The Nineteenth Century Collections and the Casón del Buen Retiro

José Luis Díez García, Head of the Department of Conservation of 19th Century Painting, 1988-2013

Before 1971, a Modern Art Museum existed to house all of these collections. In 1971 the Museo del Prado was forced – and I use this word because the Museum took the matter quite badly – to reincorporate the nineteenth century collections that had previously belonged to the Museo del Prado. There was no room for these paintings in the Villanueva Buildings, so the Casón del Buen Retiro was allocated to the Museum to hold these collections.
But only 200 out of the 3,600 works could be shown in this building. Amongst these works, an extremely illustrious painting was incorporated in 1981, namely the Guernica. The whole of the ground floor of the Casón del Buen Retiro was set aside for the nineteenth century collections. So as of 1981 there was no The Lovers of Teruel [by Antonio Muñoz Degrain] or Doña Juana la Loca [by Francisco Pradilla]. This is quite unthinkable today, because these are emblematic paintings, but at the time they simply ceased to exist. You could see them in reproductions in books. But there was no The Execution by Firing Squad of Torrijos [by Antonio Gisbert], because it was either in store or rolled up.