What The Hell America!

Similar to Maria Balshaw, the current director of the United Kingdom’s Tate museums, the successful candidate was simultaneously an insider and outsider in relation to a national art establishment disproportionately well represented in the metropolitan centers of Madrid and Barcelona. Manuel Segade, born in 1977 in Galicia (amongst Spain’s poorest and most rural areas) followed his undergraduate studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela with a PhD in Leeds under the supervision of the celebrated feminist art historian Griselda Pollock. He then took classes with the literary critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in Paris.

Between 2007 and 2009, he was director of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art. He then took on various freelance roles before being appointed as director of the Contemporary Art Museum in Mostoles, a commuter town in Greater Madrid, a post he held until coming to the Reina Sofia. A year into his new job, we met to discuss the institution he inherited, progress made thus far and the opportunities and challenges he sees for the upcoming years.

Segade, surprised to discover I had been to the museum in Mostoles, noted how it was very much off-road — not even on the radar of most cultured people working in Madrid. Yet, he saw this as far from a handicap. If contemporary art exists at the peripheries of the canon, where better to operate then at the geographical and social peripheries? In a similar vein, Balshaw gives prominence in her interviews and writings to her early encounters with art and museums in England’s industrial Black Country, an area long disparaged as a backwater by London elites. A transnational turn toward inclusivity and the breaking down of traditional hierarchies has resulted in personal and professional experience beyond the metropolis having a newfound professional kudos.

Highly critical of the witch-hunt against former Reina Sofia director Borja-Villel, Segade highlighted his disgust at how the right-wing press had targeted his predecessor’s wife. He recalled that months before the directorship was advertised, he was outside the National Gallery in London when he was called upon to draft a letter of support for Borja-Villel on behalf of an association of international contemporary art museums. Following his appointment at the Reina Sofia, Segade noted how his idiosyncratic clothing surprised many when he traveled to New York, where it had been assumed that right-wingers had ousted Borja-Villel to replace him with one of their own.

Segade’s appointment did not constitute a political coup, and he clearly identifies with the political left. He told me how Pablo Iglesias, the former leader of the radical-left Unidas Podemos — who has now left politics but remains engaged with cultural institutions — had been to visit him a few days earlier, and he was full of praise for Ángeles González-Sinde, a former Socialist Minister of Culture (2009–11) who currently serves as the president of the museum’s board of trustees. Segade is not, however, a marked man like Borja-Villel. He was explicit throughout our conversation that defending his predecessor against a politically motivated witch-hunt does not equate to defending every decision or initiative during his long tenure.

Borja-Villel first arrived at the Reina Sofia with impeccable credentials. After working abroad at New York’s Hispanic Society of America Museum, he returned to Barcelona to direct the Tapiés Foundation exhibition space and later the City’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the MACBA. He was credited with putting MACBA on the international art map; on closer inspection, a suspicious number of the accolades it (and later the Reina Sofia) accrued came from ArtForum, an influential US magazine for which he once worked. The MACBA was undoubtedly ahead of the curve in anticipating the socio-political anxieties and transformations that later crystalized around Spain’s anti-austerity, pro-radical democracy 15-M movement.

For instance, the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe spoke on a number of occasions at the MACBA before she consolidated her position as one of the chief ideologues for the new Spanish left after the occupation of the country’s major city squares by the indignados movement. With Borja-Villel at the helm, the Reina Sofia was ideally placed to become a breeding ground for new models of political and artistic activism. The museum, an emblematic institution of Spain’s democratic normalization, somewhat ironically became a space to be used by agitators from Podemos and elsewhere, whose political projects often challenged the myths of the Transition and its exemplary democratic mores.

This ideological shift was accompanied by a curatorial overhaul: a fairly conventional chronological approach to great artworks gave way to a more horizontal and fluid ethos associated with the MACBA.

Fairly typical in this regard was an exhibition staged from 2018 to 2020 titled “Poetics of Democracy: Images and Counterimages of the Transition,” which provided scope for experimental and dissident artists as well as noncanonical forms of cultural expression such as fanzines. The nuancing of established narratives might have been more effective had there been a clearer curatorial narrative — anyone not familiar with the Transition would, I suspect, have been excluded and left confused on encountering such a disparate selection of cultural artefacts. The ethos of the 15-M was later incorporated into the museum’s collection through the purchase in 2021 of Take the Street, 2011, Madrid, a comic-book style portrait of a young female protester by the Peruvian-born artist, María María Acha-Kutscher.

Jesús Carrillo, the outgoing head of cultural activities at the Reina Sofia, published an extended book-length diatribe last year titled The Unfinished Museum. The underlying thesis is that the only mistake made by the Borja-Villel regime was to be too radical and to underestimate the ruthlessness of their enemies. What such a vision sidesteps is that there were those who were sympathetic to the socio-political aims of the 15-M movement who harbored doubts about effectively putting so much world-class art in the cupboard with no clear plan of what to put in its place. It is often forgotten that the MACBA’s noncanonical approach was born out of necessity as much as conviction: its permanent collection, derived from the holdings of a private gallery owner, is decidedly underwhelming.

