Spain has a great repertoire of culture, whether it is its architecture, its literature or painting. And in addition, it has hundreds of museums that house works of this type. One of them is, specifically, “the most beautiful little museum in the world”so he stated Alfred H. Barrfirst director of the famous MoMA in New York, during a visit to the Museum of Abstract Art of Cuenca.
Currently, this museum is partially closed for air conditioning works, but it allows visits to tourists who wish to see works of Spanish abstraction between the 50s and 80s. In the exhibition you can see the works of renowned artists such as Antonio Saura, Gerardo Rueda, Fernando Zóbel, Gustavo Torner, Eusebio Sempere, Modest Cuixart and Elena Asinsbetween many more.
“The Museum of Spanish Abstract Art of Cuenca was a pioneer in a country without museums, a museum born from the personal initiative of an artist, Fernando Zóbel, and managed by artists”says Manuel Fontán del Junco, director of Museums and Exhibitions of the Juan March Foundation and one of the curators of this exhibition. “Spain lacked spaces dedicated to collecting and exhibiting this new art”concludes Fontán del Junco, in reference to the rejection of art by the Franco dictatorship.
An initiative for the love of abstract art
When Zóbel arrived in Spain after studying in the United States, he began to collecting work by abstract artists of his generation and establishing certain friendships with many of them. The fact that there were no museums at that time shocked him, due to the potential of Spanish artists, who felt repressed by their nation.
Due to this, Zóbel proposed to do a private, small museum outside the Franco regime. Furthermore, so that the Francoist authorities would not realize its existence, they built it in a less populated city like Cuenca was and is. “Until one day the painter Gustavo Torner, whom he had met at the Venice Biennale, spoke to him about Cuenca, his hometown, and about the hanging houses, which at that time had just been rehabilitated and which the city’s City Council had not yet “I had decided what use to give them,” says Manuel Fontán del Junco.
Finally, on July 1, 1966, the Spanish Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca opened its doors in the presence of the mayor of Cuenca and several artists.
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