Voces del Prado

The 1990’s: Management Chaos

Gabriele Finaldi, Assistant Director of Conservation and Research, 2002-2015

I had a great deal of contact with the Museo del Prado in the 1990’s due to my professional post at the National Gallery, where I was the curator for Spanish and Italian painting.
We regarded the Museo del Prado to be an absolutely extraordinary museum, one of great quality, featuring a marvellous history in terms of its collections. However, the management of the Museum was somewhat chaotic. In fact, while I was at the National Gallery in 1992, I received a call from “The Burlington Magazine” to request information about current exhibitions and events at the Museo del Prado, so that they could include it in their diary. They told me: “We have found it impossible to discover what activities they have or what exhibitions can be seen at the Museo del Prado, so we wondered whether you might be able to give us some information, so that we can include it in our diary pages”.
It is true that, especially in the 1990’s, the Museum witnessed too many management changes. A museum requires a certain tranquillity, for example, to stage its exhibition projects, all of which demand at least two or three years of preparation. With constant changes in management, it was difficult to establish any planning or introduce any Museum policy. And that was very noticeable from the outside.