Raphael, Rubens, Manet, Van Gogh, Chagall, Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keeffe—the names of these celebrated masters of Western art are known to nearly everyone. Now, alongside them, seventy works by nearly seventy other masters are on view to Chinese audiences during the Dragon Boat Festival holiday in “Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” the new exhibition at Shanghai’s Museum of Art Pudong.
More than 5,000 people reportedly visited on the exhibition’s opening day. The works include several treasures from the Thyssen Museum in Spain, and every piece is being shown in China for the first time.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. “We have brought nearly 10 percent of our collection to Shanghai. This is unprecedented. These are the finest works in the collection—they have literally been taken from the walls of our own museum. Our curators were not very happy about it,” Guillermo Solana, the Thyssen’s artistic director, told us with a laugh.
Just before the opening, we spoke with Li Minkun, director of the Museum of Art Pudong, and Solana about the exhibition’s masterworks and its highlights. Raphael and workshop, Portrait of a Young Man, circa 1518–1519. The exhibition is divided into 8 sections, spanning the Renaissance to postwar America. Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man is the first major work visitors encounter along the route.
Raphael died young, at the age of 37. This was painted in the final year of his life. As one of the three great masters of the Renaissance, his place in art history is unquestioned. The man in pink is a young aristocrat. The way his long neck turns toward us has an almost feminine beauty, lending the portrait an air of ease. There is a softness to him, a sweetness, an androgynous beauty.
“The way he purses his lips is like the sexy pose people make when they take selfies now—very seductive,” Solana joked. Against the painting’s gentle pinks and finely controlled light, the work has a misty, almost veiled atmosphere. We noticed that the label identified it as “Raphael and workshop.” Solana explained that, late in Raphael’s career, many assistants handled the preliminary work in the studio, after which Raphael completed the details himself. He simply did not have enough time to do everything.
Peter Paul Rubens, Venus and Cupid, circa 1606–1611. The Venus and Cupid in the second room prompts an involuntary sigh. Venus is wrapped in a white silk dress, shown in profile at a 45-degree angle; the white pearl bracelet at her wrist makes her skin appear even paler and more translucent. Behind her, Cupid holds up a mirror reflecting the other half of her profile. As she gazes at herself, we are given a fuller view of Venus.
Peter Paul Rubens, Venus and Cupid (detail), circa 1606–1611. In the right half of the composition, Cupid has placed at his feet the bow, arrows, and quiver that can awaken love. His wings also signify love’s fleeting nature. The composition recalls works by Renaissance masters such as Titian and Veronese. The painting is Rubens’s copy of a lost work of the same title by his idol, Titian. Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael, Road through Fields near the Zuiderzee, circa 1660–1662. Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael, Road through Fields near the Zuiderzee (detail), circa 1660–1662. Another painting in the second gallery is a signature example of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.
One of its leading figures, Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael, uses the sky in this modestly sized painting to set off a series of vivid elements: a village, trees, windmills, pedestrians and cattle, as well as a winding road and streams. The scene has the quiet, far-reaching feeling of a pastoral idyll. Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), View of the Grand Canal from San Vio, circa 1723–1724. “Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Canaletto’s painting appears just inside the entrance to the third room.
At first glance, it is an eighteenth-century Venice in full prosperity. Look closer, however, and the painting yields a cross-section of city life and social class: a laundress carrying a pole, idlers sheltering beside a wall, boatmen at work, and judges and aristocrats in wigs just emerging from city hall. The view is of the Grand Canal on the way to St. Mark’s Square. The Barbarigo Palace stands to the right, the Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Grande to the left; in the distance are the dome of Santa Maria della Salute and the Customs House Museum.
Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), View of the Grand Canal from San Vio (detail), circa 1723–1724. Yet we can also clearly see the mottled, peeling walls and the ragged sails of some of the boats. This is a true portrait of Venetian society—a crucible in which prosperity and hardship, social rank and decline, are felt within the closest of distances. Gustave Courbet, The Stream, 1866. In the fourth room, the exhibition enters more familiar territory: French Realism and Impressionism.
Many visitors linger for a long time before Courbet’s painting, reluctant to leave. It depicts a stream near Ornans, France. The vegetation on both banks is thick with green trees, while sunlight filters through the branches and falls in shifting patches across the water.
“This was actually Courbet’s birthplace, the place of his earliest memories. He spent his infancy, childhood, and youth here. The painting is a kind of longing for and tribute to his native land. It is not merely visual; it is almost tactile. The artist is inviting viewers to enter this place—his homeland.”
“So Solana explained.”
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. The composition is vertical, with no visible horizon, creating the sensation of wanting to move deeper into the scene—an effect that even resonates with the Chinese literati-painting concept of “deep distance.” This was extremely rare in Western landscape painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Courbet repeatedly insisted that he was “anti-academic, progressive, and social,” and this painting makes the point.
A small sliver of sky peeking through in the upper left is a stroke of genius; the composition seems able to breathe. Édouard Manet, The Equestrienne, circa 1882. Manet’s The Equestrienne is, in a sense, an old internet celebrity. It is also one of the exhibition’s major works, painted shortly before Manet’s death. In that sense, the painting was never entirely finished, though it is essentially a complete work.
