Someone has left a room or not yet entered. Isabel Quintanilla's paintings spring from that absence, from that stillness which always displays traces of life. Her works, still unknown to the public at large, are the subject of the first retrospective that the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza has devoted to a Spanish woman artist in its thirty years of existence. Many of the pieces shown in this book and its exhibition have never been exhibited in Spain before, despite the fact that Isabel Quintanilla established a bridge of modernity between the twentieth century and the great classics of Spanish painting. For decades her formal precision, her sobriety so close to nature and devoid of rhetoric, and her mastery of color were better understood internationally.