MADRID -- To kick off Madrid's exhibition season, the Prado Museum has a stellar opening act: Rembrandt will be headlining the show, but he will have to compete with a full season of 20th-century masters, art from India and raw-edged photography scattered about the capital's other major art venues.

Rembrandt
Rembrandt, Painter of Stories’ exhibition of 30 paintings and five engravings from various European and American museums will be showcased in nine halls of the museum from 15 October to 6 January.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) is sparsely represented in the Prado, his only signed work there being the Artemisa of 1634.

Alejandro Vergara, the museum's curator of Flemish and Northern Schools painting, has organised a peculiar anthology from different periods of Rembrandt's life, focusing on the development of his narrative work. It also allows us to look at Rembrandt's narrative work beside comparable works by some of his principal masters (Titian and Rubens) and the contrast with Velázquez.

Works of his younger period include St. Peter and St. Paul, on loan from the Victoria 

National Gallery in Melbourne. Later works include Samson and Delilah from the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt and Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Of the most personal phase of his career - the years before his death in 1669 - there are several characteristic works, including the Bathsheba at her Bath, on loan from the Louvre. 

Vanguardist movements of early 20th century

On 7 October, the Thyssen Foundation and Caja Madrid will open an exhibition that reviews the vanguardist movements of the early 20th century: 1914! The Vanguard and the Great War. With 220 works, this exhibition will show the birth and death of the great movements of the period: Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Abstractionism et al.

Indian art 

La Casa Encendida will precede this year's Arco art festival in offering a show, starting on 21 October, of four important Indian artists: Sheela Gowda, Amar Kanwar, N.S. Harsha and Anup Mathew Thomas. Combining different forms (installation, video, painting and photography) they deal with the problems of modern India: violence, emigration, poverty and the clash between modernity and traditionalism.

Other events at Reina Sofía
On 15 October, the Reina Sofía Museum will open with the first major retrospective of the US artist Nancy Spero, a pioneer of feminist art, before the show travels to the Macba in Barcelona and the CAAC in Seville.

Early in November the Reina Sofía will fill nine halls with a retrospective devoted to the Spanish photographer Alberto García Alix, and early in January the season's feature show will begin: the first anthological exhibition devoted to the sculptor Julio González.

text: El Pais / Angeles Garcia / Expatica 2008