Telefónica Cubist Collection

Cubism was more than an avant-garde movement; it was the artistic movement that inaugurated modernity. There was not a single cubism but many cubisms. Founded in Paris at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century by Braque and Picasso, its temporal limits extend beyond the 1920s, when other artists joined to redefine it.

Cubism proposes a revolutionary way of painting based on an intense work of deconstructing reality, of renouncing conventional perspective, of absence of details and of geometrizing forms. By modifying the way of depicting the nature of everyday objects, cubism changed forever the way of looking 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. An aesthetic legacy that has endured over time.

The exhibition is structured in three areas. We open the exhibition with the work of contemporary artists who worked in Paris, the vision of other cubisms, and we close the exhibition with the international expansion of the movement, reflected in the presence of Spanish and Latin American artists. The nucleus of the collection, which occupies the central space of the exhibition, consists of 11 exceptional pieces by the Madrid-born artist Juan Gris.
Juan Gris is the painter of mystical geometry and this is how Eusebio Sempere discovers and admires him when in 1977 he acquires, with great economic effort, the canvas Still Life with Napkin that we preserve in the Art of the Twentieth Century Collection of this Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante (MACA) and which became the first Juan Gris exhibited in a Spanish public collection. This exhibition serves as a tribute to such generosity.