Pop Art and Political Geography

Spain’s Context

In Spain in the early 1960s, a revision of the dictatorship’s pro-government discourse coincided with the celebration of 25 years of peace, which, materialising into a tourist attraction under the slogan Spain in Peace, allowed for modernity to be exercised through supports such as advertising and poster design. Photographers such as Ortiz Echagüe and Kindel (Joaquín del Palacio) and graphic design teams such as Grupo 13 paved the way inside these mediums, institutionalising an image which barely corresponded to the real political and social context of the time.

The Graphic Art Work of Grupo 13

Grupo 13 / Olmos, Foreign Residents in Spain. Spain in Peace series, 1964. Courtesy of Ignasi Solé

Grupo 13 / Alfredo, A Variation of the Working Population. Women. Spain in Peace series, 1964. Courtesy of Ignasi Solé

Grupo 13 / Laperal, Students of Higher Education. Spain in Peace series, 1964. Courtesy of Ignasi Solé

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Spain is “Different”. Visit Spain. General Directorate for Tourism, 1958. Source: Collection of the Tourism Documentation Centre of Spain, Spanish Tourism Institute www.tourspain.es

This aperturismo, or opening to the outside, started to trickle through the regime’s policies with the appointment of Manuel Fraga Iribarne to head the Ministry of Information and Tourism in 1962. It enabled previously uncommon images to filter into daily life through different media such as TV and colour-illustrated magazines, and it was Manuel Fraga Iribarne who declared: “We have Spain in peace […] and it is interesting; it is different”.

Tourism was backed as a strategy for improving the recently opened liberal market economy, at the same time as it became a major propaganda tool for the “beauty” of Spain. Therefore, it reverted back to stereotypes of a Spain that was different, stereotypes used to attract foreign tourists and at odds with the social reality of a country still immersed in a dictatorial system branded by censorship.

Different media to promote tourism helped disseminate the advertising slogan Spain is Different, which had been used previously and accentuated that “difference” as a key characteristic of the country. The slogan was chiefly used in poster designs, where photography began to take centre stage above drawing as a way to validate these differences.

Xavier Miserachs

Via Layetana, Barcelona

1962 / Later print

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Xavier Miserachs

Negocios turísticos: los objetivos typical (Cala Gogó) (Tourist Businesses: Typical Objectives [Cala Gogó])

1965 / Vintage print

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Gonzalo Juanes

Álbum de Isabel (Isabel's Album)

1957

Donation of the Autric-Tamayo family, 2018

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Colita

Antifémina (Anti-female)

1976

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Luis Acosta Moro

Cabeza de muñeca (Doll's Head)

1967 (circa) / Vintage print

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Joan Colom

El carrer (La calle) [The street]

1960 / Vintage print, circa 1965-1970

Donation of the Autric-Tamayo family, 2018

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A Reformulation of Political Art

Triunfo, cover, No. 423, year XXV, 11 July 1970. © Courtesy of Triunfo Digital

The purported indifference to North American Pop painting, of Duchampian origin, was entirely implausible in Spain, where this context seeped into daily life with political implications. Spanish Pop artists attempted to build awareness and awaken political concerns through irony and painting that was colder and more distant than the work generated by Informalism, while they also drew not only from mass media imagery but also the culture and history of art in Spain.

Within this context of profound social change and sensibility that imposed a reformulation of political art, new pieces were being forged and were concerned with chronicling the present, although with a relation to anti-Franco mobilisation that was not quite as direct as the group Estampa Popular, for instance. Realism appeared as the seed of inspiration for new critical figuration, making use of Pop Art tools that took on a slant with political and social protest.

Equipo crónica. Socialist Realism and Pop Art in the Battlefield, 1969

Groups like Crónica de la Realidad, the origin of Equipo Crónica and Equipo Realidad, took a critical approach to analyse the images produced in popular culture, arriving at social art that would transmit new values and new ethics that sought to hammer out a path opposite mass-culture iconography, with its alienating tone inside the society of consumption and the spectacle. At that time, Equipo Crónica, Equipo Realidad and Eduardo Arroyo enjoyed significant visibility and impact internationally — one such example was their presence at the 1976 Venice Biennale.

Was Spanish Pop Art Male Dominated?

Amid these propsoals, women artists started to consolidate their own work and join anti-Franco discourses, demanding political change and engaging in social critique, most notably through their attacks on the representation of women: on one side, they eschewed stereotypes and called out contradictions in the system, for instance in Elsa Plaza's comic Una vida (A Life, 1978); and on the other, they drew attention to and denounced “female” imagery and sexist behaviour in the work of some of their male contemporaries, as we can see in Equipo Crónica's work Soul Test (1966).

Elsa Plaza and Teresa Inglés, A Life, 1978, page 1. Ink on cardboard. Courtesy of the artist

Elsa Plaza and Teresa Inglés, A Life, 1978, page 2. Ink on cardboard. Courtesy of the artist

Equipo Crónica, Soul Test, 1966. Courtesy of the IVAM Collection

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There was also a scathing analysis of the media and popular culture as instruments that spread and fortified social, cultural and normative sexual stereotypes and behaviours. Creations appropriated popular imagery to underscore how gender roles, put into practice from the family and public spheres and projected by the society of consumption, were little more than assumptions. For instance, one event sharply under the media spotlight was the Miss Spain contest, used by the regime as an event that positioned Spain in media “normalisation”, and used by artists from the perspective of the alienation of the female body as an object of visual consumption.