The Prado joins the tribute to Plácido Arango at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum: “One of the great collectors”

The Prado Museum will participate through the loan of works in the exhibition-homage to the collector Plácido Arango that will take place at the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, ‘The search for the beginning. Tribute to Plácido Arango’a long-term initiative that over the next four years will occupy the first five rooms of the historic building of the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts on the occasion of the reopening of the Basque institution.

The director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Falomir, has claimed the role of Asturian collector and patron at the presentation event held this Monday at the Madrid art gallery. “The Prado would have been different without him.”stated Falomir.

Plácido Arango was a member of the Royal Board of Trustees of the Prado Museum since 1986 and president of said board between 2007 and 2012, when he became honorary trustee. As recalled by the Prado’s deputy director of conservation and research, Alfonso Palacio, in 2015 Arango donated 26 masterpieces from his ancient art collection to the Prado, including pieces by Pedro de Campaña, Luis de Morales, Francisco de Zurbarán, Herrera el Mozo, Valdés Leal and Francisco de Goya. Added to this donation is the one made in 1991, consisting of a first edition of Goya’s Caprichos.

“Plácido Arango was one of the great collectors. We were fortunate to share many experiences with him, one of them when he took over the presidency of the Prado Museum.”explained the former director of the Prado and current director of the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts, Miguel Zugaza, while pointing out that the tribute will occupy the entrances and the first five rooms of the old building of the Bilbao museum with works donated by the collector’s children.

The project will exhibit more than one hundred works from the Arango collection until the end of 2030 in different exhibition itineraries. Zugaza has highlighted an “exceptional group” of classical Spanish art with authors such as Pedro de Campaña, El Greco, Ribera, Zurbarán, Van der Hamen, Murillo, Antonio Pereda, Goya, Fortuny y to the hole Modern and contemporary art will be represented by names such as Kees van Dongen, Albert Gleizes, Joan Miró, Germaine Richier, Jean Dubuffet, Antoni Tàpies, Andy Warhol and John Chamberlain, among others.

Monumental sculpture will also play a leading role in the project, which will extend to the entrance plazas to the museum – with works by Pablo Palazuelo and Cristina Iglesias -, the new Arriaga Atrium – where Eduardo Chillida’s Homage to Calder will be exhibited – and the outdoor sculpture terrace, with a piece by Anthony Caro. In addition, the sculpture ‘Bilbao’, by Richard Serra, has already returned to the museum through the donation of Arango’s children.

The name of the exhibition comes from a text by the writer Octavio Paz, a personal friend of Arango. Maite Arango, the collector’s daughter, who spoke on behalf of her brothers, stated that “Octavio Paz expresses it very well when he relates this inclination for art with the search for a beginning, without beginning or end.”

Maite Arango has described the project as “a serious game, a kind of exquisite corpse that would allow the different collecting interests to be shown and relate them to those of other friends and institutions with whom he shared so many things in life.”

“His discretion, elegance and that decision and character to materialize the facts and get to the end of things. I think that Plácido, despite his extraordinary sense of humor, was serious,” added Palacio for his part.

As reported by the Basque art gallery, the project will also have loans from international institutions with which Arango maintained ties. Among them, the Metropolitan Museum in New York – of which he was a patron – will give ‘Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Prison’, by Paolo Veronese; the San Diego Museum of Art will provide the ‘Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber’ by Juan Sánchez Cotán; and the Hispanic Society of New York will lend Velázquez’s ‘Portrait of a Girl’. The Venezuelan artist Gego will be represented with ‘Esfera n° 1’, from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, who has also committed her donation to the Bilbao museum in memory of Arango.

Coinciding with the development of the project, the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts has created the Arango Chair, an academic program that will be inaugurated in the fall with a master class by Keith Christiansen, art historian and curator emeritus of European Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.