Banco de España : presents the catalogue raisonné and its art collection portal (1 MB)

Communication Department

PRESS RELEASE

Madrid, 22 October 2020

The Banco de España presents the catalogue raisonné and its art collection portal

From now on, it will be easier to access the art collection built up by the Banco de España over its history. Today the Banco de España presents publicly its catalogue raisonné. It is a three-volume descriptive catalogue of the Bank's extraordinary collection comprising more than 1,400 works by almost 500 artists that confirm its patronage of the arts during 235 years. Additionally, it is launching in tandem its art collection portal which makes all of these works of art available to the general public and will act as a communication channel for its future cultural activities.

This catalogue raisonné of the Banco de España's collection has been conceived as an extension and review of the catalogue of paintings published in 1985 containing 322 works of art. In the current edition, the field of study has been broadened to encompass sculpture, drawings and photography, leaving the decorative arts and the exceptionally well-endowed collection of prints for future research. The final result is in the form of a three-volume catalogue which reproduces more than 1,400 national and international works of art. Its purpose is to contribute essentially to the dissemination, research and enjoyment of this public collection by the general public, experts and art lovers.

The publication contains high-quality reproductions of each work of art accompanied by historical and artistic documentation and critical annotations, made by as many as 22 experts, along with the biographies of the artists included in each volume.

Volume I includes the section on the classical art collection: 263 works of art dating from the 15th century until the early decades of the 20th century. This volume begins with the institutional portrait gallery of more than 100 portraits of the directors and governors, together with monarchs and heads of State, who have marked the history of this banking institution from the end of the 18th century until the present day. In the words of Javier Portús, chief curator of Spanish Painting at the Prado Museum, and author of the two essays included in this volume, it is "one of the best collections in existence for studying the evolution of official portraits in Spain since the end of the Modern Age and throughout the Contemporary Age."

Aside from the contributions of Javier Portús, this volume includes texts by the curator of the Banco de España, Yolanda Romero, A collection bound up with history, and by the art historian Isabel Tejeda, Artists of the first half of the 20th century. The translations into English appear at the end of this volume.

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Volumes II and III bring together more than 1,100 works of art which currently make up the contemporary collection, dating from the mid-20th century to 2018 and set out in alphabetical order, from Ignasi Aballí to Edwin Zwakman. Readers can also find in Volume II a conversation with José María Viñuela, curator of the Banco de España between 1982 and 2015, which analyses the milestones marking the creation of the contemporary collection

Yolanda Romero was responsible for publishing the catalogue raisonné and was assisted by José María Viñuela in the process of cataloguing. Completing the team was an extensive group of experts who annotated the works of art and documented them: Virginia Albarrán Martín, María José Alonso, Beatriz Cordero, Roberto Díaz, Beatriz Espejo, Julián Gállego, Carlos González Navarro, Paloma Gómez Pastor, Beatriz Herráez, Víctor de las Heras, Carlos Martín, Cristina Martín, Carolina Martínez, Manuela Mena, Frederic Montornés, Javier Moya, Susana Núñez, Jorge Pallarés, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Javier Portús, Mónica Rodríguez Subirana, Pilar Sánchez Lacave, Elena Serrano and Isabel Tejeda.

The catalogue raisonné of the Banco de España's collection can be downloaded free of charge from the new art collection portal, which also includes new sub-sections on Architecture and History (the section on the Collection also introduces categories on graphic art and decorative arts which will be updated on an ongoing basis and bring more than 100 works of art to the collection. The portal also provides a more cross-cutting section, Itineraries, consisting of a series of unique presentations of the Bank's art collection curated by outside experts (artists, art critics, writers, etc.), which, to a certain extent, act as "virtual exhibitions" of general interest.

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A BRIEF LOOK AT THE ART COLLECTION

The Banco de España's art collection is the legacy of an artistic heritage built up over more than two hundred years. The collection bears testimony to the institution's past, its special role as a public bank, and the leading figures who have served it since the Banco de San Carlos was founded well into Spain's Age of Enlightenment. Chronologically, the collection comprises a classical section, dating from the end of the 15th century to the end of the 19th century, and a contemporary section, with works of art produced mainly by Spanish artists from the mid-20th century to the present day. The works acquired in the first two decades of the 21st century are markedly international, centred mainly on European and Latin American art.

The classical collection, making up approximately 20% of the Bank's art collection, began to take shape in the early decades of the institution's existence, with the acquisition of a number of works of art, notably those commissioned to create an official portrait gallery, one of the collection's historical treasures. It includes portraits of Charles III and other members of the royal family, and of the directors and leading figures involved in the Bank's early history, painted by Francisco de Goya and Mariano Salvador Maella, among others. In the 19th century, the portrait gallery continued to grow with works of art by the most renowned artists of the time, including Federico de Madrazo, José Gutiérrez de la Vega, Antonio María Esquivel and Joaquín Sorolla, among others, to reach more than one hundred paintings which reflect the evolution of official portraiture in Spain from the 18th to the 21st century.

Portrait of Vicente Joaquín Osorio de Moscoso y Guzmán Fernández de Córdoba y la Cerda, 13th Count of Altamira, 1786. Francisco de Goya

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In addition to the portrait gallery, the classical collection brings together other exceptional works of art from different periods, such as the Virgin of the Lily, purchased for the chapel at the Banco de San Carlos; the baroque still lifes attributed to Juan Van der Hamen; the flower paintings by Arellano or the two architectural "caprices" by Vicente Giner, to name only a few.

Virgin of the Lily, ca. 1550. Cornelis Van Cleve

Around 80% of the Banco de España's art collection is made up of its contemporary collection, largely consisting of Spanish art produced from the 1950s to the present day. Abstraction, whether of the gestural or material informalist type by prominent artists such as Tapies, Millares, Saura, Chillida, etc., or the more geometric and analytical form (represented by Oteiza, Palazuelo, Equipo 57, Elena Asins, Soledad Sevilla, Esther Ferrer), is a major component of this collection. In contrast, the collection also includes a wealth of paintings and sculptures by the exponents of lyrical realism (Carmen Laffón, Francisco López, Isabel Quintanilla, etc.).

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