Avant-Gardes and Surrealism at the Thyssen

Two rooms, two definitions of freedom

Room 43 brings together painters who, between 1913 and the 1920s, wanted to strip painting of any recognisable subject: lines, planes, pure colours, with no reference left to the visible world. Room 44 shows the opposite: painters who, from the 1920s, plunge instead into the most intimate images — dreams, obsessions, free association — to render them with an almost photographic precision. Between the two lies a generation and a change of capital: Moscow and Leiden for the first, Paris and then New York for the second.

This route does not claim to sum up either Constructivism or Surrealism as a whole — each of these movements has filled entire museums on its own. It simply follows the specific names brought together in these two rooms, to give each one the context that makes it possible to look at it as more than something passed by.

1. Room 43 — Russian geometry: Larionov and Popova

Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) and his companion Natalia Goncharova invented Rayonism in 1912-1913, one of the very first abstract languages in Russian art: bundles of coloured lines meant to make visible the rays of light reflected off objects rather than the objects themselves. The museum holds four works by Larionov, including Blue Nude (c. 1908) and Street with Lanterns (1913), which allow his path to be followed from a still legible figuration through to Rayonist dissolution. Larionov settled permanently in Paris in 1919; he married Goncharova there in 1955, after more than forty years together.

Liubov Popova (1889-1924) pushed the departure from subject matter even further. Her Painterly Architectonics, a series painted between 1915 and 1918 of which the museum holds three examples — including Painterly Architectonic (Still Life: Instruments), 1915, on view in Room 43 —, show nothing more than interpenetrating coloured planes, with no trace left of any underlying still life or landscape. Art historians read them as a personal synthesis between Malevich's Suprematism, based on pure form, and Tatlin's proto-Constructivism, more concerned with the material construction of the work. Popova died of scarlet fever in 1924, at thirty-five, having by then largely turned away from easel painting toward textile design and theatre — in the service, as she saw it, of an art useful to the revolution rather than hung on walls.

2. Room 43 — De Stijl and the bridge to the Bauhaus

In Leiden, in the Netherlands, another geometry was being invented at the same time. In 1917, Theo van Doesburg founded the magazine De Stijl, which gave the movement its name; Vilmos Huszár, a Hungarian painter settled in the Netherlands, met him the year before and co-founded the magazine with him, designing its cover. The core of the group — Van Doesburg, Huszár, Piet Mondrian, the architect Gerrit Rietveld — championed a vocabulary reduced to essentials: horizontal and vertical lines, flat areas of primary colours and non-colours (black, white, grey), which they called Neo-Plasticism. Composition XX, painted by Van Doesburg in 1920 and held in Room 43, dates from the year he visited Mondrian's Paris studio: the grid stays deliberately irregular rather than systematic, and the primary colours are noticeably toned down — what Van Doesburg called a "decomposition," the moment when all reference to an illusion of reality falls away.

László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian painter and photographer, bridges this European geometric abstraction to its most influential place of teaching: called by Walter Gropius, he joined the Bauhaus in 1923, where he took over Johannes Itten's preliminary course and headed the metal workshop. He taught there until 1928, steering the school toward concerns more technical and less mystical than his predecessor's — photography, typography and industrial design took, under his impetus, a central place.

3. Room 44 — dada, collage and methods of the dream

Kurt Schwitters was never admitted into the Berlin Dada circle; he founded his own variant in Hanover instead, from 1919, under a name he invented himself: Merz, drawn by chance from a fragment of the German word Kommerz cut out of a collage. He assembled tram tickets, stamps, pieces of wood and string into compositions he presented as a new form of artistic synthesis — his own formula holds: "one can even shout out through refuse." Merz 1925, 1. Relief in Blue Square, held in Room 44, assembles wood pieces on boards, a shoe sole and a large black square against a light background, inside a thick blue frame recalling a theatre set; unlike his earlier works, the nails are concealed from behind, so the materials appear to form a unified whole rather than a visible collage.

Max Ernst invented frottage in 1925: he laid a sheet of paper on an old wooden floor and rubbed it with a pencil, letting the grain of the wood appear as a found image rather than an invented one — the results, populated with creatures and forests, were published in 1926 in a collection titled Natural History. He transposed the same logic to painting from 1927 under the name grattage: a canvas loaded with several layers of paint was laid on a textured object (wire mesh, rope, wood), then scraped with a palette knife to reveal the relief. Solitary and Conjugal Trees, painted in 1940 and held in Room 44, extends these experiments with decalcomania, another semi-automatic technique: paint is pressed between a sheet of glass and the canvas, then pulled apart at random, producing large porous, tree-like forms concealing a female nude, a horse's head and several faces in profile. Yves Tanguy, a self-taught painter converted to Surrealism after seeing a painting by Giorgio de Chirico in a shop window, painted for his part landscapes with no geographical marker, their biomorphic forms scattered across an undefined ground or sky — as in Death Watching his Family (1927, Room 44), a beach haunted by floating biomorphic shapes and a decomposing corpse, beside a structure recalling the dolmens of Brittany; the enigmatic title is borrowed from a parapsychology treatise by Charles Richet.

From 1930 onward, Salvador Dalí formulated his "paranoiac-critical method": a deliberate, controlled way of letting his gaze hallucinate double forms within reality, to bring out a second image inside the first — a discipline, he insisted, and not a mere passive delirium like the automatism the early Surrealists championed. Gradiva Rediscovers the Anthropomorphic Ruins, painted in 1932 and held in Room 44, illustrates exactly this principle: two embracing figures amid ghostly ruins, one of them seemingly turning to stone, embody Gala, the painter's companion, under a double identity — that of the heroine of Wilhelm Jensen's novella, which fascinated the Surrealists, and a buried one drawn from his own memory. It was Dalí himself who introduced the Chilean painter Roberto Matta to André Breton in 1937; Matta, until then an architect trained under Le Corbusier, joined the Paris Surrealist group that same year. He settled in New York in 1938, where he stayed for about a decade, in contact with Tanguy and other European exiles — one of the links connecting Parisian Surrealism to post-war American abstraction. Untitled (1942-1943, Room 44), painted during this New York exile, shows a network of fine white lines incised into the still-wet paint, a technique inspired by the string installation Marcel Duchamp created for the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition.

How much time

The two rooms follow one another and answer each other: the geometry of one throws the imagery of the other into relief by contrast. Allow close to an hour for both.

Blue Nude (Larionov, Room 43) — 4 minutes.
Street with Lanterns (Larionov, Room 43) — 5 minutes.
Painterly Architectonic (Popova, Room 43) — 8 minutes.
Composition XX (Van Doesburg, Room 43) — 7 minutes.
Merz 1925, 1. Relief in Blue Square (Schwitters, Room 44) — 8 minutes.
Solitary and Conjugal Trees (Max Ernst, Room 44) — 8 minutes.
Death Watching his Family (Tanguy, Room 44) — 8 minutes.
Gradiva Rediscovers the Anthropomorphic Ruins (Dalí, Room 44) — 8 minutes.
Untitled (Matta, Room 44) — 4 minutes.

Sources and verification

Facts checked against the artist pages of the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum (museothyssen.org) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR and specialist sources on Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus and Surrealism.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Continue your visit

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

The German Renaissance, room by room Cranach, Baldung Grien and Holbein the Elder, from Bavaria to Saxony. Fauves and Expressionists, the same year, two countries Vlaminck and Dufy alongside Kirchner, Pechstein and Nolde.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.

From geometry to dream: avant-gardes and surrealism, Rooms 43-44