The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Van Gogh to Picasso: The Thannhauser Legacy , featuring the celebrated Thannhauser Collection gifted to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and marking the first time the majority of the collection as such leaves New York to be exhibited elsewhere. The show includes some fifty works by a number of the most well recognized Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and modern masters, such as Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. The Thannhauser Collection is a bequest of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation by Justin K. and Hilde Thannhauser. Justin K. Thannhauser was the son of the German Jewish art dealer Heinrich Thannhauser, who founded the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1909.

After retiring from a distinguished career as a dealer of modern art in Europe and the United States, in 1963 Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976) announced a bequest of essential works from his private art collection—spanning some one hundred years—to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Hilde Thannhauser (1919–1991), Justin’s widow, subsequently made additional gifts to the institution in 1984 and 1991.