The Gustavo de Maeztu Museum opens the exhibition “Daniel Vázquez Díaz and new painting in Spain. Fundación MAPFRE Collections”.

In collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, the Gustavo de Maeztu Museum presents the exhibition “Daniel Vázquez Díaz and the new painting in Spain. Fundación MAPFRE Collections”.

From 4 July to 28 September 2025, the Gustavo de Maeztu Museum, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, is presenting an exhibition dedicated to the work of Daniel Vázquez Díaz, a fundamental artist in the development of modern Spanish art, in the temporary exhibition hall.
The work of Daniel Vázquez Díaz (Aldea de Río Tinto, now Nerva, 1882 – Madrid, 1969) is at the heart of the debate between tradition and modernity in Spain in the early decades of the 20th century.
Between 1906 and 1918, during a lengthy stay in Paris, his painting came closer to Cézanne’s concept of structure, without renouncing the themes of Hispanic folklore. In the French capital he made contact with Spanish artists living there, such as Ignacio Zuloaga, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, among others. He then immersed himself in the work of Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir through the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard and became friends with Henri Barbusse and the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, whom he considered his true master.

t was precisely in Paris that the artist developed two of his most characteristic genres, landscape and portraiture, and it was there, influenced by these artists, that he began to assimilate a certain personal, avant-garde style known as tempered cubism.
Once back in Spain, Vázquez Díaz became one of the representatives of what intellectuals called ‘new art’. Art nouveau is a style born of the mixture of national native genres and the modern genres that artists like Vázquez Díaz brought from outside the country,
.This mixture, added to the personal style of each painter, generates what is known as new art.
This trend was the result of the desire for renewal that many artists of different orientations had in Spain in the first decades of the 20th century. As a result of the new art, other genres were born, such as ultraism, which were painted for the first time in Spain and in which Vázquez Díaz also took part.

This was how most of the protagonists themselves called the process of linking the Spanish visual arts with the international Modern Movement of the first decades of the 20th century. Daniel Vázquez Díaz was one of the great representatives of this diverse and heterogeneous art.
His painting, which has been described as tempered cubism, did not break with the past, but rather drew from it to be reinterpreted with a new sensibility in a modern key, as can be seen in the work on display at the Museo Gustavo de Maeztu.
The exhibition reviews his career and takes a broad look at the artist’s life, in which we can see portraits that continue the tradition of the Golden Age, with special emphasis on the artist’s relationship with the most innovative trends in the plastic arts that developed both in Paris, where he lived for twelve years, and in Spain on his return.

A total of 30 works make up “Daniel Vázquez Díaz and New Painting in Spain. Fundación MAPFRE Collections”. The exhibition includes portraits, landscapes, figurative, impressionist and cubist works, Vázquez Díaz was a multifaceted artist who did not pigeonhole himself and who covered a wide range of genres.Not only that, but throughout the exhibition you can see works done in pencil on paper, oil on canvas, board or cardboard, ink and tempera, graphite and blur on paper and even watercolour, exceptionally modern for their time.
The Museum is open from Tuesday to Saturday from 9:00 am to 1:30 pm and from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Sundays and public holidays the opening hours are from 11:00 to 14:00. Admission is free.