The birth of the MAXAM Collection goes back to 1899. Twenty-five years after MAXAM was founded by Alfred Nobel in 1872 as a manufacturer of blasting products for mining, quarrying and construction, our company embarked on a new activity: shooting and hunting sport shotshells.
It was a wider and more popular sector into which the commercial message had to be introduced by a range of means. At that time, the Company had two headquarters, in both Bilbao and Paris. In the French capital, the use of billboard advertising was all the rage, and it was perhaps there that the idea that led to the MAXAM Collection started to gestate. At a time in which there were no social networks or internet, no television or color press, a poster used to front a calendar was a good method of promoting the Company's products every day of the year.
Paintings ordered to illustrate the...calendar
The same method has always been used to illustrate the poster: commission a prestigious artist of critical and public renown to paint an exclusive piece of artwork for us with the purpose of being reproduced as a calendar. A tradition we started in 1899 for our 1900 calendar, and which we have repeated every year since.
What do we ask the artist for? The image to be figurative, to have in mind that it is going to be reproduced as a poster, and its content to be related to our activities. In addition to those we have already mentioned, involving blasting products and services, and sporting shotshells, these also include products and services for the defence industry, and key raw materials for nitro-chemical activities.
Among the collection's artists are some of the most representative figures of 20th and 21st-century Spanish painting: Arturo Mélida, Cecilio Plá, Manuel Benedito, Julio Romero de Torres, Manolo Valdés, Rafael Canogar, Eduardo Arroyo, Isabel Quintanilla, and so on.
More than a hundred years, more than a hundred paintings
That is how it has carried on for more than a hundred years, with more than a hundred calendars and other works that make up a collection that is unique in its concept, subject matter and style. A pioneering initiative in the field of commercial patronage, which at its outset constituted a mean to popularize art throughout society.
The calendar collections, in their day considered "the museum for those who have never been to a museum", are nowadays well known by the general public through the exhibitions that the MAXAM Foundation periodically organizes to display the works of art that illustrated the calendars.
Through their creations we can observe the evolution of not just the art of painting, but also that of our society and our habits, as well as the world around us, the world that MAXAM's products shape.
Entrada actualizada el el 07 jul de 2015
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