Madrid
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One year following carmen thyssen and the then Minister of Culture, José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, will sign, following a lunch at the baroness’s house in Madrid, the protocol of intentions to rent the Carmen Thyssen collection to the Spanish State, for 15 years with the right to purchase and a price of 6.5 million per year, the definitive agreement will be closed on February 9 at the Thyssen Museum, as confirmed by the Ministry of Culture. Together with the Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, and Baroness Thyssen, her son, Borja Thyssen. Although at first it was planned that her name would appear on the labels of the works that she will inherit from her mother, it seems that finally only the name of the baroness will appear.
In May 2021 ABC toured exclusively with the Baroness the brand new spaces of the Thyssen Museum that will house her collection. They are rooms 41-48 on the ground floor (a thousand square meters in total), from which the 20th-century paintings of the historic Thyssen Collection, acquired in 1993 by the Spanish State for 350 million dollars, have been evicted. It is accessed from the museum lobby. At the entrance, a fragment of Gauguin’s ‘Mata Mua’ and a sign: ‘Carmen Thyssen Collection’. The walls have been painted smoke white. 18 windows have been ‘blinded’.
Finally, sthere were 179 works exhibited. Only one is yet to come: ‘Mata Mua’, to which an ‘altar’ is dedicated in a room where there are another eight canvases, a ceramic and a drawing by Gauguin. The ‘Mata Mua’ is found in the baroness’s bunker in Andorra. The four marbles by Rodin that were in the hall of the art gallery are incorporated into the rooms. In the preliminary agreement there was talk of renting some 400 works from his collection. In the loan there were 425. That number has been reduced to 329, but the price remains the same: 6.5 million. How is that explained? «These are works that were in warehouses, they were never placed in the rooms. They went on temporary loans to the Museum of Malaga, the Museum of Sant Feliu de Guíxols… They don’t all fit into these rooms. Some (regarding fifty, perhaps) will be distributed throughout the permanent collection of the Thyssen Museum. In addition, I am going to include four or five that were not on loan: a Metzinger, a Vasarely, a sculpture by Yves Klein… It is not so much the quantity as what interests this museum”, said Carmen Thyssen at the time. “The museum and I have preferred to sacrifice some works.”
Of the loan, and therefore of the rent, three very outstanding works came out a long time ago: ‘Charing Cross Bridge’, by Monet; Degas’s ‘Racehorses in a Landscape’ and Hopper’s ‘The ‘Martha McKeen’ of Wellfleet’. The baron’s collection, which the Spanish state bought in 1993, and the baroness’s are not joined together, as was originally envisaged. «I applaud it. I think that the public has to see, if we reach an agreement and with the amounts that are going to be paid, how is this collection. It is what they have adduced in the museum. At first I was excited that they were united, as they were until 2002, “Carmen Thyssen said a year ago.
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