Voces del Prado

The Permanent Collection

Montserrat Sabán Godoy, Management Technician, 1977-2016

I ended up working on the Permanent Collection, and that is different because you have to get to know the collection very well. My job was as follows: when a picture goes to an exhibition, you have to rearrange the hall and cover the empty space with another picture, which tended to be chosen by the curator. Sometimes only one painting has gone, but this can entail up to five changes within the hall. Because the hall no longer offers the same reading. So have no other choice than to place a picture on another wall, and from that wall you have to move others to other walls. They would say: “It’s just once picture”. And I’d reply: “no, come down and see that it’s not just one picture, because as a result of that one picture I have to move the whole wall”. In such cases you’re always pressed for time, because you do this between eight and ten in the morning, but first you have to locate the paintings in the storeroom, bring them up to the hall, wait for the curator to come up and for him to give his approval. The point came when they would trust in my judgement and say: “Start hanging them and when I get to the Museum I’ll come by and have a look”. And then they’d give their approval, but you are the one who hung them more or less as they’d told you to.
You had to take into account the height of the painting, because each work requires a different height. Not all the pictures are at the same height. It also depends on whether it’s a full-body portrait or a half-body portrait, because all pictures have to have their point of axis. So then you arrange them, you hang them on the wall, sometimes with cables, other times with hooks, depending on the place and the curator, because some people like cables and others use hooks. Then you call the electrician to light it up for you and then you add the picture cards. All of the paintings have cards, which must be ready and prepared for the day you hang up the new picture in the hall; which is to say, the new painting has to have a card so that people know why the picture is there. And that also takes time to do.
When I began working on the Permanent Collection, there was something that was quite sacred but then later was gradually lost, which was that you had to have everything ready by ten in the morning, because that was when the Museum opened. And when it opened at nine in the morning it was even worse. Later on, they permitted me to close the hall: “If you can’t open, just close the hall”. But I felt terrible, because in the case of people who came to the Museum for the first time – because there were tourists who’d turn up at nine o’clock in the morning, such as the Japanese, who’d depart for Toledo at ten o´clock – I’d think, “they’re going to come here and won’t be able to El Greco, who is one of the artists they love the most”. I hated that. So I would race to ensure that everything was ready by the time we opened. You have to calculate the time required for the Art Handler team to do its work, then the lighting, because an electrician has to come to put in the spotlights. There’s an electrician whom I really loved, and he would say: “the day you go, I’m going to have a rest”.