Spain’s Pride : Prado Makes a New Push for Greatness

MADRID — At the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the great Prado Museum in Madrid faced a terrifying threat--the loss of the heart of its collection.

Some American art lovers had proposed that the United States forgo the Philippines as war booty from Spain and take the Prado’s Diego Velazquez paintings instead. But American bureaucrats slapped down the idea, thus keeping the Prado intact.

It is not clear how close the American collectors came to tearing the heart out of the Prado, but it is clear that, for many Spaniards, losing the grandeur of the Prado would have been far more devastating than losing an empire.

Tied to Nation’s Identity

No country is as closely identified with its art collection as Spain with the Prado. Imagining Madrid without it is like imagining Los Angeles without freeways.

As a young man in Madrid, Ernest Hemingway would visit the Prado in the mornings before writing.

“A boy who has not had a formal education,” he wrote art historian Bernard Berenson many years later, “can get a pretty good one in the Prado if he goes there every morning and takes his time.”

The Prado, founded on the collections of the kings of Spain 169 years ago, is not a complete or ordered museum. Alfonso Perez Sanchez, the present director, calls it instead “an impassioned, capricious and accidental museum.”

It does not have good examples from every important school of art or era like the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It lacks British paintings, for example, for Britain was once Spain’s great enemy. But what the Prado does have, it has in breathtaking abundance and glory.

World-Renowned Collection

No other museum has more important collections of Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Bartolome Esteban Murillo and Titian. Visitors to the Prado find one of the great art galleries of the world. Some critics insist that none is better.

The greatness of this museum probably explains why it always seems to be embroiled in controversy and caught under the shadow of politics. Spaniards are so obsessed with the Prado that they feel a need to watch over it and argue about it.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Republic, in a blatant act of public relations, named famed Spanish painter Pablo Picasso director of the museum. Once appointed, he never bothered to set foot in it--or, in fact, in Madrid. To save them from bombing, the museum’s treasures were hidden elsewhere throughout the war in any case.

Now, the Prado exhibits only one canvas by Picasso, but it is the “Guernica,” his most famous and most political painting, a symbolic portrayal of the destruction of a northern Spanish city by Nazi German bombers carrying out the orders of Gen. Francisco Franco during the civil war. Picasso refused to let the work be shown in Spain until democracy was restored, so it hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art until it was sent to the Prado in 1981, eight years after the artist’s death.

Debate Over Acquisition

At the Prado, political overtones are ever present. Museum officials are now entangled in international intrigue as they negotiate for the acquisition of the choicest part of the collection of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who is married, perhaps fortunately for the Prado, to a former Miss Spain. The Thyssen collection is usually described as the most valuable and important private collection in the world except for that of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.

Even the Prado’s $17-million modernization program, due to be finished in 1990, has roots in politics. Fearful that pollution was damaging the paintings, the Prado began to install air conditioning in all of its rooms more than 10 years ago. As part of the program, officials are also installing new lighting, redesigning the walls, expanding to new buildings and offering educational programs for the first time. This kind of work, in the view of many Spaniards, helps release the Prado from the shackles of Francoism.

To be sure, Francoism hurt the Prado in an odd way. Franco’s dictatorial regime did not often interfere with the running of the Prado. In 1974, Franco officials did force a reluctant, protesting Prado to stage an exhibition of the works of a friend of the regime, the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali. But this was a rare act. In general, the Prado was hurt by Franco mainly because of its isolation.

Madrid and its museum officials were so isolated during the Franco dictatorship that the Prado remained steadfastly ignorant of all the contemporary ideas about making a museum appeal to the public. The museum did not even distribute a map to visitors. No signs pointed the way. Tourists could spend hours in the dim, crowded and hot museum and fail to come upon the great paintings by Velazquez, Goya and Bosch.

Perez Sanchez--when he took over the Prado in 1983--called it “the great invalid of our culture.”

After the death of Franco in 1975, the Spanish government began to concern itself with the people who come to the Prado. Now the Prado hands out maps, employs a press officer and encourages a society of boosters known as the Amigos del Prado. Spanish citizens can now enter without paying any charge at all.

The Prado’s collections reflect the personal taste of the kings who built them up. Carlos V looked on Titian as the greatest painter of Europe in the 16th Century and commissioned portraits and other works from him. Felipe II, the religious, ascetic son of Carlos V, collected the bizarre paintings by Bosch of the monstrous, demonic hell that awaited sinners. Felipe IV not only appointed Velazquez the court painter in the 17th Century but sent him throughout Europe to buy art.

