Malaga,
Last year, 2024, it was a century and a half since the death of Mariano Fortuny i Marsal, one of our most interesting painters of the 19th century, although he has not always been recognized as such. The anniversary has been commemorated inside and outside Spain, especially in Catalan museums, but we still have the opportunity to learn about some less studied aspects of his brief career: he died in Rome when he was only thirty-six years old.
The Thyssen in Malaga opens, this weekend in its Sala Noble, an exhibition focused on his drawings and engravings; About thirty are on display from the Musée Goya in Castres and representative of the different settings where he worked (Barcelona, Morocco, Rome, Granada) and some of the subjects that were most dear to him: genre and everyday scenes, orientalist themes and characters sketched from life.
Paper was an always valued support for him, from his student days to his final years, those of his most elaborate compositions, due to the versatility it offered him technically. It was not the most conducive medium to train his preciousness or his study of lighting effects, but it was to test his refinement, his sensitivity and his ability to attract the viewer in discreet formats and austere media.
In these works he did not renounce the literary references that proliferate in his paintings, and that we also find in other artists of his time, nor a desire for verisimilitude that he never renounced, but it is evident that he allowed himself greater freedom in them than on canvas. More instinct and less convention in representation codes. Since this type of compositions were not intended for the market, they were allowed to leave aside the conditions of clients with still orthodox taste.
Many of these drawings – as we said, coming from the Castres museum, one of the most important collections in Europe of works by this author – are shown for the first time in Spain and in many of them we will find the germ of his pictorial developments, both compositionally and thematically, presenting them from that greater audacity.
Fortuny did not cultivate landscaping in its most common dimension, that of the representation of nature as a sole motif, but he did incorporate the environment into his works, and it is above all in his creations on paper where the role that atmospheric effects played in the construction of his language is perceived; This is also the case in his portraits of individuals exposed to the sun.
A collector of historical and everyday moments, he was a lover of Morocco and oriental culture to the extent that he tended to focus on what was pure and authentic to him: from childhood to the Albaicín, the sea, the sun, death or the human body.
Trained in Rome for three years, his stays in North Africa (in 1860, 1862 and 1871) allowed him to discover an Arab imaginary whose influence, in the form of warm and bohemian atmospheres, he maintained throughout his career and also in his graphic creation: his simple ways of life, his austere houses… and he had an ease in capturing its culture, as he always did to capture the life and light around the Mediterranean.
This cosmopolitanism, as well as his handling of low points of view, made him a very original author in the European context; The enigma of his engravings was praised, but also the delicacy of his watercolors, characterized by the ease of his brushstrokes and the quality of his inks. His scenes taken from nature and his Granada views in this technique, very vivid, attest to his taste for archeology and his aesthetic desire, his desire to improve reality.
The undone invoice so characteristic of Fortuny’s production increased in his final years, as did the vibrant touch of his strokes.
“Mariano Fortuny. Drawings”
THYSSEN MÁLAGA MUSEUM
C/Company, 10
Malaga
From February 6 to May 3, 2026
