Voces del Prado

Official visits tell so much

Felipe Garín Llombart, Museum Director, 1991-1993

The life of the Director is constrained because he has to greet and receive distinguished visitors and explain the Museum to them, and the boundaries were clearly marked out: "Director, you have half an hour", or "You have just 20 minutes". When the queen came by, I remember she always asked: "Director, is there anything new?" She is a person who notices, she pays close attention, and she was especially fond of the Prado Museum and knew a lot about it.
I have often mentioned that official visits tell so much about the individual, because for one hour, half an hour or three quarters of an hour you share moments in which you discover the level of their cultural preparation and their interest in culture.
I have a few anecdotes, of which I'll mention two. The first one, when the President of Italy came here there was no way to get him to leave the Museum, his aides would come to call him and he would ask them to give him another half hour, he would go back and look again at the paintings, he was absolutely mad about the Prado Museum, At the other extreme, when the President of China came, he was not interested and did not stop in front of any of the paintings. When somebody important comes here a "corralito" is formed, an area where the people from the media gather together, waiting to take the official photograph, so to say. That time I decided to set it up in front of Goya's paintings dedicated to the 2nd and 3rd of May. I thought to myself that if he had been at all sensitive he would have thought of the relationship with the killings at Tiananmen Square from a few months earlier. I don't know whether he thought anything along that line or if it didn't dawn on him, but that was why I did it. It was unimportant, it was inoffensive cultural play done thinking of the media.