Voces del Prado

An exciting moment: The battle of the attendants

Francisco Calvo Serraller, Museum Director, 1993-1994

If I think of something that excited me at the time, it would be my hard-fought defense of the thirty attendants they wanted to release from the Museum, even though the Prado would virtually have to close its doors. I came into conflict with successive State authorities until I reached the highest echelons of the government. Not the Prime Minister’s office, but almost. I had a tough conversation with a person I treated with respect, but certainly without giving an inch. I told him, "If you do this – he’d told me he had to do it because of a previous sentence with a certified guard …, in short, something really absurd –, if you do this with the attendants at the Prado, then the Prado will obviously close. First, because it won’t be able to function and, second, because it will go on strike and, third, because I will lead the strike myself". To this he replied, "You wouldn’t be so irresponsible". But I was really angry and said, "I’m going to tell you how irresponsible I am! I couldn’t give a damn about the Ministry of Culture, the Government of Spain or Spain compared to this!" Well, I managed to keep them. Later they turned the whole thing into the stuff of legend, at least the attendants did. It wasn’t just a human problem, a problem of employment. It was something that the Prado has that is truly exceptional, something that it might lose one day, which would be really tragic. There is no group of attendants in the world comparable to that of the Prado, not even in my day. There are art historians, people with degrees. They’re truly exceptional, people of considerable standing. I believe this forms part of the Museum’s heritage and I would be very sorry if, for budgetary reasons or questions of business strategy and the like, we should lose this, because it forms part of the Museum’s DNA.