Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco Bahamonde (El Ferrol, 1892 – Madrid, 1975) was one of the officers behind the military coup d'état against the democratic government of the Second Republic in July 1936 which signalled the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. From September of that year Franco was put in command of the Nationalist faction and, once the war was over, proclaimed a dictatorship that would endure until his death in 1975.
Before his involvement with other military officers such as Emilio Mola and José Millán Astray in the coup d'état against the government of the Second Republic, Francisco Franco forged his military career in Morocco, where he was promoted to general. During the Dictatorship he developed a policy founded on the idea of nation and tradition; a supporter of the fascist ideology and National Catholicism, he ruled Spain for 36 years with the Traditionalist Spanish Phalanx of the Juntas of the National Syndicalist Offensive (FET and the JONS) as a single political party. On a political and social level, those years were defined by repression and the persecution of political and moral dissidence, manifested in the resistance by the population, both in exile and on Spanish soil.
In January of 1937, Pablo Picasso started work on two prints: Dream and Lie of Franco I and II, submitting them in June of that year to the organisers of the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition as a show of support for the Republic, whose government donated the money fetched from the sale of the two pieces. In war and propaganda art, Picasso was not the only artist to satirise the figure of Franco and speak out against the military coup; proof of which was the proliferation of posters, drawings and prints by Francisco Mateos, Ramón Puyol, Antonio Morales and Luis Quintanilla, to name but a few.
In conjunction with the project to create the Museo de Arte Moderno and adhering to the framework of a cultural and artistic policy of intended modernisation, in 1968 Franco’s government and the then director general of Fine Arts, Florentino Pérez Embid, set in motion procedures to request Guernica from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, claiming that the work, donated by the artist, belonged to the Spanish people. Only a few months later, Picasso, who had always made his opposition to Franco abundantly clear, insisted that neither the painting nor he himself would go to Spain while the country was under a dictatorship or until the Spanish people had recovered their democratic freedom. Almost immediately after Franco’s death, and with Picasso dying a few years previously, the arrangements and debates began, finally resulting in the definitive transfer of the painting to Madrid.
