Art and Social Change in Spain (1885-1910)

Vicente Cutanda y Toraya, Workers on Strike in Vizcaya, 1882, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Until 22 September and in an almost unprecedented manner, all the exhibition galleries in the Museo del Prado’s Jerónimos building present Art and Social Change in Spain (1885-1910). The exhibition offers a unique opportunity on a scale never previously seen in Spain to learn more about painting’s move towards social themes of a type that had previously been largely absent or only rarely depicted.

The diversity of techniques and creative registers in the almost 300 works that comprise the exhibition - many never previously exhibited - make it possible to illustrate artists’ very wide range of responses to the challenge of representing the transformations taking place in the society their day through aspects of it rarely depicted in art up to that point. These include industrial and women’s work, education, illness and medicine, workplace accidents, prostitution, emigration, poverty and ethnic and social marginalisation, colonialism, strikes, anarchism and demonstrations.

Although the origins of this exhibition project lie in the importance of the Prado's collections of social painting, in itself a reflection of the works created for presentation at the various National Fine Arts Exhibitions, the generosity of almost a hundred public and private lenders means that visitors can see works such as Victims of a Fiesta by Darío de Regoyos, Burial in the Countryside by Pablo Picasso and Study of a Gypsy Woman by Isidre Nonell.