MEXICO CITY.- The Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (MBAR) present the exhibition La carne y el color (The Flesh and the Color), through October 19, 2008. The show gathers paintings and drawings from both cultural institutions.

The exhibition has the objective of taking the visitor through diverse stages in history, through works of art created by French, Flemish, Italian and Mexican artists, to show the importance that some elements in the composition of the picture has evolved. The main point in the exhibit is the dispute that, for centuries, maintained on the supremacy of drawings over color.

Drawing was viewed as the structure on which every image is built, as the rational part of the pictorial scheme, while color, for its part, was accused by the defenders of drawing as being an immoral make-up that was not more than an accessory, but, obviously, it had partisans that situated it as the light, the life of a painting.

The exhibition includes a selection of twenty Italian drawings from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes Collection, the second most important of France, second only to the one of the National Library in Paris. Among the drawings are some by Leonardo Da Vinci.

The exhibition presents a total of 89 works by 73 artists. Among them are David Alfaro Siqueiros, Pablo Caliari “Veronese”, Luca Giordano, José Clemente Orozco, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Montenegro and Gerardo Murillo “Dr. Atl”.

The work by Paolo Caliari “Veronese”, titled Andromeda freed by Perseus is on the cover of the catalogue and leaves France for the first time.

The Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) is the Mexican National Art Museum, located in the historical center of Mexico City. The museum is housed in a neoclassical building at No. 8 Tacuba, Col. Centro, Mexico City. It houses a collection representing the history of Mexican art from the late pre-Hispanic era to the early 20th century.