Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is an art museum located in the city of Bilbao, Spain. The building of the museum is located entirely inside the city's Doña Casilda Iturrizar park.
It is the second largest and most visited museum in the Basque Country, after the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum[1] and one of the richest Spanish museums outside Madrid.[2] It houses a valuable and quite comprehensive collection of Basque, Spanish and European art from the Middle Ages to contemporary, including paintings by old masters like El Greco, Cranach, Murillo, Goya, Van Dyck, Ruisdael and Bellotto, together with 19th century and modern: Sorolla, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Henri Le Sidaner, James Ensor, Peter Blake, Francis Bacon and Richard Serra.
History
The Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao was established in 1908. After moving through various venues, the final headquarters were built in 1945, in a great neoclassical building that was to undertake paths expansions in 1970 and 2001 to house the growing museum collection.
The collection of the present Bilbao Fine Arts Museum originated with the merger of the collections from the first Museo de Bellas Artes, inaugurated in 1914, and the Museo de Arte Moderno (Museum of Modern Art) in 1924. In 2008 the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao reached its century under the slogan "100 Years of History, 10 Centuries of Art".
During more than 100 years of history, the collaboration between civil society, local artists and public institutions has enabled the museum to gather an extensive collection, considered one of the most important and diverse of all Spain. Its creation is unique taking into account the importance of bequests and donations from diverse patrons and benefactors, as well as the continuous effort of the museum itself to expand through major acquisitions. Since its inception, the interest in establishing a representative artistic compendium has allowed to refine the selection criteria, and, as a result, the museum can offer and present a panoramic lengthy art history to its visitors.
Aim of the museum
In its role as a public cultural entity, the main mission is to collect, preserve, study and exhibit its own collection, pursue their enrichment, maintain services and promote quality activities in order to contribute decisively to the education of the society and projection of the cultural values of the Basque Autonomous Community.
Permanent collection
The collection of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum gathers an outstanding heritage of more than 10,000 pieces: approximately 1,500 paintings, 400 sculptures, more than 6,500 works on paper and a thousand pieces of applied arts. It also preserves relevant examples of some of the major European schools from the 18th century to the present day and other exceptional collections such as the Palace collection of Oriental art, pottery collection of Manises of the 14th-16th centuries or Taramona-Basabe collection of Etruscan bronzes, Italic, Roman and Iberian, whose chronology goes back to the 6th century BC.
The Flemish and Dutch painting schools are of particular interest, with renowned works of Gossart, Benson and Coecke, Mandijn, Vredeman de Vries, De Vos, Jordaens, Van Dyck, Grebber or Ruisdael. In 2012 the museum has added an important example of Lucas Cranach the Elder: Lucrecia (1534).[6] It also has the largest collection from Basque artists, becoming the maximum reference institution due to its artistic and documentary heritage, research tradition and proximity to the artists.
It is worth mentioning the variety of works on paper, prints and engravings by Albrecht Dürer, Van Meckenem, Georg Pencz, Goltzius, Rembrandt, Sandrart, Piranesi, Goya, Fortuny, Carlos de Haes, Cézanne, Picasso, Duchamp, Lipchitz, Utamaro, Hokusai, Rouault, Hockney, Allen Jones, Immendorff, Bacon and Antonio Saura, among others.
An indispensable tour of the museum includes rare works by Bermejo, Benson, Mandijn, Vredeman de Vries, Lucas Cranach the Elder, De Vos, Anthonis Mor, Alonso Sánchez Coello, El Greco, Pourbus, Gentileschi, Ribera, Zurbarán, Van Dyck, Murillo, Arellano, Meléndez, Bellotto, Mengs, Goya, Paret, Villaamil, Ribot, Zamacois, Madrazo, Gauguin, Cassatt, Sorolla, Iturrino, Ensor, Regoyos, Romero de Torres, Zuloaga, Sunyer, Gutiérrez Solana, Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Lipchitz, Delaunay, González, Gargallo, Bacon, Palazuelo, Oteiza, Appel, Chillida, Caro, Serra, Millares, Tàpies, Saura, Lüpertz, Kitaj, Blake, Arroyo and Barceló, among others.