Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Dreams and Lies of Franco - at Picasso Museum and Galerie Michael



Picasso Museum currently has on exhibition the "Dream and Lie of Franco" etching and aquatint 1st and 2nd plate.

Galerie Michal also currently has on exhibition "the Dreams and Lies of Franco" Etching and aquatint 2nd plate, only difference ours is for sale. Truely a museum quality work.

"On January 8, 1937, Picasso began work on The Dream and Lie of Franco, a
satire against the military uprising of the previous July. It was also at this
time that the artist formalized his support for the legitimate government of the
Spanish Republic and was the first evidence of the work to the official
commission that came to visit. The pair of etchings was finally printed on
Picasso’s own initiative, together with a text he himself had written, and the
money raised from sales of the copies donated to the Republican cause. Each of
the two plates that make up the work is divided into nine panels, and the sheets
were originally intended to be cut up to produce a series of postcards, although
this was never done. The formal structure of the sequence of images is close to
that of a cartoon or comic strip; what we see here is a committed artist
bringing together the most avant-garde concepts and grassroots popular culture
in the service of a cause. Picasso then set the etchings aside until late May.
In the days prior to this, the artist had started to work on Guernica, his great
mural painting for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition,
which is a direct consequence of his work on The Dream and Lie of Franco. On May
25 he added some tonalities to the aquatint and finally, on June 7, completed
the second plate, with new illustrations in which dramatically intense images of
death replace the initial parody. "

-- From Picasso Museum Exhibition

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