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.

Check out the Museums work here!

Compare it to galerie michaels here!

"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

MIRO, Joan "Gargantua"

Miro, Joan
Gargantua, 1977
Etching, aquatint and carborundum
Signed lower left 38/50

Story of Gargantua:

Gargantua (1929-1949) was a captive lowland gorilla who was famous in his lifetime and has been credited with saving the Ringling Brothers circus from bankruptcy. Gargantua was born wild in the Belgian Congo in approximately 1929. In the early-1930s, the gorilla was given to a Captain Arthur Phillips as a gift from missionaries in Africa. The captain was fond of him and called him "Buddy". He was kept aboard his freighter and became popular with most of the crew. One sailor, however, drunk and seeking revenge on the captain's strictness, threw nitric acid in Buddy's face. This did not kill the gorilla but the attack almost blinded him and left both mental and physical scars - leading to much more aggressive behavior.

Unable to deal with this aggression, the captain gave Buddy to Gertrude Lintz, a wealthy eccentric who looked after sick animals in Brooklyn. She cared for Buddy, and other apes, as her children and even arranged for plastic surgery on the scar, leaving Buddy with a permanent sneer. She was known to drive around Brooklyn with Buddy, dressed in clothes, in the passenger seat. This behavior backfired, however, in 1937. Buddy, frightened by thunder, broke out of his cage and climbed into bed with his "mother" for comfort. Mrs. Lintz contacted John Ringling shortly thereafter

Ringling bought Buddy from Mrs. Lintz and renamed him "Gargantua". The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, in financial problems after the Great Depression, heavily advertised their newest attraction. Gargantua attracted millions and single-handedly saved the circus. Gargantua died in November 1949. His skeleton was donated to the Peabody Museum in 1950 but is now only displayed on special occasions.