Madrid,
It consists of 4,000 works, dating from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, manuscripts and decorative arts, but the relevant aspect of the collection of Juan Antonio Pérez Simón, a businessman and collector of Asturian origin who has lived in Mexico since his childhood, is not so much the numbers as its representativeness (a valid account of the History of Art between those periods could be drawn from its collection) and its quality. Although the agreement has not yet been closed, both those responsible for this collection and the Madrid City Council take it for granted that they will soon be able to communicate the details of the establishment of some of these pieces in the capital: it is planned that the Serrería Belga, next to CaixaForum and immersed in the so-called Art Triangle (a condition longed for by the magnate), will host rotating presentations of these works, which would probably consist alternately of around two hundred of them.
The legal formula that will enable this landing in Spain of one of the most far-reaching international collections has not yet been announced, but the council has announced that the operation will involve remodelling works both at the headquarters of Serrería Belga and in its surrounding streets and squares and that it is likely that these will begin in the second half of 2025.
As a prologue to the opening of its own museum, CentroCentro is already hosting an extraordinary selection of seventy works by Pérez Simón, from Mexico, New York and the city of Madrid itself, in which an attempt has been made to highlight some of the strong points of this collection: Victorian painting (his is the largest international collection of this period, after that of the British Andrew Lloyd Weber); academic art and the avant-garde, which are confronted here; and non-Western creations, since Asian art is also part of this exhibition. Another key presence, as was to be expected, is that of fundamental Spanish artists, such as El Greco, Murillo, Goya, Sorolla, Picasso, Zuloaga and Dalí. It was decided that each author would be represented by only one work, for reasons of space; in any case, the tour is more than useful for any spectator seeking to grasp essential moments and fractures in the evolution of painting, a unique discipline in the Cibeles exhibition.
At the presentation of the exhibition, Pérez Simón mentioned the attraction of beauty as his fundamental driving force when collecting; in the texts accompanying the project he dates this passion: a trip through Europe that, in 1964, took him to Paris, Arles, Granada, Seville, Toledo and Rome and that marked the beginning of his drive to acquire art from a practically encyclopedic perspective; a list of just a few names of the creators at CentroCentro is enough to prove it, from Cranach to Yoshitomo Nara, including Rubens, Van Dyck, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Alma-Tadema, Monet, Renoir, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Warhol, Miquel Barceló.
A warm one Charity by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a Saint John the Baptist preaching in the desertfull of detail and designed to be seen up close, by Pieter Bruegel the Younger, and royal portraits by Pantoja de la Cruz (Philip II) and Van Dyck (the elegant Prince Carl Louis) welcome us to the exhibition and its section of old masters and early moderns, in which an effort has been made to have creations by well-known European artists (in addition to those mentioned, Rubens, Tiepolo, Reynolds with his sincere portrait of the Duchess of Gloucester, Gainsborough and his expressive peasant with a donkey, the Dutchman Ferdinand Bol and his luminous philosopher) coexist with creations by Manuel de Arellano, creator of the most widely disseminated images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and active in Mexico in the first third of the 18th century, and with famous caste paintingswhich at the same time, in New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru, sought to illustrate the mixing of races.
A second chapter of this exhibition is the 19th century, as we said one of the pillars of the Pérez Simón collection, which includes romantic, aesthetic, academic and pre-Raphaelite pieces. A view of Cologne by Turner and, above all, The Roses of Heliogabalus by Alma-Tadema, a composition between delicate and daring of a classic banquet that was also, half serene and cruel (that sadistic Roman emperor, whose name would be translated into Spanish as person dominated by gluttonymurdered his guests by drowning them under the flowers; it is said that Nero also did the same). These roses are not far from the great figures of French painting, from Cézanne, father of the avant-garde, and the symbolist Moreau to the impressionists and post-impressionists; among these we can cite Monet and Renoir, Van Gogh (with a brilliantly illuminated potato peeler) or Pissarro. There is no shortage of Italian, Central European and Nordic artists of the moment; in this section, female portraits win.
Finally, a journey from the avant-garde to current creation takes us from the isms of French origin represented by Braque, Picasso or Léger and Munch’s anguish in the skies to the aforementioned new Asian art (Murakami, Nara, Xiaogang, Fanzhi), passing through one of Lempicka’s best nudes, a Rothko unquestionable in his fields of color, a synthetic Alex Katz or a specular Pistoletto that introduces the spectator into his painting. In a more or less explicit way, we are invited to make that our place, again and again.
“Seventy great masters from the Pérez Simón collection”
CENTERCENTER
Plaza de Cibeles, 1
Madrid
From September 20, 2024 to January 12, 2025
