Painting Viciously: Antonio Saura’s Monsters and The Francoist Dictatorship (1939-1975)

Claudia Grego March

doi:10.5070/r52056631

Abstract

In 1950s and 1960s Europe, painting monsters was trendy. From Enrico Baj’s nuclear creatures to Jean Dubuffet’s ghostly portraits, and passing through Asger Jorn’s graffiti-like beasts, monsters became one of the most popular pictorial elements to convey the existentialist mood of the Post-World War II period. In this article, I address how the Spanish informalist painter Antonio Saura followed such trend. The painting of monsters was an idiosyncratic trait of Saura’s oeuvre, but also a way to ideologically discredit the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). The painter’s “cruel look,” as Saura himself called it, became a plastic strategy that allowed him to renegotiate some of the ideological cornerstones that the Francoist regime promoted as the essence of Spain’s national identity and its cultural tradition. As I show, by deforming Spanish historical figures, artworks, and sacred images, Saura battled the colonial, catholic, and obscurantist interpretation of Spain’s history that the regime promoted. By coming up with an art genealogy based on this “cruel look,” Saura intended to release some of the most important Spanish artists, such as Velázquez, Goya, and Picasso, from the ties of Francoist historiography in order to reformulate the country’s national identity in existentialist terms.

Highlights

In the early 1950s when Antonio Saura began to exhibit in Spain, the country's art scene was still immersed in poverty because of the geopolitical isolationism and strong censorship imposed by Francisco Franco’s dictatorship–the totalitarian regime that dominated Spain’s politics from the end of its Civil War in 1939 until Franco’s death in 1975
By the early 1960s, Saura had already established the main repertoire of motifs for his monsters: portraits, crucifixions, full-body nudes, and images of crowds characterized by human bodies, or gloomily deformed animals
These distortions would end up being the most recognizable characteristics of his work.9. Until his death in 1998, Saura would paint and draw these monstrous figures, and write about them in the numerous essays he published about his own work where he would directly refer to his creations as monsters, and relate them to what he coined as the painter’s “cruel gaze.”10 In this article, I analyze Saura’s monsters and his theory of the “cruel look,” considering the context in which they emerged–the Francoist dictatorship–and the Spanish pictorial tradition they referred to

Summary

Introduction

In 1950s and 1960s Europe, painting monsters was trendy. From Jean Dubuffet’s ghostly portraits to Asger Jorn’s graffiti-like beasts, or Enrico Baj’s nuclear creatures, monsters became one of the most popular pictorial elements during the post-World War II period. THE AESTHETICS AND POLITICS OF SAURA’S MONSTERS The scholarship on post-Civil War Spanish art has provided two main interpretations about the presence of monstrous figures in Saura's paintings.

Results

Conclusion