Miguel Falomir came to the directorship of the Prado Museum by “accident” and because the then director, Miguel Zugaza, the “great trapper”, convinced him to assume the deputy directorship in 2015. He, like a “naive Faust”, he bit there, not suspecting that only two years later he would climb to the top, when Zugaza left for Bellas Artes de Bilbao. Up to three times he refused the offer, until he fell into temptation. But that’s it. He likes to continue to think of himself as an art historian in love with the Renaissance and the decision is made: “I will not be the director of any other museum”. Next to him, Pepe Serra remembers that in 2006 he gained access to the Picasso through a competition won by Josefina Matamoros, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Ceret for 27 years, who resigned when she saw the salary and all that he would lose if he renounced the French pension. He, who had finished second, became first and “they literally tortured me”. But his work appeased even the loudest voices, he had a “bomb”, and when the opportunity presented itself to move to the MNAC, luck was in his favor again: “None or almost no one wanted to direct him then”.
Miguel Falomir and Pepe Serra exchange experiences and complicities at a lunch at the Cercle del Liceu, which invited them to think about some of the challenges facing large museums. There was no debate. The relationship between them is excellent (the lost mirror opens at the MNAC next week. Jews and converts in the Middle Ages, the result of an understanding with the Prado that had previously been embodied in exhibitions such as those dedicated to Bartolomé Bermejo and the frescoes in the Herrera de Carracci chapel), but shared ideas and views. “Without complexities, for us he is like an older brother who helps us a lot”, notes Serra, who on board the MNAC travels “through the international scene of the great museums, with the difference that we are the only ones with such a ridiculous budget” .
Whatever the chronological arc, museum collections, they agreed, keep their ability to speak to today’s man alive. Falomir apologizes for the pedantry and explains that he has just bought The Peloponnesian Wars, by Thucydides (400 BC) from a kiosk and that “in the first pages he already explains that man is always the same, he is moved by the same passions. Sometimes I even think that the art most connected to the present is the one that expires before”. And Pepe Serra cites Romanesque art as an example “which speaks of power, identity, sex, the other… Everything is there”. Even more, the director of the Prado is convinced that historical museums have an advantage when it comes to talking to the younger public, the one that has grown up watching Netflix series and “they are hungry for stories, they want you to tell them stories, that you talk about passions, and if you are able to go a little beyond the concrete fact of Goya’s Laments, it is logical that you get excited. The old masters, a translation of the Anglo-Saxon term old master which I don’t like at all because they seem to be patchy, it’s better to call them classics, they keep their ability intact so that we can see things, because we go further”.
In the discussion moderated by Llucià Homs, delicate issues also come up, such as the restitution of objects stolen, looted or torn from their places of origin. “Every work that has been looted must be restored to its rightful owners”, they point out, although in the Spanish case the Historical Memory law still does not have a regulation that gives shape to the process. They were also asked questions about the statements of Minister Ernest Urtasun, who recently announced a “revision” of state museums “to overcome a colonial framework”. “I don’t really know what he thinks about it, really. But it is clear that society has changed enormously in the last 50 years and the public demands new ways of approaching history”, reflects Falomir, who gives the example of cartography, supposedly more objective and scientific than art. “Until ten years ago, the northern hemisphere was exaggerated on maps to the detriment of the south”.
The director of the Prado compared the museum to an iceberg, which exhibits only 20% of what it holds, “but I guarantee you that the amount of junk that we keep I give it away and they don’t accept it from me”.
Pepe Serra was asked about Manuel Borja-Villel and the role he will have in the design of the new MNAC. “He is an adviser to the Department of Culture”, he clarified. “We are in contact with international museums, experts, collectors, gallerists… In this set of things that is immense, if there is something that can be taken advantage of, it will be taken advantage of. But he doesn’t intervene at all”, and he quipped: “Parachuting is a bad practice”.
