Fine Arts Academy votes in third female member

When, in 1966, Carmen Giménez arrived for the first time in the Spain her parents had abandoned for Morocco during the Civil War, “art was a subject for women, and men in general had little interested in working in it.” On Monday night the Guggenheim Museums’ curator of 20th-century art became only the third woman to be admitted into the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and the first in the institution’s 268-year history to be chosen as an honorary member.

Giménez was elected in the first round of Monday’s vote almost unanimously, receiving 34 out of 37 votes. She was put forward by members Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Juan Bordes and Francisco Calvo Serraller. Following her appointment, some members of the academy admitted that there was a desire to increase the number of women in the ranks of the institution.

It is a will that, as far as can be seen, is developing at its own — very academic — pace. The first female member to be admitted, the singer Teresa Berganza, made it in 1994. The painter Carmen Laffón came in 2000. And 12 years later, it was Giménez’s turn. “When they spoke to me about the possibility, I accepted out of a symbolic recognition of how much the role of women has changed in Spain since those long-ago 1960s,” she said, a few hours before the vote, in the living room of her home in Madrid.

Born in Casablanca in 1943, Giménez has more than her fair share of talents. A key name in the development of contemporary art in democratic Spain, she is the curator of dozens of exhibitions that marked a new era, a leading Picasso expert, and is also passionate about sculpture. We owe her the initial drive that, in the time of Culture Minister Javier Solana, ended with the founding of Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum, which she briefly headed up until her resignation in 1989, when its first director, Tomás Llorens, was appointed. Today Giménez forms part of the boards of the Reina Sofía and Prado Museums. “It was crucial to transmit an image of Spain’s modernity to the world,” she says of the times.

Since 1989 she has been a member of the group of curators of the Guggenheim in New York. It was there that, fed up with Spanish bureaucracy, she took refuge. She came up with the idea for it to open a sister museum in Bilbao. “I had to explain to them where the city was. One of the things I am most proud of is the hall of Richard Serra sculptures, the best collection of the artist’s work in the world. It was a project, by the way, that was presented at the San Fernando Academy,” she says.

Until now, Giménez has been a member of the San Fernando Academy in New York, a category that encompasses the institution’s collaborators outside of Madrid and includes a greater number of women. And given her myriad activities, it is understood that she has only accepted this new role in an honorary capacity. This position doesn’t carry with it, for example, the obligation to attend the academy’s weekly meetings. In fact, since the recent death of artist Antoni Tàpies the attendees at this elite club number just six.

A higher degree of involvement would be incompatible with her jet-setting agenda, given that she divides her time between Madrid and New York, and the high levels of commitment she devotes to all of her projects.

Right now she is working full time on putting the finishing touches to the Picasso Black and White exhibition, scheduled to open at the Guggenheim New York in October. On Monday night, surrounded by hundreds of catalogues of the Málaga-born artist, she proudly showed off the recently finished cover of the catalogue for the new exhibition, which aims to show that Picasso was worried more about “form and structure than color.”

It might be something of an unnecessary question, but what is the theme that she is planning to tackle in her academy investiture speech? “Well I haven’t had too much time to think it over,” comes the reply. “But, well, I guess it ought to be Picasso.”