Voces del Prado

Restoring the Reputation of Nineteenth Century Painting

José Luis Díez García, Head of the Department of Conservation of 19th Century Painting, 1988-2013

When I joined the Museo del Prado, my main mission was to restore the prestige of the nineteenth century collections. It’s not that arrived at a place where no previous management had ever existed. That wasn’t the thing. But it is true that the person who was there before I arrived in 1988, Joaquín de la Puente, who would retire two years after my arrival, had been the Director of the Modern Art Museum. For different reasons they had brought the nineteenth century collections here, and the department was headed by an Assistant Director because the nineteenth century collection was made up of 3,600 works, which is to say, much larger than any other collection of paintings at the Museum.
And this initial mission of restoring the status of the collection was a quite natural way of preparing for the change of leadership that would occur within a period of two years. I had time to find my feet and to study everything thoroughly, so that I would be good and ready when it came to assuming full responsibility for the collection. It wasn’t easy. During those two years, there was a natural generational clash between a twenty-eight-year-old and a sixty-five-year-old. One had no career experience at all and the other a long career that had witnessed numerous ups and downs.
At the time – and this was also the philosophy of Pérez Sánchez – I said to myself: “I have the privilege of being in charge of these collections, and now it’s up to me to become the leading expert in the world within this field”. And, naturally, that’s what I did. Over those two years I had to learn about the 3,600 paintings, think about what we wanted to do with them, what their future would be, what had happened to them in the past and how they would fit into a grand museum such as the Prado. I also thought about the place the collection might occupy and the place that I myself might occupy within a team of academics in which my colleagues were all at least twenty years older than me.
The generations that came before me suffered the complex of not having any works under the heading of French Impressionism or any other famous and well-promoted nineteenth century school. They were always weighed down with the legacy of Velázquez and Goya. But I thought, “we have something unique and better than other nineteenth century schools in Europe and around the world, America included, namely history painting”. We have the best history painters in the whole of Europe, because these artists possessed something that other countries didn’t have: they had the Museo del Prado itself. That was the first generation of painters that began to train whilst being directly aware of the legacies of Velázquez and Goya. This means that, underlying these works, over and above any themes or ideologies, we are talking about very good painting technique. This is something that I believed was true and now I had the monumental task of demonstrating it.