THE ROBERTO POLO COLLECTION. CENTRE FOR MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART OF CASTILE-LA MANCHA
TOLEDO – CUENCA
SECONDARY LEVEL: AGES 12–16
LEARNING GUIDE
Hermann Max Pechstein, Portrait of Charlotte Kaprolat, c. 1909, oil on linen
CONTENTS
I. WHAT IS THIS NEW MUSEUM AND WHAT CAN WE SEE IN IT?
II. WHY HAS IT BEEN CREATED IN TOLEDO AND CUENCA?
III. A BUILDING STEEPED IN HISTORY
IV. WHO IS ROBERTO POLO? WHY HAS HE GIVEN US HIS ART COLLECTION?
V. COLLECTORS AND DONORS
VI. A WALK THROUGH THE MUSEUM:
1. WHAT WERE THE 19TH-CENTURY BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ART?
2. WHO WERE THE AVANT-GARDES?
3. ART OF TODAY
4. PAINTING AND MUCH MORE
I. WHAT IS THIS NEW MUSEUM AND WHAT CAN WE SEE IN IT?
The Roberto Polo Collection. Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art of Castile-La Mancha, inaugurated on 27 March 2019, is a new museum created by the government of the Castile-La Mancha Autonomous Community to house the first 500 or so artworks to be assigned to us by the Cuban-American collector Roberto Polo.
We can see works by 171 artists, many of them already ahead of their time, even back in the 19th century; this is followed by a selection from the artistic movements of the early 20th century; finally we discover a wide range of work produced by contemporary artists from Europe and the United States.
Entrance hall: in the foreground, Woman, a sculpture by Annabelle Hyvrier; in the background, information panels and restored Islamic arches
II. WHY HAS IT BEEN CREATED IN TOLEDO AND CUENCA?
Toledo and Cuenca, the two cities of our Community chosen for this project, have both been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites because of their historical importance. They are two ancient cities in which the impact of the new will generate interesting contrasts. Both centres will also mount temporary exhibitions, produce publications, and organise talks, workshops and other activities for adults and young people.
III. A BUILDING STEEPED IN HISTORY
The building that houses the permanent collection in Toledo is the former convent of Santa Fe, which has been declared a National Monument; it was constructed between the 9th and 18th centuries and forms part of the present-day Miradero complex which occupies one of the city’s most strategic positions and is associated with important figures from our historical past. Building began in the 9th century on a former Visigoth settlement; it later became an Islamic palace – travellers of the time recount the lavish feasts and celebrations that took place in its rooms and gardens; remnants from that period now form part of the new museum. After the reconquest of Toledo in the late 11th century, it became the residence of kings such as Alfonso X (called the Wise), and from the 13th century parts of it were occupied by various religious orders. Between 2000 and 2003 it was restored by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture, which has worked to ensure that this extraordinary building – which has so much to tell us about Toledo and its people – is preserved.
Façade of the CORPO museum, showing the sculptural group Battle Figures by Miquel Navarro
IV. WHO IS ROBERTO POLO? WHY HAS HE GIVEN US HIS ART COLLECTION?
Roberto Polo was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1951. In 1961 he immigrated with his family, who were of Spanish and Italian extraction, to the United States where he studied fine art, philosophy and history of art in Washington, D.C., and New York. He became known as ‘The Eye’ because of his ability to focus not only on artists already recognised in the history of art but also on less familiar figures who are now being appreciated by art professionals. What distinguishes Polo is the way that he identifies art movements and acquires works of art that were ground-breaking at the time but were then forgotten. Polo is passionate about fine art, decorative art, music and literature, and ancient, modern and contemporary art. He is also a renowned patron of the arts, having gifted works to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the Victor Horta Museum in Brussels. He has received many awards and honours including Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic (1988) and the Spanish arts patronage awards Premio Capital Arte al Mecenazgo Internacional (Madrid, 2016) and Premio Fuera de Serie, Personaje del Año, categoría Filantropía (Madrid, 2017).
