The Basilea Kunstmuseum to bring art to Madrid in 2015

Ten picassos and about 200 works by some of the most outstanding since the end of the 19th century artists will travel to Madrid from the Kunstmuseum of Basel to star in two of the exhibitions more featured in 2015. The closure of the Basilea Art Museum headquarters from February, works of renovation and expansion, will allow that works by Edvard Munch, Kandinsky, Picasso, Juan Gris, Paul Klee and Andy Warhol are displayed for the first time in Spain.

The 10 Picasso works dated back 1906-1967 will be installed at the Central Gallery of the Villanueva building to offer a small retrospective, with which the artist from Malaga returns to the Prado Museum from March 16 until September 13, 2015.

During this year, when the public will have the opportunity to admire until the Goya exhibition in Madrid until May, the Spanish Gallery will also organize exhibitions by Van der Weyden, which will bring together works such as El Calvario, the Descendimiento de la Cruz, the Virgen Durán  or the Tríptico de Miraflores, as well as some by Luis de Morales or Ingres.

The rest, some 200 works including paintings, sculptures, collages, pictures and videos, dated back the end of the 19th century to the present times, will be seen by the Reina Sofía Museum public.

All these pieces will help form a tour of expressionism, abstract art, constructivism and minimalism with works by Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd and Pierre Huyghe.

Gauguin's Steve McQueen

The bulk of works by the Swiss institution that will travel to Spain to display at the Reina Sofia, over a hundred come from its collection of modern and contemporary art and the rest of the private collections Rudolsf Staechelin and Im Obersteg, also deposited at the Kunstmuseum.

This will be the first time these two private collections in Basel to show up together outside the Swiss city, with sixty paintings by such artists as Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, Chagall, Soutin, Redon, Pissarro, Picasso, Manet, Modigliani, Monet, Cézanne, Jawlensky and Hodler.

One of the Gaugin in the Im Obsersteg collection is considered to be one of the best paintings by the French artist, while some of the works by Picasso and Chagall only have left Switzerland once, in 2003, to be exhibited in Vienna.

After passing through Madrid, the two collections will travel to the United States, where you can see from October 2015 at the Phillips Collection in Washington.

In addition, among the works of the general collection of the Museum of Basel to explained in the Reina Sofia the transition from classical modernism to contemporary, not shortage authors such as Le Corbusier, Dubuffet, André Masson, Max Ernst, László Moholy-Nagy, Agnès Martin, Robert Ryman, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko or Steve McQueen.

Another of the protagonists of the year will be Edvard Munch, which the Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza devoted from October an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Munch-Museet in Oslo. This sample will gather for the first time in Madrid, from the retrospective held in 1984, 70 pieces, including oil paintings, drawings and graphic works, in order to deepen the creative force of the artist's late 19th century and early 20th.

Paintings of Raoul Dufy, Paul Delvaux and Zurbarán also fill the walls of the Museum in the exhibitions that the Thyssen plans to devote to these artists in 2015, a year in which the Fundación Mapfre will bring to Madrid 84 works from the collections of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris that will form part, from February 14, sample "the song of the Swan. Academic paintings of the Paris Salon".

Global eclecticism

Exhibitions of great museums are increasingly eclectic and thus, in 2015, you can see from the work of Björk at the MoMA to the sacred traditions of the Himalayas at the Metropolitan, through mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder in the work of Le Corbusier in the Pompidou or Tate Modern.

The MoMA in New York will dedicate a retrospective between March 8 and June 9 to the multi-faceted composer, singer and artist Björk, in a chronicle of two decades on his creative universe, from album Debut (1993) to Biophilia (2011), counted with your videos, movies, tools, objects, dresses and performances, as well as his collaborations with other artists.

Not less original widow of John Lennon will star the exhibition Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, also at the MoMA, where from May 17 to September 7 will be 125 materials of this pioneer of conceptual art and experimental cinema.

They will also highlight the important Latin American presence in 2015 at the MoMa with an exhibition related to the Argentine photographer and filmmaker Horacio Coppola and his first wife German Grete Stern who are representatives of the vanguard of the modernity in the 1930s, as well as another exhibition on architecture in the second half of the 20th century, in countries like Mexico, Cuba and Brazil.

Even in the city of the skyscrapers, the Metropolitan has scheduled two exhibitions related Asia: Sacred Traditions of the Himalayas, which will be opened until June 14, and China: Through the Looking Glass, from May 7 to August 16.

Spirituality and conceptualism

Mandalas, sculptures, jewels, masks and religious costumes are useful, in the case of the first exhibition, to address the spirituality of the Himalayas inhabitants and the pursuit of universal transcendence, while the second one explore the fascination of the West towards China during centuries of exchange and the influence of that ancient culture on designers from Paul Poiret to Yves Saint Laurent.

Much more conceptual is the exhibition scheduled by the Tate Modern in London, which from November 11 to 3 April 2016, it will host the American Alexander Calder, the artist who created the mobile sculptures inspired by the circus and cabaret and who would lead the 2015events in this British art temple along with a retrospective of pop around the world art.

The British Museum in London, one of the oldest and most prestigious one in the world, is giving until April 19 the possibility of knowing stories behind eight mummies including that of a 2-year-old boy and a of a 7-year-old girl who lived in Egypt or Sudan for more than two thousand years.

The Paris Louvre, another of the great temples of art in Europe is preparing Poussin et Dieu for April 2 to June 29, in occasion of the 350 anniversary of this painter death who is considered the most important one of 17^th century in France. He made a personal reflection about God in his works, for which he was labeled as "painter- philosopher" and "painter- poet".

Also considered a philosopher and poet, but related to shapes and space, was also Le Corbusier on whom Paris offers an unpublished retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Pari, from April 29 to August 3, on occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death, as a tribute to this architect and urban planner who revolutionized 20th-century architecture, besides his role as painter and designer.

The jewel of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for the next year will be a great retrospective on Rembrandt’s years of fullness of, from February 12 to May 17, while the Hermitage of Saint Petersburg is dedicating an exhibition to Francis Bacon until March 8.

This proposal covers a wide and diverse range of destinations so that the art lovers can continue their pilgrimage in pursuit of beauty by other "sacred places" like the Vatican museums, the Vienna Kunsthistorisches, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Cairo Museum, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.