Happiness, for Miguel Zugaza, is two walls set at right angles and a small hard leather ball. These are the raw materials of pelota vasca—a tough, quintessentially Basque sport. Think handball speeded up, with a harder ball and no gloves. It requires agility, coordination, and, in the version he plays with childhood friends at home in the Basque town of Durango, a high pain threshold. A mis-hit with your bare hand brings bone-crunching, eye-watering consequences.
"It is a noble sport," says Zugaza, the director of Spain's grandest museum, the Prado. "I like the artistic appeal of it. You have to dominate a three-dimensional space. It is one reason why there are so many Basque sculptors."
Between weekends spent playing pelota vasca in his native Basque country, Zugaza travels 200 miles south to Spain's capital, Madrid. There he devotes his waking hours to the Prado, where he is leading its soon-to-be-unveiled €152 million expansion. Unlike some of his illustrious predecessors—like Pablo Picasso, a director-in-exile during the Spanish Civil War—Zugaza does not paint. "Those of us who work around art and culture often have a sense of frustration about not being directly involved in the creative process," he says. "I live it, instead, from the outside."
Zugaza wears the dark suit and discreet air of a European museum director, but his Byronic brown locks suggest a man happy to break molds. Standing before a wall of fresh red stucco inside the new wing, he practically purrs with delight. "This will be the most polemical bit," he says. Zugaza calls the color "Goya red"—its garishness would not look out of place in an Almodóvar film—but he is not worried. In fact, he seems pleased by the idea of shocking some visitors to this temple of Spanish art—home to gilt-framed masterpieces by Velázquez and Titian as well as Goya. "My guess, from the reactions so far, is that women are going to like it," he says. "Older, more conservative men will not."
Five and a half years ago, Zugaza was hired to pump new life into an institution that only made headlines when politicians meddled, directors were fired, or the building sprang leaks. "The Prado had fallen into a spiral of discredit," he admits. "Fortunately, we have been able to change that." Zugaza, then 37, was a surprise choice for the lightning rod of a job. Even now, visitors can't hide surprise at his age. "It takes them 10 minutes to get used to the idea that they really are meeting the Prado director," he says.
Even Zugaza balked at taking the position. His predecessor famously resigned after the head of the patronato, the museum board, took over his office space. "The director was in a very weak position. I wanted to recover executive power," Zugaza explains. "If they had not accepted that, it would have made the effort worthless."
The board, recognizing they had someone strong enough to push through a velvet revolution, granted him full control. It couldn't have hurt that, as deputy director of Madrid's Reina Sofía contemporary art center, he'd gained the nickname El Pacificador—"The Peacemaker." And it is not just a question of watching over the new wing's creation. In 2004 the museum was granted partial independence from Spain's culture ministry and challenged to support itself. Zugaza hiked the admission fees and brought in corporate sponsors, merchandising, and blockbuster exhibitions. Lines now stretch down the Paseo del Prado.
"We are the last great European museum to modernize," he allows as we wander the empty halls of the new wing. "You could say we have gone directly from the 19th century to the 21st." Not much art is in position yet, unless you count a 17th-century cloister, restored and rebuilt inside a giant red-brick cube designed by the architect Rafael Moneo. Finishing touches are still being put on new galleries, gift shops, restaurants, and theaters. It is all so new that even Zugaza cannot find the keys to some doors.
Safely back in his office across the way, with its sweeping views of the old Prado edifice, he lights up the first of a string of Marlboros. His smoking is unhurried, each puff a long draw on calm. He is soft-spoken and contemplative, but the laid-back patina is deceptive. He talks of "conquest" and "passion" and proclaims, "I like working at night. It is ideal," he says. "No one calls you. You can plan things and think through ideas."
On Friday afternoons, Zugaza returns to his Basque home, to his wife, Susana, and their three children, ages seven to eleven, in Durango. He hangs out with his cuadrilla of childhood friends, walks in the hills, and goes hunting for wild mushrooms. At 5:30 A.M. on Monday he will head back again. The job "feels as though you are shooting some huge film that takes four or five years to complete," Zugaza admits. "You are totally absorbed." But on the weekends there is pelota vasca.
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