The Carmen Thyssen Museum project in the old Comèdia cinema is advancing at a good pace. After the preliminary agreement reached on May 25 with the ownership of the premises, the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, received the baroness at City Hall yesterday, who, accompanied by her team, wanted to explain first-hand the museum project in the in which the investment firm Stonewegel participates. As this newspaper has learned, the City Council is very positive that Barcelona can have a collection of the international relevance of Carmen Cervera’s.
The opening of the center reinforces an offer that is added to the future expansions of the Macba and the MNAC
The old desire of the Baroness, for whom “having a museum in Barcelona is a dream come true”, as she recently declared to La Vanguardia, coincides with the ambition of the current socialist council to reinforce the cultural commitment of the city. In this sense, the opening of the art gallery on Passeig de Gràcia, for which there is still no scheduled date, would join the expansions of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Macba) and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), the latter with the horizon set at 2029 coinciding with the celebration of the centenary of the Universal Exhibition.
Xavi Ayén
At the meeting, in addition to the mayor and the baroness, were present the second deputy mayor Maria Eugènia Gay, the councilor of Culture Xavier Marcé; José Daniel Barquero, CEO of the Thyssen Collection Group, and Ignacio Barquero, responsible for the creative direction and architecture of the Carmen Thyssen Collection. Jaume Sabater, Xavier Pujol and Juan Manuel Sevillano attended on behalf of the Stoneweg firm. And also at the meeting was Santiago de Torres, the executive president of Atrys Health, who in the early nineties was undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture and participated in the negotiation of the purchase of the Thyssen collection by the Spanish Government.
“I had been trying to open a museum in Barcelona for many years. My idea was always that, to install it here. I am Catalan, like my grandparents, great-great-grandparents, my father, who was pure Catalan, and my mother, who was born in Madrid and spoke perfect Catalan, since she married my father when she was 17,” Carmen Thyssen confessed in the cited interview with this newspaper, in which he also stated that although he had had offers from other countries “the option of Barcelona was my absolute preference.”