As an Impressionist painter, Manet depicts a spirited modern woman of the nineteenth century. She is unlike the traditional woman in a ball gown with a sweeping skirt. She wears the black top hat more often associated with men, dresses entirely in black, and carries earth-toned leather gloves. She is confident and resolute—a symbol of feminism’s rise.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. At the same time, as a modern woman she is fashionable and elegant. Her black dress is still shaped by a corset, and she holds a flower in one hand. The figure combines masculine and feminine traits.
“In 2011, the Musée d’Orsay in France held a major Manet exhibition, and this painting was used on the poster. The whole of Paris was covered with The Equestrienne. Everyone remembers it vividly.”
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Few people can have failed to hear the name of Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch master of Post-Impressionism. This classic work, with its blue-and-yellow palette, was painted in Arles, in the south of France, in midsummer 1888. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh wrote: “On the Rhône, a large coal barge is moored at the quay.
“From above, everything is wet with rain and sparkling; the water is a yellowish white, covered with a pearl-gray veil; the sky is pale violet, with a touch of orange in the west; the town is violet. On the barge, poor workers in dirty blue-and-white clothes move back and forth, unloading the cargo. This is completely a scene by Hokusai.” Vincent van Gogh, The Coal Heavers, 1888. “He said he had watched workers unloading coal from barges along the river, and painted the scene twice, in two different works.
“One is privately owned; the other is this painting of ours, which makes it exceptionally rare,” Solana told us. William Merritt Chase, Girl in a Japanese Costume, circa 1887. In the fifth room, Chase’s Girl in a Japanese Costume represents the “Japonisme” that swept Europe and the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, as ukiyo-e prints appeared in large numbers across Europe. This is a little-known strand of American Impressionism from the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, with Chase as one of its pioneers and leading figures.
“The painting depicts one of the earliest American women to wear a kimono. She is surrounded by imported Japanese objects: a screen, a low bamboo chair, and Japanese prints. People at the time were crazy about it. They thought everything Japanese was extremely cool and beautiful,” Solana said. Marc Chagall, Madonna of the Village, 1938–1942. “Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Europe in the twentieth century remained shrouded in the terror of war, and the subject of the sixth gallery is inseparable from that history.
Chagall’s paintings often appear brightly colored, sweet, and dreamlike. The woman in the white wedding dress is his wife, Bella, holding a child in an image of the Madonna and Child. Singing and playing angels surround them, along with a cow flying through the air while playing a violin. The scene is set near a small village. It looks like an ordinary rural wedding, but the painting carries deeper implications: its lightness and pleasure may be an escape from a brutal reality.
Marc Chagall, Madonna of the Village (detail), 1938–1942. “In November 1938, the Nazis attacked synagogues, and many people were massacred. As a Jew, Chagall briefly took refuge in a small town in Provence, France, to escape the Nazi army, and then began this work. The painting therefore represents both the sorrow and melancholy of its era and a measure of hope for the future,” Solana told us.
Georgia O’Keeffe, From the Plains II, 1954. Seeing O’Keeffe’s painting, our first reaction was surprise. We know her flowers and plants, but we had never seen her paint the plains and the earth. There is something appealing in this unadorned wildness, as though we were glimpsing an unknown side of the master. O’Keeffe’s painting is passionate and expansive; her fascination with light gives the work a continuous, fluid vitality.
The setting sun burns in the painting, and the horizon is sharply visible. Through the canvas, we seem to feel the heat of Amarillo, Texas, and the desert plain stretching without end.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong. Georgia O’Keeffe, From the Plains II (detail), 1954. In a letter to her dealer, she wrote: “These colors just came squeezed out of the tubes, from red and orange to lemon yellow, and it astonished me. I didn’t know what it would become.” Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau: Street with Horse-Drawn Carriage, 1908. We also found several particularly intriguing paintings in the galleries.
They are indeed works by masters, yet they prompt the question: “Did they paint this? Was the label put in the wrong place?” Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923, stereoscopic animation display. The Kandinsky we know painted abstractions—works expressing music and his synesthesia, never the concrete world. But this painting, close to the style of late Impressionism, with its Gauguin-like and almost charming houses along a street, is actually one of his very early studies.
“This was Kandinsky’s basic style before his transformation. The colors are especially bright and lively, but few people know about these works. We call them ‘hidden gems’: they have distinctive qualities, but have not yet been discovered by the public,” said Li Minkun, director of the Museum of Art Pudong. Henri Matisse, Yellow Flowers, 1902. Beside it, a quieter floral painting with something of the feel of watercolor also startled us: it, too, was by Matisse.
We know Matisse as a leading figure of Fauvism, a painter whose work seems always to open out in broad gestures and saturated color. Matisse, Dance II, 1909–1910. The nearly introspective realism and delicate colors of these flowers date from before Matisse turned toward his “wild” style. It is a reminder that, before becoming a master, even a master must spend a long time searching for an artistic language of his own. Fernand Léger, The Disks, 1918. “Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. In the Cubist gallery, Léger’s brightly colored The Disks combines the real and the surreal, differing markedly from the works for which he is usually known.
