Curators: Cristina Mendoza, Assistant Director of Collections; Mercè Doñate, Head of the Modern Art Collection; Francesc Quílez, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints  and Elena Llorens, Conservation Assistant of the Modern Art Collection.

The French Painter Gustave Courbet rocked the art world in the 19th century. Through his brush, reality entered painting: Realism was born.

With the aim of tracing his footsteps in this country, the MNAC is exhibiting a selection of his most outstanding works, most of which are being shown in Spain for the first time. The exhibition reveals Courbet's influence on Catalan painting in the period, most of all through the work of Ramon Martí Alsina, the man responsible for the renewal of painting and who introduced Realism to the Spanish art scene.

It is an ambitious exhibition, produced by the Museu Nacional, that invites the public to gain greater in-depth knowledge of Realism and at the same time discover its precedents and its legacy, in a show that deliberately goes beyond the temporal limits of this movement:
from the Spanish Golden Age, with paintings by Murillo, Ribera and Velázquez, to contemporary art, through the work of Antoni Tàpies, one of the most universal Catalan artists.
 

Exhibition catalogue.

With the collaboration of Abertis.