It ensures that in the second tender the conditions of the competition for the transfer of one hundred works are accepted for almost one million euros. “It will be one of the great artistic events of the year and there will be good and big surprises,” the museum promises
«Guido Reni’s exhibition is insured». This was stated on Monday by Prado Museum sources, who confirmed that a solvent bidder had “accepted” the terms of the second competition for the expensive and complex transfer of the specimen’s pieces to Spain from Germany. He did it after the first tender was abandoned. The museum thus saved ‘in extremis’ the celebration of one of the emblematic exhibitions of the season, which should exhibit more than a hundred pieces in the public art gallery from March 28 next year. “It will be one of the big artistic events of the year and there will be good and big surprises,” the museum promises.
The first match, for a fee of 865,000 euros, was declared invalid in June, “which had never happened before”. No one showed up, jeopardizing the holding of the exhibit, something that had never happened in the museum’s recent history.
The Prado urgently formulated a second competition with an item of 965,000 euros, the term of which expired this Monday and for which it did receive a favorable response. “One of the accredited and expert companies that the museum usually works with accepts the terms and is willing to do so,” they explained from the art gallery. “There may be more offers and the one with the best terms will be made,” the same sources added, recalling that “the companies trained for this service are not many” and the one who accepted “one of the big is” .”
They acknowledge from the Prado that this situation is “a thermometer of how the situation of instability, the rise in fuel costs and insurance premiums complicates the organization of exhibitions and exponentially increases their costs.” “In recent times, no exhibition has ever been suspended for these reasons,” they repeated, however.
These types of exhibitions work between three and five years in advance, which means that economic conditions and costs can vary greatly from conception to completion, especially in times of crisis. It is necessary to select the pieces, to link the loans to the owners, to take out the insurance, to design the spaces and to guarantee the safety of the works during the transfers and during their exhibition.
And so it is with ‘Guido Reni and the Spain of the Golden Age’, announced in the Jerónimos del Prado building between March 28 and July 9, 2023. It is organized in collaboration with the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, where the exhibition November 23 and plans to deliver the hundred works in the exhibition to the Prado on March 5.
The Prado admits in the explanatory report that it wrote to increase the amount of the tender that the “lack of offers submitted to the procedure made it possible to discover that from the moment when the maximum estimated price of the contract has been fixed until the bidders have obtained prices to prepare their offer, the evolution of economic conditions has rendered the amount determined insufficient.» They refer, without explicitly mentioning it, to the appreciation of the dollar, the rise in fuel prices and the instability caused by the war in Ukraine.
El Prado took as a reference “market prices for similar services contracted on other occasions”, adapting “to the circumstances and specific needs of this project”.
With a hundred works, including paintings, sculpture and drawings, the exhibition explores the Italian artist’s influence on Spanish creators such as Zurbarán or Murillo and focuses on Guido Reni’s collection of works in Spain by the Crown, the nobility and the clergy, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of the works come from Spanish and Italian museums and from European and American collections.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
