Spain’s most important modern-art museum on Wednesday admitted it has lost a 38-tonne sculpture by the prestigious American artist Richard Serra. The valuable sculpture, titled Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi, was commissioned from the artist by Madrid’s Reina SofÃÂa modern-art museum in 1986, and was displayed there until 1990.
The museum admitted on Wednesday that the last document it has relating to the piece and the payments made for its storage is dated 1992.
The four blocks of metal Serra used for the sculpture were cleared away in 1990 and, as they were too big and heavy to keep at the Reina SofÃÂa, were sent to a private storage depot in Madrid, the museum said.
When new Reina SofÃÂa director Ana MartÃÂnez ordered her staff to produce an inventory last year, they discovered that the storage company had gone into receivership in 1998. The four 1,5m-wide blocks of solid metal that made up the Serra sculpture had disappeared.
”The company was asked to account for the work in October 2005,” the museum explained in a statement on Wednesday. ”But difficulties were encountered, with the owner of the company saying he did not know where it had gone.”
An internal investigation ended with the police being called in. ”They will have to see whether anything illicit has occurred or a crime has been committed,” the statement added.
Serra (65) was only informed of the loss on Tuesday after the Spanish newspaper ABC rang the museum to say that it was preparing to run a story on the missing sculpture.
”I had been waiting to find out the truth before telling him,” MartÃÂnez told the newspaper.
ABC suggested the work may have been sold as scrap or melted down by somebody who did not realise its artistic value. MartÃÂnez, however, held out the hope that the piece might still be found.
”I don’t want to make any guesses,” she said. ”We still don’t know where it is. For Spain and for the museum … this could be a scandal.”
Serra did not comment. — Guardian Unlimited Â