For the last two years I have been working on research for my doctorate in history. I have found this work enormously rewarding because it has challenged me to the root of my sense of humanity, and to the drive of humanity that most interests me, the human potential to imagine...to create. But what is creativity in the face of obstacles severe enough to break a person's life in two? Are artists any more susceptible to the crushing weight of repression than other human beings? Is artistic expression a matter of life or death or a matter of whim and conceit? The answer to that last question came long ago in my life and I can safely telegraph the answer here. One has no choice in the matter. But how that answer plays out in history and in particular in the history of societies driven by authoritarian control in the twentieth century, is to me the Rorschach test of creativity. The regimes of Stalin and Hitler offer their own diabolical perspectives as to the efficacy of control over artistic expression to be sure. But in the twentieth century they were not the only ones, nor necessarily the most adept.
My research is a cultural history project focusing on three artists that serve as a broad cross-section of dissident, artistic expression during the Francisco Franco dictatorship in Spain (1936-1975). They are composer Antonio José Martínez Palacios from Burgos (1902 – 1936), poet and novelist Jesús López Pacheco from Madrid (1930 – 1997), and painter-sculptor Antoni Tàpies from Barcelona (1923 – February 7, 2012). The “dissidence” of their expression stems from the meaning of their lives and art as counterweights to the Spanish dictatorship’s National Catholic cultural project, a project begun in the earliest days of the Nationalist controlled areas of Spain at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. This then is a review of that work so far with a particular emphasis on one of the artists, Antoni Tàpies and his understanding of the role of art in society.
Composer Antonio José, the name he went by professionally, was executed at the outset of the Civil War by the Falange in Burgos under circumstances closely reminiscent to those of Federico García Lorca in Granada. For me his story is outwardly the most tragic of the three. As a victim of the regime’s most violent repression, his abundant talent as a composer, musicologist, and choral teacher were cut short. I still believe that his status has yet to be fully recognized and hope this research can help promote him as one of Spain's preeminent twentieth century composers.
Author Jesús López Pacheco’s 1958 novel Central eléctrica was a centerpiece of Spanish social realism writing of the 50s and 60s and established his reputation among his colleagues as a preeminent spokesman for social change. He represents for me the artist who had achieved some recognition under the regime, but who, as an active dissident, suffered severely from its censorship policies. These policies, as seems apparent from my research, became even more intense in the years between 1951 through to the end of the dictatorship. In López Pacheco’s case, I have focused on archival evidence from documents held in the Archivo General de la Administración in Alcalá de Henares and personal interviews. In addition, the experience of the author as an exile at the end of the 1960s gives his story an added dynamic, common to other Spanish artists who fled the regime.
The censorship documents on writers of the period also reveal that literature went through a rigid sieve of approval that other forms of expression did not. In fact by the 1950s, the regime began to make an effort to use the plastic arts as a promotional component on the international stage. And the reason for the use of contemporary art for this purpose was simple. No one in the regime, not the least Franco himself, saw a viable threat from contemporary painting and sculpture, and especially from the kind of abstract expressionist work of an artist like Antoni Tàpies.
My work at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona has concentrated on the great store of periodical resources from the period of his early career and the Fundació's wealth of primary and secondary works. By the first Bienal Hispanoamericana del Arte in Madrid in 1951 supported by the regime, and through subsequent exhibitions in Venice, Barcelona, and Sao Paulo, Tàpies was establishing himself as one of the most critically acclaimed Spanish artists since Picasso, Dalí and Miró. But his art, far from being a tool of the regime, became a force against it.
Antoni Tàpies discusses later in his life how he and other artists were well aware of the intent of the regime to manipulate contemporary Spanish artists and he recognized that cultural openings like the Bienal gave contemporary painters an advantage in terms of the distribution of their work both in Spain and abroad. Nevertheless, he disagreed with vehemently about the effects of artistic expression on society, and it is this view of art that for me has made him so important to my work. The way this story is unfolding for me now, Tàpies becomes the culmination of the power and presence of artistic expression in culture.
One interpretation of the regime’s view of modern art, and Franco´s himself, who visited some of the early exhibitions, was that art of a nature that demands more participation on the part of the viewer, more contemplation is lost on most and therefore not a revolutionary threat to the regime, or as Tàpies put it represented the “inoperancia” of art. “To me,” he says “it demonstrates the exact opposite: the ignorance of Franco about contemporary art. The facts show that art, and all of culture, if not instantly triggering the spectacular revolutions that some imagine, do silent work, on the other hand, that prepares the consciousness in a manner generally more permanent than many violent acts. Franco continually underestimated culture, intellectuals and artists without realizing that to his own discredit and that of all Francoism the consciousness of the inhabitants of the Spanish state were being fed by the intellectuals and artist”.
Using his notoriety through active involvement with student demonstrations for democracy in Barcelona, and through his own artistic expression he puts his reputation on the front line in the 1960s. Tàpies writes that this direct action involvement was a revelation that infused him with a new sense of humanity and community. He found this sense in both the students who were fighting for more open universities and in those activists who were older and who had spent most of their lives fighting for democracy under Franco. It was they who had come to him as a well-known artist, seeking his help in a seminal student sit-in at the Canpuchinos de Sarría Convent in Barcelona in 1966.
This sense of community and involvement revolutionized his understanding of the role as an artist. Instead of being concerned with strictly finding his own space in life through his artistic expression, he incorporated that space into a larger statement on how the artist confronts his material reality and his society.
