Drawings from the 20th Century

LA MANO CON LAPIS Colecciones Fundacion Mapfre Pages: 295

Noel Grima Fundacion Mapfre is the cultural arm of insurance giant Mapfre, which is now also present in Malta.

This Fundacion owns a number of works of art and collections which it exhibits around the world, especially in Madrid, and in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America. As far as I can remember, none of these exhibitions has come to Malta.

In 1989, a year after its creation, Fundacion Cultural Mapfre Vida began to put together an artistic collection which now amounts to 1500 works of art.

Since 1997 it has worked to collect drawings on paper derived from the most important artists of Spanish art: works by Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Luis Fernandez, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, among others.

Then, little by little the collection was enhanced by drawings from the international avant-garde artists of the 20th Century such as George Grosz, Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Paul Klee.

The result is this book, an excursion among the best art and artists of the past century, a book one can read at leisure, a walk among the various artistic trends and influences, so that the reader can read and appreciate the evolution of drawing from the end of the 19th Century all through the 20th.

Each plate comes accompanied by a text (in Spanish) that outlines the artist and contextualizes the drawing. There is also an index, biographies of the artists, a chronology and an extensive bibliography.