The Prisa Group, editor of the newspaper El País , has auctioned a few days ago part of its extensive art collection. Works by Manolo Valdés, Úrculo, Picasso, Canogar, Chillida, Tàpies, Antonio Saura or Mompó were put up for sale at an auction of the Durán house on January 30. As this newspaper has been able to know, a good part of them has been sold for low prices.
There are two things that attract the attention of this auction: the prices with which many of these works went on sale, and that the decision to auction them will be taken without consulting the Board of Directors of the group, as several sources of the company have confirmed To this newspaper. Some of these sources specified that "there was a plan for two years to sell the works , but in the absence of buyers it was decided to auction them."
The collection was acquired with funds from the Prisa Group over decades, mainly by those who were its two strong men since the beginning: Jesús de Polanco and Juan Luis Cebrián . At the end of the 70s, the group's founding businessman, who died in 2007, and the one who was director of El País until 1988 and then CEO of Prisa and honorary president, gradually bought many of these paintings, serigraphs and prints. The works decorated for years offices and meeting rooms of the publisher, who also owns the Cadena Ser . For approximately four decades, Prisa had managed to accumulate one of the great collections of contemporary art in Spain.
The two star works of the collection and the auction itself, in which 924 items were put up for sale - although only a part belonged to Prisa - were undoubtedly the painting La medusa raft , by Manolo Valdés , and the Triptych made in 1977 by Rafael Canogar . The first was the work with a higher starting price: 60,000 euros, although it ended with a auction price of only 70,000. The Canogar was auctioned for 35,000 as the starting price, and ended up sold at 60,000.
There have been other works that have ended in record sales. For example, Gravitaciones , by Eduardo Chillida , came out at 35,000 and ended up awarded 140,000. The same happened with Open House in the Field , by Manuel Hernández Mompó , which started at 35,000 and reached one of its highest quotes, 150,000 euros. Arc i Guixades , from Tàpies , started at 25,000 euros and ended at 90,000.
Many drawings by Antonio Saura also attract attention, which in addition to their artistic value were part of the cultural legacy of the newspaper. His weekly The Weekly Country had commissioned Saura himself a cover inspired in 1984, the novel by George Orwell . That adventure ended with a series of drawings that showed his personal interpretation of this dystopia and later served to inspire an illustrated edition. The auctioned series, of 11 drawings, came out with a price of 1,600 euros per work, and ended up awarded in various quantities, from 2,250 to 6,000 euros.
It is not very well understood why the group has decided to get rid of its art collection, since the sum collected together does not reach one million euros, a capital that does not really help reduce the debt of a company as large as the owner of El País , but instead was part of its historical legacy.
In this auction some vignettes of two of the great comedians of the Spanish press coincided, the cartoonist Antonio Fraguas, Forges, already deceased, and another historical illustrator of El País, Perídis. However, this newspaper has not been able to confirm whether these works were part of the Prisa collection, since the auction house has not provided information on who was the owner of all the works. In these cases the starting prices were around 150 or 200 euros.
This auction, as company sources explained to PAPER, is interpreted by some Prisa professionals as a rejection of its founder's legacy. Perhaps it is also a sample of the times the press is experiencing, when a group of venture capital is the main shareholder.
The official version of why the auction is part of the group is preparing a while staff travel to Madrid 's Calle Miguel Yuste, where the writing of the country is, and reducing space there was no physical space for many place artworks. The same sources have explained that the sale "is due to a reorganization of the art collection, and that everything that has been sold was unimportant and corresponds only to a minimum part of the total collection." These sources added that there is still "a large number of works that continue to belong to the group."
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