Picasso, Lorca, Capa … art reveals fate of exiles who fled Franco’s Spain

 In a cavernous space off one of Madrid’s main boulevards, a dying Federico García Lorca slumps like an unstrung puppet, a refugee cellist stares down Robert Capa’s lens, and the eyes of a young woman Pablo Picasso sketched 71 years ago meet the public’s gaze for the very first time. The images, carefully arranged among hundreds of photographs, books, flags, paintings and audio archives, herald a belated homecoming.
Eighty years after about 500,000 republican Spaniards crossed the border into France to escape Franco’s forces in the final months of the civil war, the socialist government is marking the anniversary with a huge exhibition intended – as the justice minister, Dolores Delgado, puts it – to “settle our overdue moral debt by rescuing truth from the pit of forgetfulness”.

Soldiers from Hungary stand at the memorial site of the former concentration camp Mauthausen ahead of the commemoration ceremony of liberation, Mauthausen, Austria May 06, 2018

 Some of the exiles joined the French resistance, ending up in Nazi death camps; some helped liberate Paris; some fought with the Red Army – even taking on a division of the Spanish troops Franco dispatched to help the Germans; and some began new lives in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, the Caribbean, the USSR, the US and the UK.
Divided into three parts, the exhibition chronicles the initial exile in France, life in the internment camps there, and the subsequent scattering of the republican diaspora. Long lines of men, women and children file through Capa’s photographs and the paintings that record La Retirada (the Retreat), while the boats that carried the exiles across the Atlantic appear in snapshots, miniatures and in the newssheets put together by their passengers.
The suffering of the 7,000 Spaniards who were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria is documented in the pictures taken there by Francesc Boix – photos that would later be used as evidence at Nuremberg.
There is a portrait of the poet Antonio Machado, who died in the French Pyrenees three weeks after fleeing Spain, and first editions of the works of Arturo Barea, the exiled republican journalist who settled in England and worked for the BBC, where he gained a reputation as a kind of Spanish Alistair Cooke. “Señor Barea,” George Orwell once noted, “is one of the most valuable of the literary acquisitions that England has made as a result of Fascist persecution.”
More famous and more present throughout the exhibition, which opened last week at La Arquería de Nuevos Ministerios, are the works of Picasso. Thirty-three contemporary photographs record the arrival in Spain in 1981 of perhaps the country’s best known exile – Guernica – which was flown over from New York in the hold of an Iberia jumbo jet.
Equally significant is a photograph, taken three years earlier at the Spanish embassy in Mexico City, in which King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía clasp the hands of Dolores Rivas Cherif, the widow of Manuel Azaña, the last president of the second republic. Juan Manuel Bonet, the curator of the main exhibition, sees the show as “an exercise in memory” and a chance to reflect on all that was lost when half a million people escaped over the border.

Survivors and the delegation of the U.S. leave the memorial site of the former concentration camp Mauthausen after the commemoration ceremony of liberation, Mauthausen, Austria May 06, 2018

 “What had been lost by Spain was won by these other countries that took in the exiles,” he says. “I think democratic Spain owes a debt to that exiled Spain because the culture that was lost enriched other cultures – especially in countries like Mexico, where the exiles were so warmly welcomed. In Mexico, Spanish artists, writers, scientists and intellectuals integrated and imparted their knowledge.”
Bonet, a writer and critic who has served as director of both the Reina Sofía museum and the Instituto Cervantes, says the exhibition is also intended to pay tribute to the spirit of “democratic justice” that ushered in the post-Franco era.
Four decades after the dictator’s death, however, Spain’s politics are deeply fragmented; the far-right now holds 52 seats in congress. “We always have a duty to remember what happened, especially at such a tense time in Spain,” says Bonet.

Beautiful canal with medieval architecture in Annecy, France.

If he was forced to choose his favorite pieces among the more than 300 exhibitors, the commissioner will opt for the miniature studio of a fallen soldier who now decorates the memorial to Spanish members of the French resistance in the city of Annecy.
And then there is the sketch of Picasso by Mercedes Sánchez Cruz-López, daughter of Manuel Sànchez Arcas, exiled member of the Republican government. The portrait, made in Warsaw in 1948, has never been shown in public. "I suppose I have a certain weakness because not every day a Picasso can be exhibited that had never been seen before," says Bonet.
The exhibition ends with a group of works that explore the mythical appeal and legacy of some of the icons of Spanish literature.

A statue of Don Quixote of La Mancha, in the state of Albacete, Spain

Among them is a sculpture of Don Quixote breathing his last, José García Tella’s The Death of García Lorca, painted in 1953, and a statue and an oil painting of the poet Miguel Hernández, who died of tuberculosis in a Spanish prison in 1942. “I’ve finished the exhibition with a look back at the way they thought about the Quixote and Lorca and Hernández,” says Bonet.
“Those are just three of many, but the exiles took Spain with them in their minds wherever they went. And when they came back, they showed – unfortunately – that a part of Spanish culture had been produced outside Spain, and that should never have to happen again.”