When I said to Segade that I understood the author’s desire to vent, but that I hadn’t been impressed with the book, he concurred: Carrillo was a personal friend whom he respected, but the publication hadn’t, he felt, added much to the conversation. We also agreed that, although the Reina Sofia’s remit in principle encompasses art from 1881 onward, late-nineteenth-century art painting was unfairly sidelined. I hadn’t, for example, been aware that the collection included works by the Basque-born painter Ignacio Zuloaga (1870–1945), widely considered Spain’s greatest living painter until Picasso came upon the scene, before seeing Bleeding Christ (1911), on loan for “The Myth of Spain” exhibition in Munich earlier this year.

Segade, whose PhD dissertation addresses nineteenth-century art, is keen to redress this historical omission. He hinted more generally that the permanent collection would be back on display beginning from the most contemporary works and then heading backward. He has since confirmed this at a press conference in which he vowed, from 2026 onward, to have over 70 percent of the museum’s holdings on display as well as to segregate periods, and permanent from temporary exhibitions, by floors. This is in part to avoid the sensation visitors often currently report of coming out of a lift to enter a labyrinth in which it isn’t clear what can be found and where.

Post-Franco Spain has often placed too high a premium on international recognition and collaborations. The Reina Sofia has provided a resting place for Guernica, clearly one of the world’s most iconic paintings, and a privileged location in the Spanish capital for major touring exhibitions. It is not, however, anywhere in the same league as the city’s Prado. The politicization of culture nevertheless means that expressing a preference for the older institution is often construed as evidence of conservatism. This association is a complete non sequitur in theory, if not always in practice.

The world-leading Prado collection reflects the fact that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain was arguably the most powerful nation in Europe and had an art collection to match. It can stand side by side with the Louvre or the National Gallery in London. By 1881, Spain had lost most of its empire and was a poor relation to its European neighbors. The architecture and location for the Reina Sofia clearly ape Paris’s Pompidou Center, but it is no insult to state that it is not in the same league as this French museum or the Tate Modern in London. Segade seemed surprised by my skepticism surrounding his claims that Borja-Villel had boosted international prestige or that nobody turned down the chance to collaborate with the museum. He also sidestepped my question about why there weren’t more applications for his job by quoting the fifty-plus applications for the role of assistant director.

At a time when Madrid is thriving as a tourist destination, the Reina Sofia plays an important role in the city’s brand. On December 1, 2018, the local metro stop, Atocha, was renamed the “Art Station.” In 2021, a new Hard Rock Hotel opened directly opposite the Reina Sofia with postmodern Meninas signed by flamenco-pop star Rosalía in the lobby. In summer 2022, the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger caused controversy by posting a photo of himself in front of Guernica on social media. Photographing Picasso’s masterpiece had always been prohibited, but an international rock star was allowed not to play by the rules.

In an attempt to court the Instagram generation, one of Segade’s first moves following his appointment was to lift the ban. When I inquired about this, he claimed there was no real rationale for the historical ban, which simply made reference to ensuring “the quality of the visit.” He considered that best guarantee of that was young people feeling at home in the museum. I inquired whether this was the spirit behind his claim that he could see a place for musicians such as Rosalía (who has in the past been filmed performing in front of Guernica) in the museum of the future. He did, although he decried the undue media attention around the claim — made within the context of a lengthy press conference — as lazy journalism.

If, to a significant extent, the Reina Sofia owes its existence to Madrid wanting a permanent home for Guernica (and thereby bypassing claims for it to be returned to the Basque Country), Segade disagrees with my assessment that the painting has been a blessing and a curse for the institution, insofar as it has guaranteed visitor numbers but arguably made the museum and the Ministry of Culture complacent. Segade argued instead that the visitor numbers it guarantees gives the Reina Sofia the freedom to be more adventurous and try different things. As with all major museums, programming is done far in advance, and Segade has inherited a backlog of exhibitions from Borja-Villel. Yet there are, he suggested, advantages to this, as it gives him the time to work on more mundane matters behind the scenes. Although complementary about the administrative structures he inherited, some quite basic housekeeping clearly needs to be done.

The publication of the catalogue for the major “Picasso 1906” exhibition, staged to coincide with the half-centenary of the painter’s death in 2023 (but not appearing until the year after) is indicative of an institution that is highly professional in some regards and completely dysfunctional in others. Segade noted down my observations about the unintelligibility of the English translations accompanying Richard Serra’s sculpture Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasí. The late US artist was commissioned to create the work for the Reina Sofia Centre in 1986. After two years on display, it was put in storage. In 2006, the museum admitted it had somehow lost the thirty-eight-tonne sculpture and had no idea where it was. Serra completed a replica now on display.

Under Borja-Villel’s leadership, a number of exhibitions didn’t satisfy the minimum levels of professionalism associated with a major art museum. This was indicative of a hands-off approach that did, nevertheless, carry some advantages, as it provided a home for upcoming or marginalized artists unlikely to get past the gatekeepers or bureaucracy of the Pompidou or the Tate. On the one hand, Segade’s more traditional management style is already being felt by, say, those teaching on the Reina Sofia–accredited master’s course run in conjunction with local universities. Conversely, he told me that his priority is to take the museum’s commitment to horizontal as opposed to hierarchical working practices and collaborations to the next level. His overarching goal is that a diverse range of people come to the museum to enjoy themselves — although he refused to be pinned down on specific milestones or indicators of success.

The Reina Sofia has survived the perhaps most turbulent period of its thirty-plus year history; time will tell how it might thrive in this new age.