Portrait of Roberto Polo by Jan Vanriet, 2014, oil on canvas, located in the museum entrance V. COLLECTORS AND DONORS
Sometimes, an art collector decides to bequeath, donate or assign artworks for the benefit of a public institution – or even to create one – and in so doing to give something to the whole community. In the United States – where, despite the prevailing capitalism, it has been traditional to give back to the community some of what has been received from it – this was how many magnificent museums – which, quite rightly, bear the name of their creator – came into being. It is a tradition that Roberto Polo is keen to continue, although, unlike most benefactors, he has decided not to wait until after his death but to demonstrate this generosity during his lifetime and has begun this process while he still has many years to continue enjoying this ‘family’ of his.
VI. A WALK THROUGH THE MUSEUM
The Collection contains a series of works by modern artists as significant as Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein, Schlemmer, Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy and Max Ernst. It includes a wide selection of works by artists from Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, many of whom were barely represented in museums in Spain, not even in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. The Prado Museum boasts a rich collection of 15th- and 17th-century Flemish paintings and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum has some revolutionary 19th- and 20th-century artists, but the avant-gardes of this region of Europe were lacking; the Polo Collection has now filled this void with Paul Joostens, who created the first collages and Dada objects ahead of Kurt Schwitters, Jozef Peeters, Georges Vantongerloo, Marthe Donas, Marc Eemans, Pierre-Louis Flouquet, Jos Léonard, Karel Maes and Victor Servranckx, Belgium’s leading abstract artists. It also offers an excellent selection of works by contemporary artists from Europe and the United States.
Visitors to the Polo Collection museums in Toledo and Cuenca will be surprised by the originality of the works on display, but it is Roberto Polo’s belief that museums should focus on artistic value rather than on the latest trends in the market.
Jesus (2018), a 9-metre-long work by Nino Longobardi in resin and brass, occupies the central area of the church of the former convent that now houses the museum. In the background are works by Jan Vanriet (right) and Koen de Cock (left). 1. WHAT WERE THE 19TH-CENTURY BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ART? Certain French artists, such as Delacroix, Daumier and Degas, played a part, along with others like the British artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Hungarian Rippl-Ronai. Alongside paintings of landscapes and figures we find many scenes of everyday life, because at this period all themes began to enjoy equal status.
Honoré Daumier became famous for his satirical drawings and engravings, which caricatured the French politics and society of his time.
Henri-Edmond Cross adopted pointillism, the style made famous by Seurat and Signac and one of the principal currents of Post-Impressionism; he would later cultivate a style that became instrumental in the formation of Fauvism.
View of Gravelines (North), Seen from Grand-Fort-Philippe, pointillist oil painting by Henri- Edmond Cross, c. 1891
Moreau was the leading exponent of French Symbolism and was famous for the eroticism of his oil paintings and watercolours of mythological and religious scenes and for his enigmatic interpretations of figures from ancient history and myth.
Rossetti, a painter and poet, was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an artistic movement that idealised the Middle Ages and sought to return to the purity of pre-Renaissance art.
Eugène Delacroix, Fisherwoman on the Beach, c. 1843–45, oil on canvas
2. WHO WERE THE AVANT-GARDES?
Modern art was born out of the upheaval resulting from the major changes that occurred in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century and in the wake of the devastation caused by the First World War, which marked the start of a new era. In the early decades of the 20th century, innovative art currents began to develop that were known as the historical avant-gardes.
Art Nouveau is a decorative style that spread across Europe and to the United States in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th and was employed mainly in architecture and the applied arts. In Belgium, a leading exponent, along with Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, was Henry van de Velde, whose work can be found in the Polo Collection; he was the first consciously abstract artist in the history of Western art and the founder of modern design theory.
Georg Kolbe, Henry van de Velde, 1913, bronze, height 55 cm
Fauvism – so named because the painters who created it were described as fauves (wild beasts) due to their vivid and aggressive use of colour – flourished in France in the early 20th century; artists in the Polo Collection such as the Belgian painters Victor Servranckx and Prosper de Troyers had a fauve phase before embracing abstraction.
Victor Servranckx, Untitled, 1921, oil on canvas
Expressionism, which focused on the emotive and subjective and employed distortion and an equally colourful palette, emerged in Germany with the exhibitions of the Die Brücke group (1905), two of whose founders, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erik Heckel, are represented in the Polo Collection, as is another leading member, Hermann Max Pechstein. The Russian artist Vassily Kandinsky, the most prominent of the pioneers of abstract art, cultivated this style for a time, as did Franz Marc, with whom he founded the group known as Der Blaue Reiter in Munich in 1911. When the Nazi assault on modern art was at its height, many of these artists would be included in the ‘degenerate art’ exhibition of 1937.
A Street in Murnau, by Vassily Kandinsky, c. 1908, oil on craft board
Cubism, created principally by Picasso and Braque in Paris between 1904 and 1911, rejected traditional perspective, modelling, and light and shade, reducing forms to planes and geometric figures in its two phases: Analytical Cubism (1910–12) and Synthetic Cubism (post-1912). Many artists in the Polo Collection went through a Cubist phase of some kind, including Man Ray, Karl Schwitters, Paul Joostens, Georges Vantongerloo, Marthe Donas, Gustavs Klucis, Jos Léonard, Karel Maes and Gustav Miklos.
Marthe Donas, Still life ‘K’, c. 1917–18, oil on canvas
Futurism, launched in Italy in 1909 by the poet Marinetti, and which came to an end with the start of the First World War in 1914, rejected the past, instead glorifying speed and technology, and was later associated with fascism. Some artists in the Collection – Peeters, Joostens and Van Dooren – were in touch with this style for a time.
Constructivism emerged in Russia and took its inspiration from geometric forms and industrial and mechanical sources; it received a decisive boost with the October Revolution of 1917, after which it became the representative style of the new society before being crushed by Stalinism in the 1930s. The Polo Collection includes works by some of its great artists: El Lissitzky, Gustavs Klucis, Ivan Kliun and Ilia Chashnik. All four were in touch with the Suprematism, created by Malevich in Russia at the same time, and which was the first art movement based on pure geometric abstraction.
Proun, c. 1920, a Constructivist work by El Lissitzky in which the artist uses mixed media on paper
At the start of the 20th century, the modern art trend culminated in abstract or non-figurative art with its refusal to imitate nature and its concept of painting as a plane covered in colour and form. The principal exponents of this style were found in Germany, Russia, Belgium and the Netherlands. At the same time, the Dutch group known as De Stijl was using abstraction to seek out laws of balance and harmony with the aim of achieving ‘pure plastic’ expression. A number of the artists represented in the Collection formed part of this group – Van Doesburg and Vantongerloo being two of its founders.
Georges Vantongerloo, Function and Variant, 1939, amalgam of pigment and gum arabic on paper
In 1919 the Bauhaus was formed in Germany. This school of design, whose name means ‘building house’, sought, like Constructivism in Russia, to improve people’s living conditions through architecture and industrial design; for the Bauhaus this meant paying special attention to everyday objects. It was forced to close down when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Many of the most outstanding artists of the period taught at the Bauhaus, including Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy.
Construction, a work by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, a teacher at the Bauhaus, created in 1923, in stainless steel, plexiglass and painted vulcanised fibre
The Der Sturm gallery was very important for modern art as it was the centre of the avant-garde in Berlin. Up to its closure in 1924, all the great artists of the time exhibited there, from Munch to Picasso, including many of the artists in the Polo Collection: Schlemmer, Schwitters, Peeters, Flouquet, Donas and others.
Work by Marthe Donas, Tango, produced for the cover of Der Sturm magazine in 1920. Marthe signed her work ‘Tour Donas’ because at that time it was not easy to be accepted as an artist if you were a woman.
Dada was a nihilist movement that spread across Europe and to New York at the start of the 20th century. It rebelled against tradition and focused on the absurd, on provocation and the humorous. The Belgian artist Paul Joostens was ahead of Schwitters in creating the first collages and Dada objects; another artist in the Polo Collection is Man Ray, who moved from Dadaism to Surrealism, as did Max Ernst, one of the most celebrated of the Surrealists.
Paul Joostens, Dada Object, mixed media assemblage, created around 1918
Surrealism was interested in fantasy, the irrational and the unconscious. The Polo Collection includes some important Surrealist artists such as the German Max Ernst, Man Ray (also a filmmaker and photographer) from the United States and the Belgian artists Marthe Donas and Marc Eemans, the first Belgian Surrealist, ahead of Magritte.
