MADRID.- Fundación Mapfre has presented three new exhibitions to mark the start of the season: Ver Italia y Morir (See Italy and Die); Mirar y ser visto. De Tiziano a Picasso. El retrato en la colección del MASP (See and be Seen. From Tiziano to Picasso. Portraits in the MASP Collection); and La danza de los colores (Dance of Colours), which are open until December 20,2009 in the exhibition halls in Recoletos, 23.

All three are projects undertaken in collaboration with other museums around the world: the Musée d’Orsay Paris, the MASP of São Paulo and the Hamburg Kunsthalle. Each of the three exhibitions offers a different slant on the early years of modernity.

"Ver Italia y Morir" takes visitors on a tour of images of 19th-century Italy. A place not to be missed! The idea behind the exhibition is to show how the 18th-century enlightened “grand tour” ideology is reinvented during a century of class conflict, industrial development and transport revolution, just at a time when Italy becomes closer, not only through drawing artists’ pencils and painters’ brushes, but also through photography. All of this serves to create a portrait of Italy, in which a romantic, poetic image is complemented by a depiction of its archaeological heritage and social strata.

"Mirar y ser visto." De Tiziano a Picasso. El retrato en la colección del MASP brings visitors closer to this genre through 33 masterpieces from the 16th to the 20th centuries. From Tiziano, Velázquez, Goya, Frans Hals and Van Dyck to Corot, Manet, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani and Picasso, the show includes portraits ranging from the solemn, where the power of the subject is emphasised in direct representations of reality, to the modern, where the focus is on the individual and the concept is favoured over any likeness.

Finally, to commemorate the centennial of the Ballets Russes, which played such a distinguished role in spreading avant-garde aesthetics, the MAPFRE FOUNDATION is presenting an important set of drawings of their principal dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, accompanied by contemporaneous works by Frantisek Kupka, Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, Sonia Delaunay-Terk and Alexandra Exter, all of which emphasise the relationship between music and dance and the origins of abstraction.

Alberto Manzano Martos, Chair of the MAPFRE FOUNDATION’s Cultural Institute, and Pablo Jiménez Burillo, its Director, have taken part in the press conference alongside the exhibitions’ curators Guy Cogeval, Chair of the Musée d’Orsay, José Teixeira Coelho, Head Curator at the MASP, and Hubertus Gaßner, Director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle.