• 38 paintings by some of the great representatives of this movement centered around the work of Madrid-born Juan Gris, of whom twelve works will be displayed, including the oil painting Nature morte à la serviette (1924) owned by MACA.

• This is the first time the Telefónica Cubist Collection is shown in a Spanish contemporary art museum of public character, a milestone in its touring exhibitions.

• The exhibition is completed with the documentary Juan Gris. Cubism and Modernity, by José Luis López-Linares and several educational workshops and activities. Alicante, September 30, 2014.- Not one, but many cubisms are brought together in the exhibition "Telefónica Cubist Collection" with 37 beautiful pieces of exceptional quality that can be visited from today until January 11, 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante (MACA).
To this selection of 37 works organized around the work of Juan Gris, is added the oil on canvas Nature morte à la serviette (Still Life with a Napkin, 1924) owned by MACA and which collector Eusebi Sempere acquired with enormous economic effort in Madrid in 1977. This work is preserved in the MACA's 20th Century Art Collection and became the first Juan Gris exhibited in a Spanish public collection.
The exhibition, which brings together part of the holdings of the Telefónica Cubist Collection, is structured in three areas: the work of Juan Gris –11 exceptional pieces by the Madrid artist–, the vision of other cubisms with the work of other contemporary artists who worked in Paris (Gleizes, Metzinger, Marcoussis, Lhote, Valmier, María Blanchard...) and, closing the exhibition, the international expansion of the movement reflected in the presence of Spanish and Latin American artists.
This is the first time the Telefónica Cubist Collection is shown in a Spanish contemporary art museum of public character, a milestone in its touring exhibitions. The exhibition is completed with the documentary Juan Gris. Cubism and Modernity, by José Luis López-Linares and several educational workshops and activities.
Many Cubisms
The Telefónica Collection highlights the diversity of cubist proposals and techniques developed over time, as Cubism was more than an avant-garde: it was the artistic movement that inaugurated modernity. There was not just one cubism but many cubisms. Founded in Paris at the end of the first decade of the 20th century by Braque and Picasso, its temporal limits extend beyond the 1920s, when other artists join to redefine it. Through a revolutionary way of painting, cubism changed forever the way we look at painting: now the viewer must traverse planes, lines and colors, arranged according to their own rhythm that demands not only sensory contemplation, but also an intellectual exercise of reconstruction.

Above all, cubism is based on intense work of deconstructing reality, renouncing conventional perspective, absence of details and geometrization of forms. Its capacity for transformation made it an aesthetic legacy that has endured over time.
Juan Gris, the Purest of the Cubists
Juan Gris developed a notion of painting capable of structuring his entire aesthetic trajectory with great coherence and powerfully influencing that of other artists, from his time to today. He joined the cubist movement when it was already founded to refound it, creating a universal plastic language related to modern classicism and abstraction called second cubism or synthetic cubism. Juan Gris does not start from nature to go to the abstract but from the abstract of geometry and the plane of color to go to reality. A new definition of cubism carried out between 1916 and 1923 that gives unity to the painting, now converted into a true architecture of forms and colors.
For Juan Gris, cubism was not a pictorial procedure but an aesthetic, a state of mind that permeated his vision of modernity. The artist is represented in the Telefónica Cubist Collection in the diversity and complexity of his trajectory. From the works of the first decade of the 20th century characterized by the fragmentation of the image, restrained chromaticism and rigorous geometrization of forms to his works of the 1920s, nuanced with color, more lyrical, more naturalistic that include the exterior, organic life and the curve. Juan Gris always seeks dialogue between painting and poetry. Inventor of plastic rhymes—a sort of aesthetic metaphors—, his canvases hide symbolic games, correlations of forms and figures that give plasticity and sensuality to his eternal works.

The Cubist Movement in Paris

Traditionally art history considers that cubism was born in 1907 and died in 1914. But in times of cubism, being a cubist was something more complex and diverse. To the first artistic avant-garde of the century were added, besides Picasso and Braque, the most important artists. Some initially adopted the cubist aesthetic, such as Picabia, Duchamp, Lipchitz, Leger, Gleizes or Metzinger, the latter authors of On Cubism – Du cubisme—, a highly influential text in which they expounded their theory of the flat plane and multidimensional perspectives. Others joined later such as Dufy, Derain, the Delaunays or María Blanchard who did so for a brief but intense period in which she created a series of still lifes of great geometric purity. And among them, Guillaume Apollinaire drafting the text that would serve as a false manifesto, The Cubist Painters.
The study of the Parisian environment between 1914, the date of the beginning of the First World War and 1924, year of publication of the Surrealist Manifesto, has demonstrated the persistence and development of the cubist experience illuminating a second period as fertile and "heroic" as the first. New registers always around Juan Gris. Artists who worked beyond canonical cubism affirming the plastic possibilities of color, betting on the aesthetic and communicative qualities of form, giving spatial sensation and depth to compositions..., landscapes and still lifes, that capture our gaze.

International Expansion in Spain and Latin America

Several artists who participated in cubism played a leading role in the modernization of Latin American art, extending geographically the avant-garde movement: networks, crossings, personal relationships and travels that transport and transform cubism from one side of the Atlantic to the other. In the Uruguayan Rafael Barradas or in the Argentines Pettoruti and Xul Solar, the imprint of this movement is evident. The works of the Brazilian do Rego Monteiro or the Uruguayan Torres García start from cubism but point to other influences such as primitivism. Novel are the calligrams of the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, a union of painting and poetry by combining image and text. The Spanish artists Joaquín Peinado and Manuel Ángeles Ortiz transformed and reinterpreted the cubist language with the incorporation of landscape in the case of the latter.