Voces del Prado

1981. My promotion to Assistant Director

Manuela Mena Marqués, Head of the Department of Conservation of 18th Century Painting and Goya, 1978-2019

Two years after I joined the Prado, the Museum experienced a kind of crisis, one in which the Director, Pita Andrade, resigned because of the arrival of the Guernica, amongst other issues relating to this matter, and the actions of the Ministry of Culture (in his view). I’m not judging anyone. He was replaced as Director by Don Federico Sopeña, who was a leading figure from the world of culture, but, above all, a musician. He was entirely unconnected with the museum world and the history of art, but he was involved in the world of culture and identified with a certain kind of management that was popular at the time.
They called me from the Ministry to tell me that they wanted me to be the Assistant Director of the Museum. Suddenly I was faced with the real Prado, the Prado that needed to change, a museum that had already begun to change but whose development had been halted abruptly. My contribution was to provide a new impetus, using the previous experience I had gained outside Spain, in Italy and, above all, in the United States, where I’d already worked at a large museum, the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston, where I’d been able to observe how things were done. Over there, the telephones and the elevators were extremely fast, for example, which couldn’t have been further from the truth over here.
For a year and a half I was on my own at the Museum. But I had the complete backing of Federico Sopeña, who also had powerful backers, which was very important for the Museum. And these backers respected him, although this has not always been the case at the Prado; the contrary has very often been the case. With Sopeña this respect certainly did exist, and this was extremely important when it came to transforming the Museum. Shortly afterwards, approximately a year and a half later, there was a political change and the Socialist Party arrived, which changed everything. They removed Sopeña as Director and appointed Pérez Sánchez, whom we had all always wanted as the Museum’s Head. It happened just like that. And Pérez Sánchez didn’t even recognise the Museo del Prado; I had to guide him around the halls, because everything was completely new. There were more members of staff; on the catering side, new and perfectly trained staff had been brought in. New halls had been opened. We had undertaken a number of absolutely drastic changes. It was truly hard work, work that we continued to carry out, given that there were still very few of us at the Museo del Prado and we had to do everything.