Inspired by the famous book by Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. From Friedrich to Rothko (1975), the exhibition aims to demonstrate the pictorial, aesthetic and historical-cultural connection between the northern European tradition - particularly early Romantic landscape painting - and modern European and American abstraction.

The exhibition features 124 works, approximately half by 19th-century artists and half from the 20th century. It opens with three sepia landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich from 1802 depicting spring, autumn and winter from the four seasons from the first of his Jahreszeiten series. These compositions were lost in 1935 and have only recently been rediscovered. The Fundación Juan March is exhibition these three landscapes for the first time apart from the small exhibition held in Berlin following their restoration. The exhibition ends with works by the leading figures of American Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko (large format watercolours from the National Gallery of Washington), Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Georgia O'Keeffe. Also included are two contemporary European painters: Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter in whose works the continuing heritage of Romantic landscape painting is clearly and uniquely expressed.

The lengthy chronological span of the exhibition covers landscapes by artists of the "northern tradition". In addition to Friedrich they include Philip Otto Runge, J.C.C. Dahl, E.F. Oehme, Carl Gustav Carus, Carl Blechen, Carl Blechen, J.M.W. Turner, John Robert Cozens and John Constable, the American 19th-century Luminists such as Church, Cole, Heade and Bierstadt; artists who spanned the transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries and others representative of the 20th century such as Van Gogh, Mondrian, Munch, Nolde, Klee, Kandinsky and Ernst, among others. Many of these artists have already been the subject of monographic exhibitions at the Fundación Juan March