Catalogue of the exhibition The Fury of Colour. Francisco Iturrino (1864-1924) curated by Lourdes Moreno and Miriam Alzuri.
With this exhibition the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga wishes to pay tribute to Francisco Iturrino (Santander, 1864‒Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1924), one of the leading artists represented in our permanent collection, and to help settle a historical debt: the unfair silencing of a pioneer in Spanish avant-garde art of the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The Fury of Colour is a nomadic artist’s pictorial diary that tells chiefly of his decisive contact with the light and color of the south. This joyful discovery led him to shun the bohemian and symbolist aesthetic of his early years in Belgium and Paris for original paintings which, despite depicting motifs drawn from Spanish folklore, are notable for their vibrant and expressive use of color in tune with Fauvist painting. Iturrino’s main contribution as an artist is this powerful palette in unrestricted paintings of monumental female nudes, exquisite still lifes and exuberant landscapes. His emotive idealization of the south reached a height in the prodigious depiction of the gardens at La Concepción in Málaga.