Off Grid

I’ve waited a very long time for this. But finally it’s happened, and I couldn’t be more delighted. There are things here that have been in storage for so long, nobody thought they’d ever see the light of day again,” says Helga de Alvear, sounding for all the world like the proprietor of a spectacular architect-designed house who has just been given the keys.

In fact, the comparison is apposite. The new Museo Helga de Alvear in Cáceres, capital of its own province in the little-traversed region of Extremadura, represents the fulfilment of a dream for the German-born, Spain-based gallerist, who had long been seeking a showcase for her world-class collection of 20th- and 21st-century art.

As we move from room to room, she points out the salient details with the satisfaction of the new homeowner. “That’s Kandinsky, that’s Yves Klein; that one’s Damien Hirst. Over there is the space with my Thomas Hirschhorn – Power Tools – which I’ve had in boxes for years. It’s only been shown once, at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. I’d never seen it in the flesh, but when I saw the photos I thought, ‘I’ll have that’,” she says, beaming.

With her warm smile and soft features, and her beige wool coat with big buttons, you might mistake the 85-year-old Alvear for the kind of cosy grandmother-figure who offers you sugared almonds, were it not for the glint of steel behind her thick spectacles.

“I learned to be a gallerist, but my vice is collecting,” she confides. “I’m guided by intuition: I have very good hunches. But I’ve also been lucky. The Pace Gallery once gave me a table by Donald Judd. They said it would cost more to ship back to the US than it was worth. And who’s that boy who takes photos? Wolfgang Tillmans. I bought him when he was unknown. ‘This guy, some day…’, I thought. And they were so cheap at the time.”

Spread over the four floors of a glittering modernist edifice on the edge of old-town Cáceres, the museum’s permanent exhibition gives an idea of the breadth and quality of Alvear’s collection, which includes some 3,000 works of art. Strolling the all-white halls, I see Richard Long, Dan Flavin, Beuys, Twombly, Bourgeois – and also work by names like Elmgreen & Dragset, Kara Walker and multidisciplinary Korean conceptualist Kimsooja. There are large-scale works to catch the eye and stimulate the mind, among them a Dan Graham installation in glass and aluminium (Pavilion for Showing Rock Videos/Films, 2012) and a room-sized Olafur Eliasson (Echo Activity, 2017), all mirrors and illusions. Steve McQueen’s sumptuous Venice-after-hours video piece Giardini (2009) plays in one of the projecting rooms.

Helga de Alvear in front of Katharina Grosse’s Faux Rocks (2006)

Olafur Eliasson’s 2017 installation Echo Activity

Ai Weiwei’s Descending Light (2007), the gallery’s Instagram hit

Larry Bell’s Bay Area Blues, 2018

Finally, we arrive at what has rapidly become the museum’s poster child and biggest Instagram hit: Ai Weiwei’s Descending Light, a massive 2007 piece composed of 60,000 beads of red glass in a crumpled simulacrum of a Chinese lamp.

“Mary Boone called me from New York and said ‘Helga, I’ve got a work here that you’re gonna love’,” recalls Alvear.“It was by a Chinese artist that no one had heard of yet. Mary said: ‘I’ll give you a good price, and I’ll send it to you for free, but you’ve got to have a place for it’. And now it’s got this wonderful setting, and of course the visitors are absolutely stunned.”

Helga de Alvear, née Müller, was born into a family of German industrialists in the Rhineland wine-making region of Nahe. She came to Spain as a language student in 1957 and learned her trade as a dealer under the formidable Juana Mordó. Alvear has a history of being ahead of the game: her Madrid headquarters, in the shadow of the Reina Sofía museum, was an early arrival on Calle Doctor Fourquet, a once-seedy street that now bristles with contemporary galleries. (“I was the first to bring Nam June Paik to Spain. I did a show with him in 1985. Nobody came. People said I was taking the mickey.”)

Meanwhile, her collection has grown into one of the finest hauls of contemporary art in Spain – indeed, in Europe. ArtReview describes her as a collector “with pockets deep enough to keep artists, dealers and even, it has been said, the occasional art fair afloat”. Though her purchasing power has soared, Alvear’s shopping list has been consistent: US minimalism, photography and video, and modern Spanish and Latin American art. But by the new millennium, the familiar collector’s dilemma – what to do with it all? – had become a matter of urgency.

The big question is why she chose, of all places, this provincial town in the western reaches of Spain’s interior, far from the white-hot circuits of contemporary art, in which to deposit her blue-chip collection.

