Voces del Prado

The Political Vicissitudes of the Country and Management of the Museum

Mercedes Orihuela Maeso, Conservator of the Service of Deposits, 1975-Up to date

When I joined the Museum, I think the Director was Xavier de Salas. Don Diego Angulo had served as Director, but he had resigned for financial reasons. He had wanted money to enable the Museum to function properly, but the truth is they gave him very little. He resigned and the Director’s position went to the Assistant Director at the time, Don Xavier de Salas. And then they appointed Alfonso Pérez Sánchez as Assistant Director, who was a lecturer at the Complutense University. During the period of Xavier de Salas, there were strong links with the Franco Government. He promoted very good relations, because he’d been a diplomat, a cultural attaché in London, and he was the great-nephew of Pablo Bosch y Barrau. Which is to say, he had a great ability to get around political commitments. Then Xavier de Salas retired, I suppose at around the age of sixty, and they appointed José Manuel Pita Andrade as Director, who was also a university professor. He was here, if I recall correctly, between April 1978 and around the arrival of the Guernica at the Casón del Buen Retiro, which would have been October 1981, perhaps [10th September 1981]. They insisted on increasing the price of entrance tickets to the Museum and he didn’t agree, which is why he resigned.
Then they appointed somebody as Director who was unconnected with the world of the history of art, which meant that he wasn’t that warmly received, although he went on to do quite well, because he at least let others lead the way. He was a musicologist, a music historian, Federico Sopeña. Given that Pérez Sánchez didn’t agree, he resigned and went back to his faculty. So then the Assistant Directorship went to Manuela Mena, and then, in 1982, with the arrival of the Felipe González Government, Alfonso Perez Sánchez was appointed as Director of the Museum, also based on the demands of the Museum staff, who called for him to be appointed. And he was here, if I remember correctly, up until February 1991 or maybe 1992, when the first Iraq War took place, because he signed a manifesto opposing the Spanish Government’s decision to take part in the war. And then we went for several months without a Director. You have to bear in mind that the Museo del Prado is like a transatlantic ship in the middle of the ocean: it keeps sailing with or without a captain at the helm. That’s the truth of the matter.
The most important thing that could happen to this institution was that it might no longer depend on the political situation or the whims of the respective governments, as it did during the early years when I first arrived at the Museum. An agreement was reached, one that is still in force today, between the main political parties, which are now known as the Partido Popular (Conservatives) and the Partido Socialista (Socialists), that politics would no longer play a part in the affairs of the Museum itself. And, quite frankly, the Museum has really functioned much better since then.