Alberto Anaut a sneaky cat design adapted to be everywhere and go unnoticed had been manufactured. He watched with feline tenacity from behind the thick-rimmed glasses of a modern archivist. He asked relentlessly, but asked with the sagacity of someone who does not intimidate with a question but invites to speak. He never parked the journalist that he was, he just got better performance out of the newspapers. The last 30 years have been spent inventing things, in the alchemist’s way.testing improbable combinations that he turned into possibilities, into spaces for action, instead of debate.
Alberto Anaut has died in Madrid at the age of 68 after a long illness. He was a man from Madrid in 1955 who studied several things (Sociology, Political Science, Information Science) without finishing any of them to fully lead into journalism. He practiced in Diary 16in the magazine Mercadoin The country and, as the last expedition, he changed the direction of the wind in his favor to reach against nature to EL MUNDO, where he raised the strangest and most exciting Sunday of the 90s: Magazine. Alberto Anaut belongs to the rare specimen of a journalist who leaves his job behind to join another brotherhood with unique characteristics: the cultural manager.
From newspapers he made his laboratory of ideas, the synthesis room where he could wind up possible new adventures. Anaut was capable of riding everything and when the voyage reached cruising speed, change boats, oceans and storms. From the last writing of his biography he escaped in 1996 to get on board Factorya cultural management company founded with Alberto Fesser and with a clear purpose: devise formats, test risks, assume vertigo.
Thus was born the cultural management company and he launched successes such as PhotoEspaña, the Eñe Festival or the magazine ‘Matador’. The latter is a prodigy of confection, capriciousness, elegance, beauty, content. “Fortunately ‘Matador’ doesn’t pay off,” he told me one afternoon on the terrace of Bar Santos (Plaza de Santiago), a few meters from his house, as if a business that didn’t whistle was the most desirable thing in the world. .
“Matador It is not a business, but it is a balanced bet”. He convinced 2,000 members to contribute small amounts and move it forward. One issue a year. An unusual large format. A prodigious paper. A collector’s item. A letter of the alphabet as a numbering… It is probably one of the happiest extravagances of the many that Anaut incurred. He used to walk with his eyes cast to the ground, pondering some new expedition to who knows where. Sometimes with his hands in his pockets, always turning to some new matter.