Media: El Confidencial.com
Original title: Un peso pesado del arte mundial ha escrito la gran defensa de la huerta valenciana
Author: Miquel Molins
Date: 18th May 2025
A MUSEUM OF TREES
A world art heavyweight has written the great defence of the Valencian orchard
Vicent Todolí, the former director of the Tate Modern, the Serralves Museum and the IVAM, has written an atypical book about his career in art… and his garden.
Who is Todolí is usually one of the most recurrent questions in any report on Todolí. Todolí is a pope of world art. But he is also an enigmatic being who seems to avoid the limelight, hence the somewhat forced symbolism about his desire to live without artificial light (disappointment: he only turned off the switch in one of his estates, in the Vall de la Gallinera). Todolí is the Spaniard who has directed the Tate Modern and the Serralves Museum in Porto. One of the main promoters of the IVAM in Valencia. He is all that, but he is also the man who develops one of the most important citrus orchards on the planet, in his village, in Palmera (in the Valencian region of La Safor).
Perhaps tired of being asked who the real Todolí is, Todolí has finally written his book. A sort of autobiography, concise and clean. It is entitled Quisiera crear un jardín (y verlo crecer) (I would like to create a garden (and watch it grow) (Ed. Espasa). After reading it, it is easy to conclude that the author is a true outsider of the art system. But at the same time it is easy to realise that he has been at the centre of that same system for decades. Todolí’s book, edited in collaboration with the Valencian journalist Juan Lagardera, is nothing like the memoirs of a former director of the Tate. And perhaps that is why they are of particular interest. They do not succeed in solving the enigma of what lies behind the character, but it is easy to conclude that Todolí’s great virtue, what has made him different, is precisely the perception that he is not a speculator, but someone with a mission. It is art, but it is his life. And it is, finally, his garden.
Todolí, where anyone would expect some teachings on how to run large cultural institutions, makes one of the greatest defences ever written about the Valencian huerta and natural heritage.
In the prologue he reproduces a message from Rafael Chirbes to Todolí himself:
Dear Vicente:
What a joy that there are people who are
doing something useful
in this country abandoned by the gods and destroyed by men.
destroyed by men.
One day I will try to come to an agreement
with you
to visit this botanist. For the moment, as with the oil initiative, you have my full sympathy, and my support if I can be of any help to you.
Best regards
The choice of that quotation is a declaration of intent for a download which, from a feral chronology, puts in order the reason for his defence of the agricultural surface; the reason for his life among museums; the reason for the similarities between art and nature.
As if from an appendix by Chirbes, Todolí reflects on the reason for his foundation Todolí Citrus, which includes more than 500 varieties of citrus fruits: ‘the reason why I embarked on it (…) was precisely to stop an urban development plan’. He will insist a few more times: ‘The urbanistic depredation of the Mediterranean coastline has led to the disappearance of a great deal of farmland. What once looked like a great sea is being reduced to lagoons, and the process is slowing down, but not stopping. A territory and a landscape that we received as a legacy to be used and enjoyed in a meaningful way, and which, as such, we should preserve and pass on to the next generations, is undergoing irreversible and irresponsible transformations, most of the time the result of greed and lack of scruples, combined with a suicidal short-sightedness’.
The connection to the agricultural terraces comes to him through his family saga, to the point that in reality the obsession to touch the land also resembles the need to recollect with his past, far from the exile of his progress. My grandfather,’ he writes in his pages, ’was the advisor to the citrus groves of the father of Francisco Brines, the poet of Oliva. A job that was later continued by my own father, Brines, whom he often invited to lunch in the family orchard, compared me to Hermes, messenger of the gods who only touched the earth with his winged sandals to get his momentum. He said that because, when I lived in Oporto and later in London, every month I returned to Palmera for a few days. I need to touch land so as not to get lost in fiction’.
In his immense orchard, which can be visited on request and to which countless chefs make their pilgrimage, Todolí says he is ‘saving and conserving varieties that have no commercial interest. For us, it is enough that they exist. As when the mountaineer George Mallory was asked why he had climbed Everest: ‘Because it’s there’, was his answer’.
We will have, in its pages, a bit of banter about the stages at the Tate or the IVAM.
We will learn about his aversion to meetings: ‘At the Tate I spent most of my time talking to sponsors, to patrons. Above all, we had meetings, gatherings. The English love meetings. I, in general, can’t stand them. There were meetings where at the end I would say to them: ‘If someone from the outside had been in this meeting, they wouldn’t know if we work with art or if we sell potatoes’. We used the same language as the City managers, our neighbours across the river. In fact, we organised breakfasts for them, so that they could see the exhibitions on their way to work. The word art was nowhere to be found, and that seemed extremely dangerous to me. Potatoes are counted by kilos and prices, but not art.
We’ll know more about his truculent outcome with the IVAM: ‘With Carmen Alborch as director of the museum I formed a tandem that has been the best of my career. Later I decided to leave Valencia. I wasn’t thinking of leaving, but they did me a favour. Sometimes an obstruction is a liberation (…) Eduardo Zaplana said that, if he won the elections, he would appoint a person with no experience in the arts as director of the IVAM: Consuelo Císcar, curiously enough the sister of Ciprià Císcar, one of the driving forces behind the museum, as well as the wife of a politician who at the time had gone from the PSOE to the PP after a confusing case of corruption. The museum thus became an object of political merchandise. As a professional, I felt offended, because while at the international level our colleagues were lavishing us with lavish praise for our work at IVAM, at home we were not recognised. In other words, our success was our failure. (…) In March 1996, one day I arrived at IVAM and I didn’t go in. I walked around the block three times and said to myself: ‘I’m never going back’.
But, fundamentally, we will understand the reasons for an orchard. ‘The most important art that the nymph taught me is the art of planting trees. That is the supreme art, the one that encompasses all the other arts and which, at the same time, is less than the other arts, because the works it produces are ephemeral and changeable’.
Because Todolí seems to have been training all this time until he arrived at the direction of the most important museum of his career: ‘It is an open-air museum of trees whose permanent collection is always changing. It is not necessary to replace the works because they are the ones that transform themselves every day and acquire a new colour, size, smell, etc.’.
If anyone is interested in the art world, they should read Todolí. If someone likes to tend a vegetable garden, they should not miss it.
