When Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza acquired a watercolour by Emil Nolde in May 1961 he initiated a change of direction in collecting by the Thyssen family. While during the inter-war period his father, Henrich Thyssen, had assembled a remarkable collection of Old Masters, between the 1960s and 1990s the Baron was extremely active as a collector of the principal 20th century art movements, among which German Expressionism occupied a key position.
In 1993 the Spanish State acquired most of the Thyssen collection and a significant selection of German Expressionist art - a school previously almost absent from Spanish collections - thus passed into the possession of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. For the first time in decades, the exhibition German Expressionism from the Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection now reunites those works with the group of Expressionist paintings that remained with the Baron’s wife, Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, and his children.
