In 1937, Picasso painted the famous Guernica as a way of protesting the leveling of a small Basque village by German aerial bombers under General Francisco Franco’s command. Most of the civilians killed in Guernica, Spain, that day were women and children. (The men were away fighting.) It was market day, so everyone was in one convenient place for a mass murder. The German and Italian forces who ensured Franco’s victory were, within three years, to have all of Europe at their mercy.
Under Franco’s reign, which lasted from 1936 until his death in 1975, despite his concentration camps and firing squads that killed hundreds of thousands of Spanish citizens, artists continued to create. Many fled to Paris, where their compatriots Picasso and Miro had paved the way for artists from Spain. Thanks to the great strength and courage of these artists, we have today a legacy of Spanish art created during those violent, tyrannical years.
Fernando Zóbel, artist and collector, was responsible for saving hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and other art objects from this period. At the height of the Francoist dictatorship, he founded a museum dedicated to nonfigurative art. -century houses suspended over the Huécar River—a complex called The museum—a unique structure, with three stories and a labyrinth of stairways—attracted the attention of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. When Barr visited the facility, he said that the museum was “the most beautiful small museum in the world.”
