“Spain is different.” With this slogan, the Ministry of Information and Tourism, chaired by Manuel Fraga, in the 60s of the 20th century, in the midst of the Franco dictatorship, intended to attract European tourists, through a campaign in which the Golden Age Spanish national values have been raised on the altars.
The Franco regime presents itself as the natural heir of the traditions of the 16th century through its propaganda apparatus which found a critical echo at the time. This is how “Equipo Crónica” was born, a group of artists who, in the 1960s, shared their anti-Francoist meaning.
Today, an exhibition at the El Greco Museum brings together a dozen of his works to mark the sixty years of the birth of the Valencian group. Rafael Solbes and Manuel Valdés have constructed their own pictorial universe.
“El Greco is different” pays tribute to them in Toledo in an exhibition organized by the museum technician, José Luis Rus González, which will be open to the public until March 9.
The exhibition focuses particularly on Equipo Crónica’s first pictorial series, “La Recovery” (1967–1969), in which they used images from Spanish Golden Age painting to satirically connect politics and culture. The Cretan painter plays a “primary” role there because of “his stylistic affinity” with the creations of Valdés and Solbes.
“The Culture of the West”, “The Happening of the Count of Orgaz” or “The Antichambre” are some of the works that can be seen in an exhibition which brings together painting, graphic art, sculpture and tape designed by ten providers such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofía Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante or the Juan March Foundation.
“To speak of Equipo Crónica is to speak of one of the greatest representatives of pop art in Spain”, an artistic movement “whose development in our country, unlike that cultivated in its country of origin – the States -United -, was determined by the social and political context of the end of the Franco regime.
The art of both, Rus explains, is “eminently political, a weapon against the manipulation of the great myths of the golden age by the Franco regime.” The two artists, who developed this characteristic pictorial work over 17 years (between 1965 and 1981), used media language to offer ironic images of social criticism.
Fraga’s “Spain is different” campaign, Franco’s propaganda
In response to the “famous ‘Spain is different’, from the Ministry of Information and Tourism, headed by Manuel Fraga, in the 60s”, they explain from the Museum of Toledo, and to the images manipulated by the propaganda apparatus, Valdés and Solbes oppose media representations, “obtaining authentic illogical collages from which hilarity emerges as a critical element of established power”.
El Greco, along with Velázquez and Goya, is the most cited artist in this first series of Equipo Crónica. “The Cretan master’s painting adapts to the plasticity of screen printing – a technique widely used at that time -… We therefore find El Greco as a special guest in this ironic and uncomfortable pop art”, he adds.
Valdés and Solbes found in El Greco one of the main mechanisms of confronting images that they used, that of juxtaposition, observing the extraordinary naturalness with which the Greek artist reproduced several of his models throughout of his work.
“Dismantle official imposed reading” with “ironic and critical works”
“These juxtapositions which initially do not make logical sense give a new meaning to the work in an attempt to dismantle the official reading imposed by those in power. With a completely renewed visual language framed by figuration, the artists give the works an ironic and critical dimension,” underlines the curator.
One of the works in which Doménikos Theotokópoulos stars entirely is “The Antechamber,” which shows “this gentleman with his hand on his chest, represented as a kind of public employee.” “It’s a bit sinister, because we see on the table that the only element on the table is a brass knuckle,” explains the museum technician.
You can also see in the exhibition another recontextualized work like “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz”, titled by Equipo Crónica as “The Happening of the Count of Orgaz”. With this, they intended to establish “a critique of the relationship between the new Spanish capitalism of the 60s and the repressive apparatus of public administration,” he emphasizes.
The exhibition also includes a comic strip, which is the only work signed by Equipo Crónica in this exhibition and which was published by the Mexican publishing house Novaro, added Rus, who thanked “the absolute trust” for being able to organize this exhibition the role of the director of the El Greco Museum, Rosa Becerril.
This exhibition will also give rise, according to Becerril, to a scientific conference around the Valencian group in spring 2025 or to the holding of workshops. “We like to involve contemporary art in our exhibitions, remembering the modernity of Greco himself,” emphasizes the museum director.