In fact, says Alvear, “Cáceres chose me.” She first came here years ago, on a buying trip to the art fair Foro Sur (now defunct), and loves the city for its glorious old town, with convents and palaces (many of them built by conquistadores with the riches acquired from their New World adventures), and the wild natural beauty of the surrounding countryside. But the collection arrived much later, by a curious route. Over the years, the gallerist had approached various Spanish cities, including Seville, Madrid, Granada and San Sebastián, without success. Then coincidence, and connections, intervened. Returning to Madrid from Lisbon by road, Alvear stopped for lunch at the two-Michelin-starred Atrio in Cáceres, where owners José Polo and Toño Pérez are not only standard-bearers of Extremadura’s gastronomic scene but also art and design aficionados. The Atrio couple put Alvear in touch with Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, then regional president of Extremadura, whose offer finally clinched the deal for Cáceres. “He said, ‘Helga, it’s staying right here’,” she remembers fondly.

The site chosen for Phase I of the project was an early 20th-century modernista mansion on Calle Pizarro, at the edge of the city’s historic nucleus. Charged with repurposing of Casa Grande were Spanish architects Mansilla + Tuñón, whose clean-lined modernist style brought luminosity and elegance to the somewhat dour granite building. It also wowed Polo and Pérez, who commissioned the same firm for their restaurant’s superb new location, a stone palacio on Plaza San Mateo.

But a second phase, entrusted to Emilio Tuñón (Luis Moreno Mansilla having died in the interim), was already planned. The museum’s new wing, which more than doubles the floor space of the 1910 mansion, would extend from the back of the house into what was once the garden, effectively linking Calle Pizarro with the hitherto scruffy and neglected environs of Plaza Marrón.

The project has not been without challenges. First, there was the complex building work, which tested residents’ patience for six long years. Then COVID-19 hit. Deadlines came and went, but the completed building’s official opening on 25 February this year, as the pandemic’s third wave rolled across Spain, was greeted with amazement and delight. Thanks to Helga de Alvear, trumpeted the local press, Cáceres would soon be roused from its provincial slumber to become a firm fixture on the international modern-art circuit. Comparisons were drawn with other contemporary art museums in unlikely places whose effect on the local culture has been transformative. (Hauser & Wirth in Bruton, Somerset, is an obvious example.)

New vistas have opened up for the city, to be sure – like the one from Plaza Marrón down Camino Llano. On the right-hand side of this humdrum street stand blocks of cheapo 1970s housing and two-up-two-down houses of an earlier vintage, some of them boarded up and plastered with peeling bullfight posters. There is a neighbourhood supermarket, a two-star hostel, a mattress shop. On the other side stands the museum, its dazzling-white cubes looming above the barrio like a modernist castle. Palm trees and conifers flank a wide esplanade, paved with Portuguese-style cobblestones, leading to the new wing’s entrance. You can imagine this becoming a hang-out for kids after school, or a place for locals to meet and greet as part of the traditional evening paseo.

Art experts in Spain were surprised that Alvear’s collection touched down in Cáceres – never exactly a modern-art hub – and not on Madrid’s Paseo del Prado or in some other major European city. But she firmly believes it is where it needs to be. “We live in a connected world and art has no borders; culture is global. A small city can also be relevant in artistic terms,” she says.

“Now extremeños have a new access to contemporary art, and visitors from outside can experience these works without the crowds, the hurry and pressure of a big city.”

For many, the museum’s long-term success will depend on the bridges it is able to build with the community. For journalist Cristina Núñez, this means winning over not just the kind of art-savvy middle-class local who was already a regular at Casa Grande, but a much broader social mix. She points out that this is already happening through the museum’s outreach programme, the private visits for local residents and the Saturday workshops for children. It also helps that entrance is free. Already a surge of interest from cacereños has booked online reservations solid for months in advance. “The museum needs to generate a loyal fanbase in the city, so that people can really feel a sense of ownership”, she suggests.

Architect Margarita Jubete, who lives a few doors away on calle Pizarro, thinks this will not be easy. “This town has always been a little bit resistant to avant-garde culture. I used to go to the Thursday guided tours at Casa Grande, which were free, and often I was the only one there. So there’s a lot of work to do. That said, my son has started nipping out at a moment’s notice, saying he’s ‘just off to have a look at something at Helga’s’. So all is not lost. There’s no doubt that, for Cáceres, this is something big.”

Paul Richardson has written for the Financial Times, The Telegraph and The Economist, among other publications.

The Helga de Alvear museum is at calle Pizarro 8, Cáceres;
fundacionhelgadealvear.es

Exterior of the Alvear gallery

Katharina Grosse’s Faux Rocks (2006)

Richard Long sculpture flanked by Miguel Ángel Campano and Luis Gordillo’s paintings. Grosse’s Faux Rocks can be seen in the next gallery