Voces del Prado

A successful scandal

Nuria de Miguel Poch, General Secretary of the Friends of the Museo del Prado Foundation, 1989-What's on

Francisco Calvo Serraller, within the Trust of the Foundation, carried out the cultural activity of disseminating the collections. He has a clear understanding that art does not progress but it does evolve. Painters are always observing what others are doing and the best example is the Prado Museum, where we have Rubens painting after Titian, and Goya observing Velázquez. All these examples can be found in the collection. At a course we had at the time, he had the idea of inviting artists rather than historians of art, just to see what happened, what they could tell us about the Museum. It was a good experience, so interesting that we gathered all those lectures together in a book. That book sold out. The director was Pérez Sánchez and he thought of getting the artists to express themselves in their regular milieu, the work of art. We thought it was a magnificent idea, and we asked each of them to produce four works on paper, without limiting them in terms of where they had to work, how to do it, or what type of technique they should use. The only common feature was the size, the format, because it was a collection, and they had to take their inspiration from the Prado Museum. We exhibited their work at the Museum. It was quite a scandal because at the time it was not customary to find contemporary artists at a historical museum but it was a great success, to the extent that we repeated the experience a few years later. The second time around there were no male artists, because they were all men the first time; this time all the artists were women. There was no predesigned plan behind the first list of artists, it just came out that way because the artistic landscape at the time was such. Things had changed so much that the situation was no longer the same. So the second time we wanted all of them to be women.
Another book was published, the works were exhibited at the Museum, and it was equally successful.
The last of these exhibitions is going to be shown now, starting in September 2018, and it will be a collection dedicated to photographers. In the previous collection, the one with women artists, we had included two photographers, Ouka Leele and Cristina García Rodero, who did some magnificent and very different work. Ouka Leele did a sort of performance in the Museum, and at the same time she was taking pictures. On the other hand, Cristina García Rodero, who has won the Magnum Award and is more of a reporter-photographer, went all over the place and took some really interesting pictures. This time there is a mixture, both men and women. Nearly all of them have won the National Award for Photography and we try to have people from different generations.