Shedding the old skin: cultural production in the Iberian transitions to democracy

Abstract

In 1981 a long queue of adults, children and senior citizens flooded the Paseo del Prado in Madrid, waiting to see Picasso’s monumental anti-war painting Guernica in person. The painting had finally made its way to Madrid from its more than forty-year exile in New York. According to Javier Tusell, historian and General Director of Fine Arts of the UCD (Union of the Democratic Center) government’s Ministry of Culture at the time, the large painting represented “a talisman reminding us of the dangers of past civil discord... in this way it could be said that the arrival of Guernica signifies an end point in the Spanish transition to democracy” (1981). Picasso’s painting turned into a collective talisman of the Transition, the eye-catching visual symbol of a new and allegedly peaceful Spain that had returned to democracy after a long military dictatorship. Yet, Spanish government institutions exhibited the avant-garde painting in a way that separated the painting from the crowds of observers, placing it behind a bulletproof glass screen to prevent potential damage to the artwork. The way the Spanish public engaged with this artwork evinced the complicated mix of top-down measures inherited from the Franco regime and bottom-up pressure from popular mobilizations (Quaggio 2014, 199–264). Only a few years before, during a popular festival in Lisbon in June 1974, forty-eight artists painted a collective “antifascist” mural in the central district of Belém to celebrate the Carnation Revolution of that year, which overthrew the authoritarian Estado Novo regime overnight and paved the way for Portugal’s own process of democratization. Also in Lisbon in May 1974, members of the Democratic Movement of Plastic Artists went to the Palácio Foz and turned the removal of a statue of the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar and the bust of the Estado Novo’s writer António Ferro into a public performance, covering the monuments with black cloths and affixing a communiqué, which stated that the initiative was “at the same time a symbolic destruction and an act of artistic creation in a gesture of revolutionary freedom. Fascist art harms your vision” (Serapiglia 2022, 322; Pratas Cruzeiro 2022, 313). From the beginning of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, its main actors interpreted artistic activity as a playful performance against symbols, policies and structures associated with the Estado Novo. According to these actors, this activity should be essentially collective and able to disseminate ideologized messages of civic participation and social democracy in the public arena (Dionísio 1993).