For the first time in two years, the works of one of Spain’s most celebrated painters, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, are back on public display at his namesake museum in Madrid. The Sorolla Museum partially reopened this week, boasting a nearly 20,000-square-foot expansion. That includes new exhibition spaces, an auditorium and storage for the museum’s 1,394 paintings and roughly 5,000 drawings by Sorolla—the world’s largest collection of his works.
The museum opened to the public in 1932, after his widow’s death. The home makes for an enchanting space. Since the 1930s, the museum has undertaken partial measures to adapt to increased visitation, including redesigning exhibition halls and installing climate control to protect Sorolla’s works.
That changed four years ago, when the museum began an ambitious overhaul and expansion project costing some €13 million (roughly $14.5 million), according to Todo Alicante’s Rocío Mendoza. Work on adjacent properties bought by the Spanish Ministry of Culture began in 2022. The main museum shut its doors in 2024.
The expanded galleries are now open, although the house and studio will remain closed for years to come. But the goal is to recover its original essence,” Valera tells Todo Alicante. The expansion was built with the same architectural spirit as Sorolla’s home studio—an ample use of wood and emphasis on natural light—giving it a cohesive feel with the larger museum.
It also lives up to Sorolla’s nickname, “the master of light,” which he earned for his paintings of sparkling beaches and other outdoor scenes. In 1909, Sorolla visited the White House to paint U.S. President William Howard Taft’s portrait, making him the only Spanish artist who has portrayed an American president.
The expanded museum has an interior courtyard and garden roofs that designers hope will help the space blend in to its residential surroundings. A glass wall in the expanded building, which currently frames a view of the under-construction studio home, will later be converted into a connective threshold that physically and conceptually bridges the museum’s past and present. The reopened museum’s first temporary exhibition, “Behind the Artist’s House: The Architecture of the Sorolla Museum, 1905–2026,” debuted this month and runs through early January.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
