Voces del Prado

The anonymous donation of a Picasso in the summer of 1974

Felícitas Martínez Pozuelo, Administrative Technician, 1971-2018

I had only been working here for a short time and in the summer we used to work one Saturday a month. Xavier de Salas normally went to Trujillo at the weekends.
Pedro Sobrino appeared and said, “Feli, a gentleman has turned up with a painting and says it’s an anonymous donation.” I asked, “An anonymous donation?” And he said, “Yes, he left the painting and went.” To which I replied, “That’s not possible”. I didn’t know much but from what I did know, the Museum wasn’t somewhere where you could turn up with a painting and say, “I’m leaving this here, it’s an anonymous donation”. It would be an anonymous donation for the world but not for the Museum. If we did accept it we would always have to know where the work came from. I wasn’t very experienced at the time but it did occur to me to think, “Who knows if this is a donation and not a stolen painting that someone wants to hand back?”
“Hold on a moment, I’m going to make call.” So I called Xavier de Salas and started telling the story, “Don Xavier, we’ve got a gentleman here who’s come to anonymously donate a painting, he isn’t the donor but he’s been asked to bring the painting.” To which he replied, “But have you seen the painting?” To which I replied, “No, it’s covered with a blanket and I haven’t touched it either (I didn’t even want to touch it).” “Right, what you’re going to do is go with Pedro Sobrino and unpack the painting. If there’s anything on the reverse, describe to me exactly what you can see.” So, by phone, Pedro Sobrino and I started with, “Don Xavier, we can see some labels that say ‘Picasso’, a title in French and some gallery.” “Right, fine”, he said, “so read all those labels and describe them and when you’ve got all that, prepare a receipt for the gentleman to sign. Give him a copy and ask for his national identity number and his details.” I didn’t dare touch the painting and Pedro was just staring at it.
It was a painting by Picasso and I never saw it completely as I got so nervous. Definitely a Cubist painting which must have been from the 1920s. So I drew up a document as best I knew, I read it to the man and he thought it was perfect. We signed it and gave him a copy. It was an extremely odd experience with a painting which I can’t say any more about after that as I never knew what happened to it.