Voces del Prado

2002: two staff structure charts

Miguel Zugaza Miranda, Museum Director, 2002-2017

I found a marvellous Museum full of remarkable people, outstanding professionals who weren’t organised. I remember that I asked Eduardo Serra for the staff structure chart: “Please, let me have the staff structure chart so I can have a look at it”, and he gave it to me.
I asked for the same thing from the Museum’s manager, Leticia Azcue, now the marvellous sculpture curator, the Chief Curator of Sculpture of the Museum, and they gave me two different charts: so the president of the Board of Trustees and the manager of the Museum had two different staff structure charts on paper.
So I would say that the disorganisation was pretty notable. I think the Board of Trustees didn’t really know what its role was, nor did the curators; the different levels at the Museum didn’t really know what they were supposed to offer the institution. What I did notice straight away was that remarkable quality that all the professionals who work in this institution have. It’s a difficult institution, a very demanding Museum, it asks a lot of everyone. But if you give that, if you’re there to give your all to the Prado I think you end up getting a lot back, but if you’re there just to take you’re out, sacked. I think the Prado knows how to get rid of you quite quickly. I had the good luck to very quickly get on the same wavelength as people’s abilities and desire to work, and with that material and at a moment of change that had already started it was fantastic because everything started to go better. Well, that’s my impression. I hope people who worked with me during those years have the same impression. The projects that each person had were realisable, possible ones. We aimed to secure the means to move ahead and make them a reality. This is what happened during those years. At the same time that we were doing a new building, the Casón del Buen Retiro was being remodelled. There were various extremely important architectural and infrastructure projects going on, but at the same time that we were doing the new space for the Museum we were working inside on the new layout, and was it was good that it was a simultaneous effort.