As a museum, however, the Prado owes its existence to a king with rather limited taste in art--the reactionary, unpopular Fernando VII, whose oppressive policies in the early 19th Century led to the loss of the Spanish empire in the New World.

Exiled Art to Prado

Anxious to redecorate the walls of his palace in the French fashion of wallpaper and miniatures, Fernando pulled down the royal family’s large, unfashionable canvases and sent them to the Prado for storage and exhibition. The Prado, which had been built 30 years before to house a natural sciences museum that never materialized, opened its doors once a week in 1819 so that the public could see the king’s paintings. The museum was born.

Today, a great deal of confusion is being generated by the prospect of the Prado similarly acquiring a collection of paintings en masse-- more than half of the 1,600 works in the $2-billion Thyssen collection. That collection has outgrown its present home at the Villa Favorita on the shores of Lake Lugano in Switzerland, and the baron has been looking for a larger site. His fifth wife, Carmen Cervera, a 45-year-old former Spanish beauty queen, evidently persuaded him that the Prado would fit the need.

For the Prado, the Thyssen collection is a blessing with barbs. Thyssen’s French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, German Expressionist works, contemporary American art and French and Dutch Old Masters would fill many of the gaps in the Prado collection. But the Prado would have to house it in a small, renovated building known as the Villahermosa Palace now set aside for paintings kept in storage for lack of space.

“For the Spanish public,” Prado director Perez Sanchez said, “the arrival of the Thyssen collection is an important event, and it is necessary to rejoice over it. But, for us, it is a setback. The exhibition of our collections will be cut back for several years.”

Nevertheless, Spanish officials, reluctant to turn down a staggering gift, signed an agreement with the baron last April for the exhibition of the paintings in the Prado for the next 10 years. The cost to Spain, in maintenance, renovation and rental fees, would come to $177 million.

Only a Loan

But the gift is not a certainty. The 67-year-old Dutch-born baron, whose title comes from his naturalized Hungarian father and his fortune from his German steel industrialist grandfather, has only promised to loan the paintings to the Prado for 10 years while deciding what to do with them permanently.

Spanish officials insist they have an understanding that, if all goes well, the baron will turn the paintings over to the Prado 10 years from now. But such understandings with wealthy private collectors are notoriously uncertain: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently lost the collection of Armand Hammer and UCLA that of Norton Simon, although officials at both institutions believed that the art had been firmly promised to them.

Indeed, The Times of London insists that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Prince of Wales have persuaded Thyssen to turn the paintings over to Britain at a cost to the British government of almost $200 million.

After Franco died, some Spaniards thought they had uncovered a scandal in missing paintings.

“The Prado has more than 7,000 paintings,” said Damaso Santos, the Prado’s press officer, during a recent tour of the museum. “A few years ago, we thought that 3,000 of them were lost. Some people believed that Franco and his family had taken some. But that was not true. They may have stolen some of the national patrimony, but not from the Prado.

“These paintings had been given out to embassies and other government offices for many years and then passed on to still other offices without letting the Prado know. We have tracked most of them down. We have made an inventory. We call it ‘the dispersed Prado.’ ”

The foolish distribution of Prado paintings began more than a century ago. It hid some shady practices. The minister of development pried paintings out of the storerooms of the Prado in 1896 to line the walls of his country estate.

Hanging in Public Buildings

But almost all of the other paintings hang in public buildings throughout Spain, not in private homes. They sometimes hang, however, in a neglected state. For more than 70 years--until 1968--some paintings by Jose Ribera had decorated the walls of the recreation room of a school in Badajoz, suffering a battering from hurtling game balls.

The modernization program brims with controversy. Director Perez Sanchez has been applauded throughout the art world for asking John Brealey, chief of restoration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to take charge of restoration at the Prado. But Brealey has complained often about the lack of equipment, natural light and space for his team.

Many art critics have hailed the recent restoration of a series of 12 galleries on the ground floor as examples of the finest work in lighting and museum decor. But almost all agree that the Prado, in another phase of its modernization, shattered the somber mood of the great black paintings of Goya by mounting them in silly burlap matting.

There are continual reports of conflicts among the staff, some of it arising from differences between specialists hired before the death of Franco and those hired afterward. Those who know the Prado well say that it is still staffed with a number of incompetents who cannot be fired.

For those who love the Prado, these troubles can be dispiriting and tiresome. But most of the Prado’s 2.5 million visitors a year enter the doors of the museum ignorant of its troubles, with their sense of stepping into a hallowed, special place undiminished.