The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu is taking part in the Art and Social Change in Spain exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado with the loan of a work from the FMCMP Collection: Madwoman!, by Jiménez Aranda. The  Masaveu Collection is present in the same show with two loans: La dame à l’aigrette by Anglada Camarasa, and Study of a Gypsy Woman by Isidro Nonell.l

Curated by Javier Barón, chief curator of the Department of Nineteenth Century Painting at the Prado, the exhibition invites visitors to discover the fascinating if relatively short-lived (barely twenty-five years around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) phenomenon of social art. Barón was also the curator of the Masaveu Collection: Spanish Nineteenth-Century Painting. From Goya to Modernism exhibition on display at the FMCMP Madrid Centre between 2019 and 2023.

The show is a unique opportunity to learn how artists depicted the profound social changes that occurred in Spain between 1885 and 1910. The themes chosen to articulate the sections of the exhibition cover different aspects of contemporary life, including some of which have previously received hardly any attention due to their lack of beauty and perception as unseemly, trivial or uninteresting. 

The variety of creative techniques and registers in the almost 300 works that comprise the exhibition, many of them receiving their first public showing on this occasion, illustrate the very different ways in which artists responded to the challenge of representing the transformations taking place in the society of their day. Some of the aspects they cover, such as education and industrial and women’s work, had rarely been depicted in art up to that point.