Carmen Thyssen will cash in on her dream Barcelona museum

White smoke for the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Barcelona. The Baroness has reached an agreement in principle with the Stoneweg investment fund and the owners of the historic Comedia cinema, located in the heart of Barcelona, ​​to transform the elegant building with a neoclassical façade into a museum and cultural center. It will be the aristocrat’s fourth museum, which will make money by renting part of her formidable collection.

As reported on Friday by the digital ‘On Economia’ and later confirmed by various sources familiar with the process, the Pla and Planàs families, owners of the historic building, have an agreement with the baroness and the Stoneweg investment fund to transform the use of the cinema. The baroness’s collection of Catalan paintings from the last three centuries would occupy a privileged place in the new cultural complex. The investment would amount to 65 million euros and it is estimated that it will generate about 300 direct and indirect jobs.

The preliminary agreement sets the duration of the rental of the space at 25 years and contemplates that the baroness rent out part of her private collection. These are works that are not exhibited or that circulate in galleries and museums around the world. The investors would cover the rental of the facilities of the Baroness’s collection.

Two weeks ago, Carmen Cervera had expressed her willingness to resume the project of opening a new space for art in Barcelona, ​​her hometown. “An important museum of some of the best works of Catalan art would be the best legacy that could be left to future generations,” she told the newspaper La Vanguardia.

The owners of the cinema hinted then that things would take a long time, but everything has been precipitated and the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Barcelona Museum is emerging as a reality. It would be the fourth in the baroness’s collection, joining the Thyssen-Bornemisza that houses the bulk of her collection in Madrid, – along with that of her husband, which has been property of the Spanish State since 1992 – the one in Malaga – dedicated to painting Spanish from the 19th and 20th centuries – and that of Andorra – with temporary exhibitions of funds from the collection -.

It would be the fifth if the Barcelona museum does not paralyze the one that Carmen Cervera had planned in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, on the Costa Brava. The option of opening another museum in Alicante already vanished at the beginning of this year.

‘OnEconomia’ assures that the Baroness had a multimillion-dollar offer to exhibit part of her private collection in a new museum in Dubai, but that she preferred that they be exhibited in her hometown.

Tita Cervera’s dream of having her own museum in Barcelona comes from afar. Already in 2012, the transfer of around a hundred works from her collection to the pavilion of Queen Victoria Eugenia in Montjuïc was taken for granted, when Tita Cervera threatened to remove her fourth from the Thyssen in Madrid. The project was frustrated and the baroness ended up taking refuge in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, where she was building, in fits and starts, a museum for the collection of Catalan painting from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The future Barcelona museum is located at the intersection of Gran Vía and Paseo de Gracia, the two most noble roads in Barcelona. A very expensive and coveted location, a diamond in the real estate market, which has housed a cinema for more than six decades. Managed by the Yelmo Group, it closed its five theaters on February 14. Before being a cinema, the building, known as Palau Marcet, was a private residence from 1887 to 1934. It then became the Comedy Theater and became a cinema in 1960.