The Belgian artist Marc Eemans was one of the pioneers of Surrealism. The image shows: Lady Removing her Finery, 1927, oil on canvas.
3. ART OF TODAY
The second part of the Collection covers the period from the end of the Second World War to the present day. The majority of these artists began working during the early part of the 1950s and have continued into the 21st century, producing art in a wide range of artistic idoms, techniques and formats. There are non-figurative works and others that follow the new paths of figuration.
Although the Collection includes many artists from France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Poland, the majority in this section are from Belgium, the United States, Spain and Italy and are known today beyond the borders of their respective countries; they are artists with works in the collections of major international museums such as Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York, Yale University Art Gallery and many others; they have also taken part in important international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennial.
Work by the Flemish artist Marc Maet, Diary of a Painter II, acrylic on canvas
4. PAINTING AND MUCH MORE
Although oil paintings, watercolours and drawings make up the majority of the Collection, there are also some late 19th-century sculptures (Carriès, Bick, Lacombe, etc.), collages and assemblages by the avant-garde artists already mentioned (Joostens, Eemans, Ermilov, Van Dooren) and a striking selection of late 19th-century modernist furniture (including Rossetti, Georg Hulbe, Armand Point, Van de Velde, Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, Peeters and Servranckx), along with some interesting examples of industrial design, notably lamps (van de Velde, Huib Hoste, Jozef Peeters, Marc Louis Baugniet, Victor Servranckx, Gerrit Thomas Rietveld and Naum Slutzky). The Collection also includes more recently developed media such as photography, represented by various photographers of past and present, as well as installation pieces.
Josef Hoffmann, Armchair, 1905, produced by the Wiener Werkstätte in painted pinewood
ACTIVITY
Many abstract works are based on the human body. Think about how these artists have interpreted it and give your own interpretation.
Room 1: Hyvrier 345 Room 4: Kliun 046 Room 6: Joostens 056, Vantongerloo 058, Schwitters 184 Room 8: Peeters 043 Room 9: Servranckx 084, 085, De Cock 289, 290 Room 10: Eemans 164, 165, Gindertael 175, 176, 177, 178 Room 11: Ernst 144, Eemans 154, 158, 161, 162 Room 12: Maet 262, 263 Room 16: Flouquet 109, 110, 111, 120 Patio: Hyvrier 349
Kurt Schwitters, Untitled, 1929, painted wood, height 42 cm ACTIVITY
In some rooms, especially the Surrealist room (11), we find distorted faces and strange-looking heads. What do you think these people are feeling? What did the artist want to express?
Room 6: Donas 076 Room 9: Ceccobelli 293, 294, Hyvrier 346, 347, 348 Room 10: Troyer 170 Room 11: Servranckx 091, Suro 199, Flouquet 117, 118, 119, Murdoch 314
Darío Suro, Self-portrait, 1942, oil on canvas
ACTIVITY
Look at these mysterious urban landscapes. What do they suggest to you? Imagine yourself walking around these towns and cities. Where would you go? What feeling do you get from them?
Room 6: Kandinsky 032, Van Dooren 062, Wunderwald 096 Room 10: Hofer 197
Work by Karl Hofer, Agnuzzo (Ticino), c. 1940, oil on canvas
ACTIVITY
With ‘Dada objects’ it seems as if the artist wants to play with the viewer. How do you interpret this game? As a joke, collusion, a riddle?
Room 6: Joostens 050, 052, 053, 054, 055
Work by Paul Joostens, Dada Object, c. 1927, mixed media assemblage ACTIVITY
Look at the furniture displayed in the museum. How would you use it? Do you think it looks comfortable? What do you think the people it was made for were like?
Room 6: Rossetti 004, Point 014 Room 8: Baugniet 043 Room 11: Mollino 218 Room 15: Hoffmann 024, Serrurier 027, Peeters 042, Kozlowsky 240
In the centre of the photograph, Empathy of the Truth to the Life and Vice Versa, by Jaroslaw Kozlowski, made with two tables, four chairs and two plants. In the background are works by Marc Maet (on the left) and by Karen Gunderson (on the right).