EL PRADO-FRANCO – TELAM Agency
After three months of research, the professor and professor emeritus Arturo Colorado and his team found 70 works from the Francoist looting in the Prado Museum collections and, after the discovery, some pieces will be exhibited in a room to raise awareness about what happened and so that the heirs of the true owners can come to recognize them.
The document prepared by Colorado – available in its entirety at https://www.museodelprado.es/obras-incautadas- highlights the importance of distinguishing between two types of seizures: “Works sent for preservation to the warehouses of the Prado and of Modern Art by the Republican Artistic Treasury Board during the war and those assigned on deposit to both museums by the Francoist Heritage Defense Service in the postwar period”.
In the first case, which corresponds to 32 of the 70 pieces, the file included at least the origin. On the other hand, that did not happen with the other 38, kidnapped during the dictatorship.
As can be read in the report, the owners of the pieces “failed to prove ownership, had died, were in exile, had been retaliated against, or were simply unknown because their names were not recorded in the seizure records.” From now on, it is up to the potential owners and heirs to claim, if they consider it, the refund.
The original ownership of the thousands of assets looted during the years after the Civil War was erased in most cases. Among the owners are the works of the Republican mayor Pedro Rico, a Sorolla work owned by the Marquis of Villalonga and churches in Guadalajara and Segovia.
“It is absolute chaos. There are republicans, nobles and churches. The Francoist service did not return all the works and did not inquire into the origin of those goods. And there was also a lot of interest from Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón, the deputy director and director of the Prado during the dictatorship, because some of them stayed. He was a decisive and highly questionable figure in this whole story,” Arturo Colorado points out in the report. Sánchez Cantón also took the opportunity to buy goods that were already seized at the museum at a low cost.
Beyond the initiative of the Museum, the Ministry of Culture of Spain has not yet initiated any investigation into the looting in its 16 state museums and there is still no inventory of the stolen goods that were deposited during the Franco regime.
The report implies that to these 70 pieces could be added seven medals entered in 1936, from the Retiro Exhibition Palace, and 89 drawings deposited in 1971 by the Ministry of Education and Science, without reference to who was the previous owner. These pieces -explains the report- are still in the investigation process in the Documentation and Archive area of the Museo del Prado, headed by María Luisa Cuenca.
As a way of showing the public the impact of looting, El Prado will place a selection of 11 of these works in the Baja Norte Gallery of the Villanueva building until May 2 so that the heirs of the owners can come to check if they are real that actually belong to them.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
