The Prado Museum is investigating the origins of 62 works from its collection. As they announced, they want to find out if they were confiscated during the Spanish Civil War or Franco’s dictatorship.
“The goal of the new initiative is to clarify any suspicions that may exist about the background and context of the artworks before they became part of the Prado collection and, if necessary and in accordance with the legal provisions, to return the works to their rightful owners,” the museum wrote in a press release.
The Madrid Museum recently published a list of 25 works originating from seizures during the Civil War (1936-39), and published images of 22 works on its website. By Thursday, the number of artworks confirmed as seized had risen to 62 – mostly paintings. The list, which is continuously updated, can be viewed on the museum’s website.
The list includes, among other things, paintings by a Flemish artist from the 17th century Jan Brueghel Jr.a French painter Francois Boucher and the Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla.
Most of the works on the list were kept in museum archives, only five – including Soroll’s portrait Women with a white headscarf – and it was on display in state museums in Girona, Granada and Malaga. “The quality of these works has a very wide range, some canvases are the work of masters such as Joaquín Sorolla, while others are anonymous works whose authorship will probably never be known,” Andrés Ubeda, head of the Prado’s conservation department, told RTVE television this week.
The list is getting longerAs they also announced from the museum, they established an investigation group, which he leads Arturo Colorado, an expert on cultural heritage and the Civil War, to investigate the provenance of works from his collection. She will publish the report in January.
All 25 works that were originally identified were deposited in the museum collection Commission for the Protection of Artistic Heritage, founded by Francisco Franco during the Civil War. Of these, 17 paintings were donated to the museum between 1940 and 1942. Six of them were first transported to the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid in 1942-43, and were later taken over by the Prado.
in Spain this year they already had a high-profile case of the restitution of a work of art. Ramón de la Sota Chalbaud, the great-great-grandson of Marquis Ramón de la Sota y Llano, after a precedent ruling (from a state-owned hotel chain), got back two works (a Spanish and a Flemish master) that had been confiscated from his aristocratic family by Francoist forces 85 years ago .
Source: Rtvslo