Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

The collection's strength is twofold and traceable directly to its double origin: a genuinely deep holding of Basque art, described by the museum's own history as the most complete artist list of its kind, built from the same early 20th-century civic patronage that founded the museum itself, alongside old-master and modern European painting bought through named, documented transactions - the 1919 exhibition purchases, Echevarrieta's 1919 gift, the 1924 and 1990s old-master acquisitions - rather than through inherited dynastic or colonial-era collecting. Few mid-sized European museums can trace as much of their founding collection to specific, dated purchase decisions by named civic bodies.

The museum now on Plaza Eduardo Chillida did not start as one institution. Bilbao's industrial and shipbuilding bourgeoisie, prosperous at the turn of the 20th century and wanting a cultural institution to match, backed the founding of the Museum of Fine Arts on 5 October 1908, a joint civic effort involving the town council, the provincial council and a group of artists. It opened its doors on 8 February 1914, installed in three rooms fitted out by the municipal architect Ricardo Bastida inside the former Atxuri Civil Hospital, by then repurposed as a School of Arts and Crafts. The painter Manuel Losada became its first director. The collection, based on deposits from the Provincial Council, the City Council, the state and several local institutions, along with private donations, grew to around 250 works before the building proved both too small and too poorly located to draw visitors.

A second, separate institution followed. In 1922 a motion to the Provincial Council proposed a dedicated Museum of Modern Art, built around works acquired at Bilbao's 1919 international exhibition together with new donations; it opened on 25 October 1924 under the painter Aurelio Arteta, with 137 works, in rooms attached to the Provincial Council's own building. For over a decade Bilbao ran two separate public art museums, born of the same civic impulse but organisationally distinct, each too cramped for its own growing collection.

The immediate cause of the Museum of Modern Art's founding was a single exhibition. In 1919 the Provincial Council, chaired by a commission under Ramon de la Sota, staged the First International Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in Bilbao, bringing in work by Picasso, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Maurice Denis and Mary Cassatt, among others - a delayed but decisive exposure of the Bilbao art world to the international avant-garde, a year after Robert and Sonia Delaunay had already shown there at the Association of Basque Artists' invitation. The Provincial Council bought at that exhibition Cassatt's Woman Seated with a Child in Arms and Gauguin's Washerwomen in Arles, at the time the first works by either painter in any Spanish public collection; Ramon de la Sota separately bought and donated Zuloaga's Portrait of the Countess Mathieu de Noailles. That purchased group, plus later donations and acquisitions, became the founding nucleus the new Museum of Modern Art opened around five years later. The same year, 1919, the Bilbao businessman Horacio Echevarrieta donated Martin de Vos's Abduction of Europe to the older Museum of Fine Arts, a gift brokered by the Basque sculptor and art dealer Francisco Durrio, who had lived for decades in Montmartre's Bateau-Lavoir, worked in ceramics alongside Picasso, and stayed close to Paul Gauguin - one direct, named thread connecting Bilbao's museum-founding generation to the Paris art world it was trying to catch up with.

The Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 and suspended both museums' development immediately. Facing the risk of air raids, the Museum of Fine Arts moved its collection into the Uribitarte warehouses; around thirty works, mostly by Basque artists, went instead to decorate the offices of the Basque Government's Presidency, provisionally housed at the Carlton Hotel. At the start of 1937 most of the Museum of Modern Art's holdings were shipped out of the country to France by sea. Franco's troops took Bilbao in June 1937 and brought the city's institutions under new control; efforts to recover both museums' collections, and to bring the works exiled in France back to Spain, began soon after and were completed by the end of 1939. The sources consulted for this record describe that return as accomplished but do not itemise whether anything sent to France, or into the Uribitarte storage, failed to come back.

Even before the war ended, the problem of housing two collections in one place was already being solved on paper: in 1938 the architects Fernando Urrutia and Gonzalo Cardenas were commissioned to design a single new building for both museums, on a neoclassical plan the museum's own history explicitly compares to Juan de Villanueva's 1785 design for the Prado. Approved by the provincial and city authorities in February 1939, the new Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao opened on 17 June 1945, merging the two collections into one address de facto, though the administrative merger of the two institutions was not completed until 1969. The building was declared a Historical-Artistic Monument in 1962.

By the 1960s that single building was already too small again. A first extension, designed by Alvaro Libano and Ricardo Beascoa after a tour of European museums, opened in 1970: an L-shaped, glass-fronted structure influenced by Mies van der Rohe, distinct enough architecturally from the 1945 building that in 2010 it was added to the international register of Modern Movement architectural heritage in its own right. A further renovation in 2001, led by the architect Luis Maria Uriarte with Rafael Moneo and Norman Foster on the selecting jury, physically linked the two buildings and consolidated visitor services that had previously been scattered piecemeal through both.

The museum is, as of 2026, mid-construction. A 2019 international competition for a further expansion and renovation, run under the motto Agravitas, was won by Foster + Partners working with the Basque architect Luis Maria Uriarte, beating fifty-seven competing teams; the stated aim is to restore the 1945 building's original entrance to public use and add roughly 6,700 square metres of new construction, a new BBK Museoa exhibition space of over 2,000 square metres, and improved accessibility, layered respectfully over the existing 1945 and 1970 buildings rather than replacing them. The first stone was laid in November 2022 and the first structural pillar in January 2024. Rather than close during construction, the museum kept a reduced but genuine public programme running throughout: through most of 2025 in the 1945 building, then from October 2025 in the renovated 1970 building, entered from Plaza Eduardo Chillida, with the permanent collection shown in a rotating format the museum calls BBKateak. For the duration of the works, admission is free.

That decision appears to have worked on its own terms. The museum's director, Miguel Zugaza, told the regional newspaper Deia in January 2026 that 2025 had been 'a very special situation' precisely because the institution had chosen not to close, and the museum recorded 211,848 visitors that year - a 2 percent rise on 2024 and its best total in six years - which he presented as validation of the effort to keep the doors open through a major building project rather than as an unrelated success. A visitor arriving expecting the museum's usual 1945 facade will instead be redirected to a different building's entrance, on a different square, for as long as the Agravitas project runs.

Coverage of the museum in 2025-2026 centres less on individual visitor sentiment than on the fact that it has stayed open and kept growing its audience through a major construction project, which the museum's own director treats as the year's central achievement rather than a side note.