- Dates: February 11 – May 22, 2022
- Curated by Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d´Art Moderne de Paris in cooperation with Hélène Leroy, curator of the Musée d´Art Moderne de Paris, and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, curator of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
- Exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris Musées
- Sponsored by the BBVA Foundation
- The audacious freedom of fauvist and cubist artists at the onset of these two movements in the early 20th century was considered scandalous as it revolutionized traditional representation of portraiture, landscape, and still-life.
- The section entitled ‘Rendezvous in Paris’ features figurative painters and sculptors who actively contributed to the blossoming of a new artistic scene in Paris during the interwar period.
- Surrealism championed the irrational, the revolutionary, and the liberation of the mind, and its ideas were integrated across all fields of artistic creation and heralded new artistic and technical inventions.
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao present From Fauvism to Surrealism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris , an exhibition sponsored by the BBVA Foundation that presents a selection of nearly seventy masterpieces by significant artists that illustrates the history of the MAM collection while offering an overview of the avant-garde artistic movements that flourished in Paris during the first decades of the 20th century.
The MAM was built on the occasion of the historic Exposition Internationale (1937) as a home to the collections of modern and contemporary art of the city of Paris, which expanded rapidly in the years following major acquisitions of works by important artists of the Parisian art scene, only later to become a formal museum in 1961. Patrons were an integral source of support for this project, especially Dr. Maurice Girardin, whose museum bequest of 1953 became the nucleus for the collection of modern masters, including the Fauves, Cubists, representatives of the School of Paris and French Masters.