The Collection of María Josefa Huarte, donated to the University of Navarra in 2008 and origin of the Museum, leaves for the first time and travels to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao, where it will be exhibited until October 12.

This summer, thanks to the collaboration between the two institutions and the support of Petronor, the public will be able to enjoy one of the most eloquent examples of private collecting in our cultural environment, the María Josefa Huarte Collection. Made up of 47 works -of which 40 are now on display at the Bilbao museum- important groups of works by Jorge Oteiza, Pablo Palazuelo and Antoni Tàpies stand out, both for the quality of the pieces and for the way in which they represent the evolution of each of these three creators. Together with them, and up to a total of 19 artists, the collection includes other important figures, such as Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Vasili Kandinsky, Eduardo Chillida, Eusebio Sempere or Manuel Millares. The collection was donated in 2008 to the University of Navarra, thus giving rise to the creation of the museum attached to this institution, designed by architect Rafael Moneo (Tudela, Navarra, 1937) and inaugurated in January 2015. 

A UNIQUE COLLECTION

Member of a prominent family of Navarrese businessmen based in Madrid, whose artistic patronage promoted some of the most innovative proposals of their time -among them, Oteiza's Propósito experimental, the magazine Nueva Forma, the Alea group or the Encuentros de Pamplona of 1972-, María Josefa Huarte Beaumont (Pamplona, 1927-2015) began her collection in the early fifties favoring geometric and informalist abstract tendencies. The uniqueness of her collection is inscribed within the collecting work that, in parallel, her father and brothers developed, although María Josefa followed her personal taste and her interest in certain authors and works, training herself in a self-taught way, going to galleries and artists' studios.

The María Josefa Huarte Collection. Museo Universidad de Navarra is made up of almost fifty works (paintings and sculptures, above all) by nineteen artists and offers a panoramic view of some of the aesthetic proposals that contributed to the renewal of Spanish art in the fifties and sixties, such as geometric abstraction, informalism, material and gestural painting or kinetic art.

In this sense, he understood abstraction as an aesthetic path towards modernity and, at the same time, as an inner and personal itinerary of spirituality. This explains his harmony with the work of Palazuelo who, following in the wake of some of the first abstractionists, such as Kandinsky, claimed the ability of art to generate images and metaphors capable of revealing the ineffable, what is hidden from our eyes.

Along with Tàpies and Oteiza, Palazuelo is one of the artists best represented in the collection, all three through exceptional pieces that allow us to reconstruct an important part of their respective artistic careers. A selection of the main works that make up the legacy of Maria Josefa Huarte to Museo Universidad de Navarra is now presented exceptionally in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum through a montage that proposes to the visitor a dialogue with the works from new formal and conceptual relationships.