Like many other artists of his generation, Léger enlisted during the First World War. His direct experience of the war had a profound effect on his mental state, and after his discharge he required a long period of psychological recovery at a Paris hospital. Fernand Léger, Country Gathering, 1954. This led him away from the abstraction he had favored and back toward the real things of everyday life. In The Disks, it is not difficult to detect the theme of war, the shadow of industrial machinery, and bright blocks of color that also suggest flags in motion.
Léger’s Cubist period was in fact quite brief, which makes this painting, reflecting his state of mind early in his career, especially valuable.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Major-master exhibitions are now appearing across China. What makes this new exhibition at the Museum of Art Pudong distinctive? First, it spans an unusually long period and presents a broad range of movements. As the title’s “six centuries” indicates, the oldest work brought from the Thyssen was made around 1464, while the latest dates to 1980—a true span of 600 years.
This is also a curatorial project shaped by the strengths and character of the Thyssen’s collection, one of Spain’s three major art museums.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. “Our collection has fewer than 800 works. We do not have many works from each movement, but we cover a great many movements, and the timeline is exceptionally complete. We have representative works by all the masters,” Solana told us. The 70 paintings on view amount to a concentrated essence of Western art history, encompassing nearly every major movement: the Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, the Russian avant-garde, American Modernism, Art Informel, Pop Art, and American Realism, among others. A history of Western painting unfolds before us in its most concise form.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Second, the exhibition’s presentation is unusually inventive. Instead of leaving visitors to search through a crowd of works for the highlights identified in a guidebook, the Museum of Art Pudong has made the key works “visual”: each is set against a raised, colored backdrop, with a signature reproduced from the artist’s painting by cutting it out digitally.
“Do you find the colors of the backdrops especially harmonious? They were extracted from the paintings themselves. The pink behind Raphael, for example, comes from the young man’s clothes. Canaletto’s backdrop uses the blue of the Grand Canal in the painting,” Li Minkun, director of the Museum of Art Pudong, told us.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Georgia O’Keeffe’s large-scale orange painting of the American plains is the only work whose backdrop uses a separately selected color.
“Because the entire painting is orange-red, we chose an earth-related color to set off the breadth of the Great Plains,” Li Minkun said.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” entrance to the exhibition galleries, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. At the entrance, a complete 600-year timeline allows visitors to see Western art movements and periods arranged clearly along a single vertical line, tracing their development through time.
“In fact, 80% of our visitors are not art specialists. In the past, many people came to exhibitions and wondered, ‘When was this movement? What style corresponds to the period of the painting we just saw?’ Now we have written the dates and movements directly into the display to make it easier for everyone to understand,” Li Minkun said.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. The galleries are also spacious, with enough room between works that the exhibition never feels cramped. Solana, the Thyssen’s artistic director, mentioned more than once in interviews that the galleries at the Museum of Art Pudong are 4 times the size of those at his museum, and that the lighting is among the most advanced in the industry.
“Do you know? I landed here 10 days ago, saw the Museum of Art Pudong, and compared it with our own museum. I was genuinely jealous!” He pulled an exaggerated face.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Works and corresponding labels in the exhibition, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. We also noticed that every major work is accompanied by an “extra-large” label. In addition to a timeline, each includes close-up views and explanations of 4 significant details. This is an experiment other museums have not attempted before.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Third, the exhibition offers unusual works by familiar masters. Alongside canonical examples from Western art history, we see works made before these artists became masters, as well as very late works. Their styles can differ sharply from the masters we think we know. When we spoke with Li Minkun, director of the Museum of Art Pudong, we asked why the exhibition had opened at this particular moment. She explained that the national college and middle-school entrance examinations had just ended, graduation season and summer vacation were approaching, and the museum wanted as many people as possible to see the exhibition. For students, she said, it could also be a good chance to relax.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. The Museum of Art Pudong has gone to considerable lengths for this exhibition. The installation period was extremely short. Transporting and coordinating so many important works across continents required enormous effort and time, yet less than 1 year passed between the beginning of negotiations with the Thyssen and the exhibition’s final presentation.
“Our changeover period was especially short—only 31 days. People in the industry thought it was unbelievable. Solana joked that if anything happened to the works during transport, he would come over on the cargo plane with them,” Li Minkun said with a laugh.
“Masters of Six Centuries: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza,” exhibition view, Museum of Art Pudong, 2023. Speaking of the difficulties of installation, the lighting adjustments were a challenge in addition to the tight schedule.
“Because the works span such a broad range of periods, many use different kinds of glass. Some have acrylic, some ordinary glass, and some no glass at all. To give every painting the best possible presentation—without reflections or anything that interferes with the viewer’s experience—we put in a great deal of work,” Li Minkun said. She repeatedly emphasized that, although the Museum of Art Pudong’s galleries are among the best in the industry, she did not want the exhibition to feel remote or intelligible only to a small group of professionals.
“We have always wanted to be ‘a museum for the people’: a place everyone can understand and find beautiful. Children should enjoy it, and it should suit all ages—a place people want to drop by simply because they have some free time.” Photo courtesy of the Museum of Art Pudong (MAP).