An ex-commissioner of the Reina Sofía Museum denounces that her boss has stolen the exhibition 'Picasso in Gósol'

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Paloma Esteban, former conservative head of the Department of Painting 1881-1940 of the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, denounces that his former bosses in the museum have "appropriated" the project of an exhibition that Esteban devised and developed between 2012 and 2017 and that the museum canceled as unfeasible. That same discarded project has now reappeared on Queen Sofia's agenda with the commissioner of Rosario Peiró, her superior in the museum. Queen Sofia responds that Esteban's work was only "preparatory" and that, therefore, it is incorrect to speak of appropriation.

The denounced facts refer to 2012. Then, Esteban proposed to the Museum's director, Manuel Borja-Villel, and Rosario Peiro a sample dedicated to the summer that Pablo Picasso spent in the Lleida town of Gósol . In 1906, the Malaga painter spent four months in the Pyrenees. There he studied Romanesque art and Iberian art and received the influence that led him to Las Señoritas de Avignon (1907), the work that changed his career. An important fact: that thread that leads from the Pyrenees to Cubist painting is a theory that has not been shown so far in any exhibition. However, it has been treated in academic congresses; It is not an extravagant idea nor does it contradict conventional Picassian knowledge .

In 2015, the proposal became a formal project: Esteban shows a report of that year in which he explained what the story of the exhibition was going to be, in which spaces of the museum would be exhibited and what pictures would reach Queen Sofia . Esteban claimed his responsibility for the exhibition and its catalog and linked it with other projects of his personal career . Queen Sofia officials gave clue to the project. Picasso in Gósol was due to debut in autumn 2019, in the rooms of the Permanent Collection of the Reina Sofía National Museum of Art, floor two.

Esteban explains to EL MUNDO that both Peiró and Borja-Villel maintained their support for the project during the following months. He assures that before a trip to New York, the Museum director asked him which paintings included in the project were in the United States and promised that he would personally negotiate his assignment . Peiro did the same on the eve of a trip to Paris. And in 2016, a curator of the Picasso Museum in Paris (co-producer of the project) examined with Esteban the space planned to host the exhibition.

The following year, the project was canceled. According to Esteban, his bosses explained that the exhibition was expensive and that the collaboration with the Picasso Museum was not satisfactory . «It is true that it is an expensive exhibition. Insurance for a picasso's loans is the most expensive in the market, ”he explains. "I believed it." In 2019, Esteban retired with the idea that Picasso's exhibition in Gósol had been parked like so many truncated projects.

Until February 4 of this year, the newspaper La Vanguardia reported that Queen Sofia plans to show in spring 2022 a sample of the impact of that summer on Gósol and its influence on her invention of cubism. According to what was published, Esteban considers that the subject and the thesis are the same as she proposed , as well as its volume (about 100 pieces, counting drawings and sculptures). In addition, the paintings of which the information speaks are the same as Esteban had defined in his report, with special emphasis on the portrait of Gertrude Stein of 1906.

What is the version of Reina Sofía? The Museum has prepared a writing in which it assures that the idea that Esteban proposed and developed is not the one of the sample that will be seen in 2020. «The project was not continued due to a problem of dates with the Picasso Museum in Paris, at the time co-organizers of the sample. Later, and once the lady. Esteban had ceased his services in the museum, the possibility arises to resume the exhibition, that not the project of Mrs. Esteban. At this moment the decision is made not to have Mrs. Esteban's project since, in the opinion of the museum, its reading is in the common places of Picasso's historiography ».

What does that mean? «The start of the project was based on a formalistic reading focused on the painter's personal life and based on period readings already made by other art historians. An expository speech already done », they explain from the Museum.

In principle, any boss should correct or discard the work of his employees if he does not find it good. "What is strange to me is that Peiró is the new commissioner," Esteban explains. In his opinion, Peiró's profile is that of a manager rather than that of a researcher. Peiró arrived at Reina Sofía from the Macba, along with Borja-Villel, in 2008. In these years, she has been curator of four temporary exhibitions in the museum, in addition to the Picasso exhibition. The trip of Guernica , of the Obra Social la Caixa.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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• Reina Sofia Museum

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