Frommer's Review
Until around 1985, the contents of this museum virtually overflowed the premises of a legendary villa near Lugano, Switzerland. One of the most frequently visited sites of Switzerland, the collection had been laboriously amassed over a period of about 60 years by the Thyssen-Bornemisza family, scions of a century-old shipping, banking, mining, and chemical fortune with roots in Holland, Germany, and Hungary. Experts had proclaimed it as one of the world's most extensive and valuable privately owned collections of paintings, rivaled only by the legendary holdings of Queen Elizabeth II.
For tax and insurance reasons, and because the collection had outgrown the boundaries of the lakeside villa that contained it, the works were discreetly marketed in the early 1980s to the world's major museums. Amid endless intrigue, a litany of glamorous supplicants from eight different nations came calling. Among them were Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles; trustees of the Getty Museum in Malibu, California; the president of West Germany; the duke of Badajoz, brother-in-law of King Carlos II; even emissaries from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida -- all hoping to acquire the collection for their respective countries or entities.
Eventually, thanks partly to the lobbying by Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza's fourth wife, a Spanish-born beauty (and former Miss Spain) named Carmen Tita Cervera, the collection was awarded to Spain for $350 million. Controversies over the public cost of the acquisition raged for months. Despite the brouhaha, various estimates have placed the value of this collection between $1 billion and $3 billion.
To house the collection, an 18th-century building adjacent to the Prado, the Villahermosa Palace, was retrofitted with the appropriate lighting and security devices, and renovated at a cost of $45 million. Rooms are arranged numerically so that by following the order of the various rooms (nos. 1-48, spread out over three floors), a logical sequence of European painting can be traced from the 13th through the 20th centuries. The nucleus of the collection consists of 700 world-class paintings. They include works by, among others, El Greco, Velázquez, Dürer, Rembrandt, Watteau, Canaletto, Caravaggio, Hals, Memling, and Goya.
Unusual among the world's great art collections because of its eclecticism, the Thyssen group also contains goodly numbers of 19th- and 20th-century paintings by many of the notable French Impressionists, as well as works by Picasso, Sargent, Kirchner, Nolde, and Kandinsky -- artists whose previous absence in Spanish museums had become increasingly obvious.
In addition to European paintings, major American works can also be viewed here, including paintings by Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Robert Rauschenberg, Stuart Davis, and Roy Lichtenstein. There is also an agreeable and moderately priced cafeteria and restaurant on-site.
In 2004 an additional new exhibition opened in an extension occupying the site of two mansions (one the former Palace of Goyeneche) on adjoining Marqués de Cubas street. Known as the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, it occupies two floors, with Salas A to H on the second floor and Salas I to P on the first. The latter includes sculptures by Rodin, Fauvism, North American and German Impressionism, Post Impressionism, and Early Avant-Gardes of the 20th century. Among the standouts are works by Braque (Marina a l'Estaque) and Picasso (Los Segadores). The second floor display contains 17th- to 19th-century paintings by Italian, Dutch, and Flemish artists. Realism and Early Impressionism are the main themes. Salas E and F feature some magnificent North American landscapes.
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