Picasso en el punto de mira

At the end of 1971, Spanish bookstores and art galleries suffered the attacks of right-wing groups, which from the first night raids with painting, increased their degree of violence dramatically until they consummated the destruction of the prints of the Vollard Suite at the Theo Gallery. Madrid. Traditionally, these aggressions have been included in a wider sequence of attacks on culture that continued until the dawn of democracy. However, their circumstances suggest that they were specific and planned actions that formed an authentic campaign whose purpose was the destruction of a symbol: the name of Picasso. This work exposes the ideological responsibility of these attacks and recovers the memory of those who also happened in Barcelona, ??where the same groups used Molotov cocktails to devastate Picasso’s Taller room and the Cinc d’Oros bookshop, whose premises reduced to ashes showed the charred remains of his tribute to Picasso. This offense to Picasso did not elicit any official response, not even in Barcelona, ??a Picasso city that, in full Francoism, inaugurated a museum dedicated to the artist and extended it to receive their donations. It provoked, nevertheless, an artistic response in the form of private projects, and sometimes clandestine, destined to redress Picasso, the man and the artist. Under the motto “against violence, intelligence”, they constituted spaces of ethical and aesthetic conciliation whose analysis brings another point of view to the interpretation of the artist’s reception, and emphasizes that, as a model of attitude, it favored the appearance of behaviors intellectual and artistic critics before the Franco regime.