Voces del Prado

José Luis Díez. A new era

Ana Gutiérrez Márquez, Senior Technician of Museums (Conservation of 19th Century Painting), 1975-2018

After don Joaquín retired José Luis Díez arrived. That was also the time when the Museum was totally computerised; we went from writing out catalogue entries by hand to typing out the references and inputting all the data on the works onto computer. It was a great moment and we started to catalogue all the 19th-century works.
We did a general catalogue, which is the one that was published in 2015, and on the basis of that internal project, which took us a long time, José Luis really activated the exhibition programme. We did various exhibitions with the Ministry. They were exhibitions that brought together the different themes within the 19th-century collection: Neo-classicism, history painting, various important painters such as Federico de Madrazo, the literary world, etc. So these different themes were brought together and we did a series of exhibitions, some travelling ones and others not.
That was the key work that we did, cataloguing and all the process behind an exhibition, which we all know is very complicated and takes a long time. I think this was José Luis Díez’s fundamental task: energising and promoting the collection, which had remained hidden in some ways. There hadn’t been any opportunity to do this before because they were different times with different resources.