Art During Dictatorship: Abstraction In Spain Under Franco

Dalí, Miró, Picasso. Spanish artists changed the world in the first half of the 20^th century? What about the second half? The half that came of age and worked under the shadow of Francisco Franco’s authoritarian rule?

Their story is told February 26 through June 18, 2023, at the Meadows Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas during the exhibition “In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art.”

The “Museum of Spanish Abstract Art” referenced in the title is the Museo de Arte Abstracto Españolwas, founded by painter Fernando Zóbel (1924–1984). It opened to the public on July 1, 1966, as the first collection in the country devoted to abstract art.

“The Museo de Arte Abstracto Español was born in a Spain that was essentially a cultural desert, with few or no collections and institutions and little infrastructure devoted to modern and contemporary art,” author, historian and director of Museums and Exhibitions of the Juan March Foundation Manuel Fontán del Junco writes in the exhibition catalogue.

Dictators tend to have that effect on the arts. Franco’s greatest contribution to contemporary art came in a perverse manner.

In 1936, he led troops against Spain’s democratically elected government igniting the Spanish Civil War which lasted until his Nationalist forces assumed power in 1939. Spain was aligned with Nazi Germany during the conflict. Enlisting the Nazi’s help to defeat his Republican enemies, and the Nazi’s wanting to show off the superiority of their modern air force, an aerial bombing of Guernica, Spain occurred in 1937 which killed or wounded one third of the population there. Civilians.

In response to this atrocity, Picasso painted Guernica, arguably the greatest painting of the 20^th century.

Museo de Arte Abstracto Español

“Franco’s government did not support abstract art,” exhibition curator Clarisse Fava-Piz told Forbes.com. “Artists had difficult access to contemporary artistic creation, they lacked exhibition spaces and venues to showcase their works.”

Spanish artists took matters into their own hands forming collectives and traveling widely to artistic capitals like Paris and New York to stay current with contemporary ideas.

“Spanish abstract artists were part of these same artistic conversations, pushing beyond the limits of the picture frame, questioning traditional modes of representation and experimenting with materials,” Fava-Piz said.

The apex of their do-it-yourself efforts to keep Spain connected to Modern art, which was increasingly abstract during the post-war years, was the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español.

Entirely the private initiative of Zóbel, the museum aimed to cultivate a domestic audience for Spanish abstract art. In addition to supporting contemporary artistic creation, the museum gathered a community of artists, who, together with Zóbel, managed the museum, making it also the first artist-run museum in the country.

Its revolutionary historic mission can easily be overlooked because of its staggeringly beautiful location.

“Housed within the spectacular Casas Colgadas (Hanging Houses) in the historic clifftop town of Cuenca, one hundred miles southeast of Madrid, the museum showcases Spanish abstract art within a fifteenth-century architectural setting overlooking a striking natural landscape, making it one of the most memorable museum experiences for visitors,” Fava-Piz said. “Curators carefully integrated paintings and sculptures into the unique spatial environment of the historic building. This unconventional approach yielded a powerful aesthetic experience.”

Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, described it as “the most beautiful small museum in the world” after visiting.

Presently, the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español is undergoing a renovation allowing for more than 40 works from its collection by over 30 artists to visit the Meadows Museum, the leading center in the United States for exhibition, research and education in the arts and culture of Spain. For many pieces, this exhibition represents their first-time leaving Cuenca and their debut in the United States. This will be the exhibition’s only stop in the U.S.

The unprecedented stateside showing of artwork from the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español presents a comprehensive selection of Spanish abstract painting and sculpture from artists active in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Their works demonstrate resilience, profound creativity, and a particular sense of boundary pushing in the context in which they were produced,” Fava-Piz said. “What sets these artists apart from their contemporaries is the diverse range of their artistic practices experimenting with the language of abstraction, in particular in the use of materials in their compositions; burlap, the material of predilection of Manuel Millares, wire gauze, Manuel Rivera, wood, Lucio Muñoz, and the well-known ‘matter paintings’ by Antoni Tàpies, among so many other types of artistic experimentations.”

Franco Turns Around

Following, and because of, the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s Spain was weak, poor and internally fractured. He aligned with the Axis during World War II, providing them nominal support, but his country stayed out of the fighting. This fence-sitting spared Spain from the worst of the damage caused by the War, but excluded it from the Marshall Plan which rebuilt Western Europe.

Weak, poor and fractured appeared to be Spain’s long-term future, but while dictators may not be keen on contemporary art, they do generally have a gift for taking advantage of opportunities. Franco’s opportunity came with the Cold War. Franco was a devout anti-Communist dating back to the Civil War; this made him attractive to the United States.

While Franco’s regime discouraged artists to work beyond the confines of the realist artistic tradition, starting in the mid-1950s, it began co-opting the success of the nation’s abstract artists at international fairs abroad.

“During the Cold War, cultural patronage became a key strategy for the Spanish regime which sought to construct a modern image of itself as it pursued diplomatic relations with Western democracies. Although Franco had long scorned the avant-garde, his efforts to reestablish diplomatic links with western Europe—marked in part by Spain’s entry into the United Nations in 1955—led to a reassessment of cultural policy,” Fava-Piz explains. “Seizing on cultural diplomacy as a key component of its nationalist agenda, the regime marketed Spain’s abstract artists as members of an international avant-garde while at the same time emphasizing the ‘Spanishness’ of their art.”

The Spanish government sponsored an ambitious program of exhibitions in Paris (1959), New York (1960) and London (1962).

Cultural diplomacy was a tool of America as well. MoMA and the CIA worked together during the Cold War to demonstrate Western freedom through the lens of art.

Spain remained under Franco’s control until his death in 1975. The nation would transition to democracy within a few years.

Picasso died in 1973. He stipulated that Guernica not be shown in Spain while Franco was in power. Control of the painting’s future was given to MoMA. In 1981, an agreement between the museum and Spain sent the painting to democratic Madrid where it has been ever since.