Voces del Prado

Chairs for the Prado

Alicia Quintana Martínez, Head of the Education Service, 1983-2007

Calvo Serraller didn't last long. This is just an anecdote. He was removed or forced to resign because of a false matter of corruption. His wife was the director of a magazine, Nuevo Estilo, and it ran a feature on designer chairs at the Prado Museum. So you saw Las Meninas and immediately below a picture of a chair, with the text, "this chair can be bought at a price of ----," and the Ministry found that too commercial for their liking, so he resigned. But that day I was coming and ready to argue with Calvo Serraller; I say I was coming because we were always in another building. He really liked the Workshop School and had decided that the students should make seating for the halls in the Museum, Zurbarán type chairs, which are so scarce nowadays, those nice chairs with crosspieces. Calvo Serraller wanted them to make around 50 chairs. I was going to tell him that our students were there to learn, not to work in a production line. That's what I was about to tell him and when I went through the door at the Museum and heard about the chairs in the Nuevo Estilo magazine, I turned around and went back to my office. It was not the time to talk about chairs with the director.