The CORPO permanent collection, housed in Toledo, is made up of works by artists from the historical avant-gardes of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, the so-called peripheral avant-gardes,together with a fine selection of work by contemporary artists from Europe and the United States. It comprises pieces by 171 artists, from famous names to visionaries, includingmany prominent figures such as Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein, Kandinsky, Schlemmer, Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy and Ernst. But, more importantly, and mindful of the educational role that all public museums should fulfil, CORPO showcases a large number of less familiar but equally imperative names such as Joostens, Donas, Peeters, Flouquet, Servranckx, Maes, Eemans.
The avant-gardes represented here reflect the diverse pictorial trends pursued by the most audacious artists of the first half of the 20th century in Flanders and in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe – the so-called ‘peripheral avant-gardes’ – as well as in the United States. The Collection includes Informalist currents (the beginnings of abstraction, Constructivism and Neoplasticism), with the variousforms of abstraction and new realism (neorealism, Novecento, magic realism, lyrical figurativism, New Objectivity, Precisionism) predominating – not forgetting, of course, the poetical currents of Surrealism.