Voces del Prado

A veritable deluge of exhibitions and lectures

Juan Luna Fernández, Head of the Department of Conservation of 18th Century Painting, 1969-2016

I remember “European art at the Spanish Bourbon court in the 18th century” [“El Arte europeo en la corte de España de los Borbones durante el siglo XVIII”, 1980], which was a travelling exhibition, first held in Bordeaux at the Musée des Beaux-Arts then in Paris at the Grand Palais and finally at the Prado.
You could say that since that exhibition in 1980 on court art in Bourbon Spain there’ve been an absolute deluge of very peculiar exhibitions, some as odd as the one devoted to Japanese Nanban art which was due to some agreement signed with Japan. Nanban art refers to art made for foreigners in Japan but these works were also influenced by foreign art. They were extremely interesting and were special loans from the museum in Kobe. There were also some negotiations that brought works from Serbia, which wasn’t an independent state at the date as the agreement was with Yugoslavia.
All this also meant organising lectures series in which I was very involved to the extent that soon after I joined I was asked to organise the lectures at the Prado, essentially the Saturday and Sunday ones. Interestingly, I was the one to inaugurate the 400-seat lecture hall as I had to give a lecture on Claude Lorrain in conjunction with an exhibition that I had curated entitled “Claude Lorrain and the classical ideal of landscape in the 17th century” [“Claudio de Lorena y el ideal clásico de paisaje en el siglo XVII”, 1984]. This was an absolutely lovely exhibition I have to say, although not because I curated it of course.