Painting from memory

Memory. It’s a curious organ. And one that we don’t use anything like enough.

For outsiders visiting Spain, it’s often hard to remember that the nation isn’t that far from a fascist past. Francisco Franco, dictator for nearly four decades, only died in November 1975. A great many Spaniards living today still remember his times. 

That always strikes me when I hear a Spaniard talk about “the war”. That doesn’t mean the Second World War, as it would for a Brit or a Frenchman or a German. Generally, it means the Spanish Civil War, which brought Franco to power.

Equipo Crónica in the Reina Sofía museum

So close are the events of that terrible time, that reminders keep emerging. One that we found particularly moving was in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid: a series of six paintings by an artistic collective, called Equipo Crónica. The group was set up in the early sixties by three artists from Valencia, Rafael Solbes, Manuel Valdés and Juan Antonio Toledo. Toledo, however, was called up for military service soon after and, when he returned, he found the collaboration between the other two had grown so close he could no longer fit in.

Within the collaboration, they used simple, plain colours, not merely to underline messages that are often intense to the point of brutality, but so as to avoid the touches and undertones of paint that would distinguish one painter from the other. They are truly collective works.

Franco remained a brutal authoritarian right up to his death. That release, for Spain and beyond, as much as for himself, came on 20 November 1975. But less than two months earlier, on 27 September, five young men were murdered – ‘executed’ is just a euphemism – by firing squad, on the orders of a court martial, countersigned by the dictator.

A salute to the last victims of Franco’s killing machine

Equipo Crónica decided to record the event in a series of ten paintings, six of which we saw in the museum. They chose not to make the paintings strictly documentary, depicting the actual event of the execution. Instead they made them “symbolically documentary”: each shows a wall (since the victims were stood up against a wall to be shot), a leaf from a desk calendar showing the date of the murders, a face with eyes blacked out to depict what happened to the young men or perhaps the blindness of the world, and a black strip for mourning across the top left.

The walls are, apparently, each in the style of an artist admired by the collective, but I can’t identify them.

In the foreground is a painter’s palette, broken into five pieces, one for each of the victims and perhaps a symbol of the impotence of art in the face of such criminality.

Palette broken into five pieces
Face with eyes blacked out
A wall for the victim to stand against
Mourning stripe at top left
The date at the top

It’s a strong and striking memorial not just to the victims of a specific crime, but of the dangers the hard right and nationalist movements represent for all of us (Franco adopted the label ‘nationalist’ for his side in the Civil War, against the ‘Republicans’ he eventually defeated with help from both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). It was moving to see it in one of Spain’s most prestigious museum. Long may it serve as a reminder to Spaniards of what it means to accommodate the far right.

A reminder many of us outside Spain badly need, too. In Hungary. In Poland. In Italy, for pity's sake. And, far from least, in Brexit Britain.

Our memories of the dangers of fascism are over 70 years old, from the Second World War, rather than little over 40 as in Spain. And we’re becoming forgetful. Toying with notions that should have been consigned to the history books.

At our own serious peril.