Miguel Falomir came to the management of the Prado Museum by “accident” and because the then director Miguel Zugaza, the “great trickster”, convinced him to assume the deputy directorship in 2015. He, like a “naive Faust”, stung, without suspecting that only two years later he would climb to first place when Zugaza went to the Bellas Artes de Bilbao. He rejected the offer up to three times until he fell into temptation. But he is already there. He likes to continue thinking of himself as an art historian in love with the Renaissance and the decision has been made: “I will not be director of any other museum.” At his side, Pepe Serra, remembers that in 2006 he gained access to the Picasso through a competition won by Josefina Matamoros, the director of the Museu d’Art Modern de Ceret for 27 years, who resigned from the position when she realized the salary “and “A lot that I would lose if I gave up the French retirement.” He, who had been second, became first and “I was literally tortured.” But his work silenced even the loudest voices, he had a “bomb” time and when the opportunity to jump to the MNAC arose, luck was on his side again: “No one or almost no one wanted to direct it at that time” .
Miguel Falomir and Pepe Serra exchange experiences and complicities at a lunch held this Tuesday at the Cercle del Liceu, which has invited them to think about some of the remains that large museums face. There has been no debate. The relationship between them is excellent (next week The Lost Mirror opens at the MNAC. Jews and converts in the Middle Ages, the result of an agreement with the Prado that had previously been reflected in exhibitions such as those dedicated to Bartolomé Bermejo or the frescoes of Carracci’s Herrera Chapel) and combine shared ideas and views. “Without complexes, for us he is like an older brother who helps us a lot,” says Serra, who on board the MNAC travels “through the international scene of the large museums, with the difference that we are the only ones who have such a ridiculous budget. ”.
Whatever their chronological arc, museum collections, they agreed, keep alive their ability to speak to today’s man. Falomir apologizes for his pedantry and says that he has just bought The Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides (400 BC) at a kiosk and that “already in the first pages he says that man is always the same, he is moved by the same passions. Sometimes I even think that the art most closely linked to the present is the one that expires the earliest.” And Pepe Serra gives as an example Romanesque art “which speaks of power, identity, sex, the other… It’s all there.”
What’s more, the director of the Prado is convinced that historical museums have an advantage when it comes to talking to younger audiences, those who have grown up watching Netflix series and “they are eager for stories, they want you to tell them stories, That you talk to him about passions and if you are able to go a little further than the specific fact of Goya’s Laments, it is logical that you will get excited. The old masters, a translation of the Anglo-Saxon term old master that I don’t like at all because it seems like they go in taca taca, better we call them classics, they keep intact their capacity for us to see, so that we always go further.”
In the discussion moderated by Llucià Homs, tricky questions also arise, such as the restitution of objects stolen, looted or torn from their places of origin. “Any work that has been stolen must be restored to its legitimate owners,” they point out, although in the Spanish case the Historical Memory Law still lacks a regulation that shapes the process. They were also asked about the statements of Minister Ernest Urtasun, who recently announced a “review” of state museums “to overcome a colonial framework.” “I don’t really know what he thinks, honestly. But it is clear that society has changed enormously in the last fifty years and the public demands new ways of approaching history,” reflects Falomir, who gives cartography as an example, supposedly more objective and scientific than art. “Until ten years ago, on maps, the northern hemisphere was oversized to the detriment of the southern.”
The director of the Prado compared the museum to an iceberg, which exposes only 20% of what it guards, “but I give the amount of rubbish we keep to them and they don’t accept it.”
Pepe Serra was asked about Manuel Borja-Villel and the role he will play in the design of the new MNAC. “He is an advisor to the Department of Culture,” he clarified. “We are in contact with international museums, experts, collectors, gallery owners… In this set of things that is immense, if there is something that can be used, it will be used. But he does not intervene at all”, and he ironically: “Skydiving is a bad practice”.
