do so, it has had the support of a large number of private collections and more than 80 lenders, among them major institutions such as the TATE, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and the Milwaukee Museum of Art.

Another standout is "Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez" which opens on 30 September at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in collaboration with Grimaldi Forum Monaco. The exhibition brings together a selection of ninety paintings that are among the most important and most compelling by this Irish-born British artist, including many works that have hardly ever been shown in public before, alongside the work of various old masters who influenced his career. It sets out to go deeper into the mark left on Bacon's work by French and Spanish culture, since he was a fervent Francophile and had a great knowledge of the art of the Spanish masters, Velázquez among them.

Beyond his first Parisian encounters with Picasso's work in the twenties and thirties, his relationship with Spanish culture shows up mainly in his obsession with the Retrato del Papa Inocencio x, painted by Velázquez in 1650. Although he had the chance to see the painting in person at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery during a trip to Rome in 1954, Bacon preferred to keep reproductions of it in his memory, rather than the original, while creating the more than fifty artworks he devoted to the motif. Besides Velázquez, Bacon was fascinated by other old masters, such as Zurbarán, El Greco and Goya, whose work he was able to admire at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

There's also the exhibition "Cubism and War" at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, with Picasso, Rivera and Gris as its great protagonists, which opens on 21 October. An exhibition centred on the survival of the European artistic avant-garde based in Paris during the First World War (1914-1918), and its response to the anguish, pain and danger that this huge conflict meant, with the development of an artistic movement that pushed a Cubist aesthetic with architectural elements, based on stability and integrity.

The exhibition will present a selection of close to 80 artworks made between 1913 and 1919. The central artists of the show are three foreigners living in France who, precisely because they were foreigners, could not take part first hand in the military campaign: Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Diego Rivera. The show will also explore the important role of other artists in similar circumstances, such as María Blanchard, Gino Severini and Jacques Lipchitz, and that of French artists who for various reasons could not join the fighting, such as Henri Laurens and Henri Matisse, who made some of his most experimental artworks during that period.

Although the emphasis of the exhibition will be on the non-combatant artists and their creative evolution, it will also explore the artistic response of the two great Cubists who survived action in the trenches: Georges Braque and Fernand Léger.

An autumn of photography

As for photography, in October you'll be able to see the iconic black and white images of Paris taken by Robert Doisneau, while the Círculo de Bellas Artes is giving its walls over to the colour photographs of Capa. The Fundación Mapfre will also be putting up Bruce Davidson, and CaixaForum Madrid will host Cristina García Rodero and her tribute to the women of Annapurna. Another of the most interesting shows is the one MUSAC is organising on Gustav Metzger, an artist rescued from a concentration camp whose work has always been focused on encouraging critical thinking so as to prevent another Holocaust.

The Fundación Canal in Madrid comes up with a surprise this autumn with the exhibition "Robert Doisneau. The beauty of the everyday". The photographer is one of the great figures of the 20th century. He earned his place, in his own right, in a select group of artists now considered the great legends of world photography. This exhibition brings together in one space several of his emblematic works and others never or very rarely seen, which will reveal an unexpected and unknown side of the artist. A unique chance to come at the work of this photographer from a different angle, a photographer determined to show life not as it is but as he would have liked it to be.

Then there's the one devoted to Robert Capa at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, one of the most remarkable photojournalists of all time. Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest and naturalised as a US citizen in 1946, he consolidated his reputation with his photographs of the Spanish Civil War, where he was present on every combat front. As a reporter, over the course of his career he captured the brutality of war in images, and those images changed the perception and the standards of war photography for ever.

The show presents the first photographs of "Capa in Color", in which he portrays the American and British troops during the Second World War, in moments of rest or leisure. It also includes photographs of ski resorts in Switzerland and the Alps, spectators at the Longchamp racecourse, cultural figures, fashion models or simply people in cafés. Some of the photographs in this show were published in magazines at the time, but had never been printed or exhibited in Spain until now. Capa in Color brings together more than 150 colour shots and tearsheets from the publications, along with some personal documents. Curated by Cynthia Young (Curator at the International Center of Photography, ICP), the exhibition presents an exceptional side of the career of this photographer and correspondent.

Also in Madrid, the Fundación Mapfre presents in the Sala Bárbara de Braganza the photography exhibition Bruce Davidson, from 22 September, after its run at the Garriga i Nogués venue in Barcelona. It's the most complete retrospective so far devoted to the 82-year-old American artist, one of the leading photographers of what is known as humanist photography and a member of the Magnum agency. The exhibition, made up of 190 photographs and documentary material, is arranged in 12 series in chronological order that gather the most important works of his entire production. Among them are the well known Bandas de Brooklyn (1959), Calle 100 Este (1966-1968) and Tiempo de cambio (1961 and 1965), which allowed him to connect with communities and neighbourhoods in the United States and show their reality.

The Espacio Fundación Telefónica will surprise us this autumn with its exhibition devoted to Alfred Hitchcock, one of the great masters of suspense. One of the most brilliant filmmakers of his time, but also someone who knew how to combine commercial demands with the development of a body of work marked by his own style, based on a spirit and on forms repeated film after film. The show "Hitchcock, beyond suspense" revolves around that idea of Hitchcock as a total creator, of Hitchcock the author.

The exhibition presents some of the keys to Hitchcock's style, such as his command of the resources of avant-garde art and cinema, his knack for surrounding himself with great collaborators, from technicians and actors to designers and screenwriters, over whom he kept an iron grip, or the fundamental role played in his work by female characters and by the complex relations between the sexes. The show Hitchcock, beyond suspense, curated by Pablo Llorca, professor of Film History and History of Photography at the Fine Arts faculty of the University of Salamanca (USAL), contributor to various Spanish and foreign media and also a film director, revolves around that idea of Hitchcock as a total creator, of Hitchcock the author. The exhibition can be seen on the third floor of the Espacio Fundación Telefónica from 5 October 2016 until 5 February 2017.

And finally, at the MACBA we'll be able to see the exhibition "Miralda. MADEINUSA", centred on the counterculture of the eighties, with several installations, videos, comics and fanzines on show to examine the political use of the culture of the period. With five decades of artistic career behind him, Antoni Miralda (Terrassa, Spain, 1942) has turned something as universal as food into a creative universe. He settled in Paris in 1962 and was a pioneer in creating collective works and rituals celebrating the ceremony of food, starting from colour and its symbolism. The exhibition "Miralda. MADEINUSA" recovers all of the artist's projects connected with his time in the United States. Curated by Vicent Todolí and produced by the MACBA, it will be shown in Barcelona from 20 October 2016 until March 2017. Working closely with the artist and his archive, the exhibition will document for the first time and exhaustively the 14 projects Miralda carried out in the United States, from the mid-seventies to the late nineties. The most significant installations will be reconstructed, and sculptures, drawings, photographs, audiovisual material, sketches and other materials will be shown, giving an idea of the scope and complexity of the projects and a sense of the collective spirit that characterises the artist's method.

Among the standout works on show will be Breadline (1977), Wheat & Steak (1981), El Internacional Tapas Bar & Restaurant (1984-1986) and Honeymoon Project (1986-1992). The exhibition will also present the large installation that forms part of the MACBA Collection, Santa Comida (1984-1989), which gathers the legacy of Afro-Caribbean culture in America today.