Equipo Crónica, an art collective active between 1964 and 1981, and founded in Valencia by Rafael Solbes, Manuel Valdés and, briefly, Juan Antonio Toledo, turned the strategies of American Pop toward the urgencies of late-Franco Spain. Working collectively allowed the artists to skirt the cult of authorship prized by the regime and to adopt the tone of an underground press, mixing mordant wit with mass-media immediacy. Their 1971 screenprint Guernica belongs to the celebrated Guernica 69 cycle first unveiled at Galería Grises, Bilbao, in December 1969, where the group recast Picasso’s wartime painting as a running commentary on censorship, exile and cultural repatriation.

Formally, the print orchestrates a collision between Cubist fracture and the ben-day dots of Pop: Picasso’s shattered horse and screaming figures are compressed into a stark black-and-white silhouette across which a comic-book explosion—lifted from Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam!—detonates in primary yellows and reds. The onomatopoeic “WHAAM!” ruptures the grisaille tragedy with a graphic blast of mass-culture spectacle, underscoring Equipo Crónica’s conviction that modern warfare is mediated as much by television and advertising as by bombs. The silkscreen matrix, with its flat planes and industrial finish, amplifies that argument: violence is now reproduced, disseminated and consumed with the same ease as a magazine cover.

Such appropriation is doubly pointed. By grafting Lichtenstein’s Pop vernacular onto Spain’s most venerated modern painting, the artists stage a trans-Atlantic dialogue about memory: what happens when an image designed to shock 1937 Paris becomes a postcard in 1970s mass culture? Their hybrid iconography suggests that historical trauma risks slipping into visual cliché unless continually re-activated. At the same time, the work reinscribes Picasso—then still physically absent from Franco’s Spain, within a contemporary Spanish idiom, asserting a cultural lineage the dictatorship had sought to suppress.

The series also answered a specific political moment. In 1968-69, Madrid petitioned MoMA to return Guernica to Spain; intellectuals feared the regime would appropriate the mural as proof of national “normalisation” under its tourist slogan “Spain is different.” Equipo Crónica’s prints countered with an image of Guernica literally under fire, implying that any uncritical homecoming would explode its original anti-fascist charge. By embedding the Lichtenstein blast inside Picasso’s composition, they exposed the regime’s PR gambit and reclaimed the painting’s republican meaning for a new generation of viewers living under censorship.

Today, Equipo Crónica’s Guernica stands as a touchstone for politically engaged Pop on both sides of the Atlantic. Its screenprint format democratised access to the image and anticipated post-Franco artists’ use of multiples to challenge institutional control. Within the Robledo-Palop Collection, the work anchors a narrative in which global Pop tactics are marshalled for local dissent, reminding us that the tragedies Picasso painted are neither museum relics nor aestheticised décor, but open questions about collective memory, media spectacle and the ethics of looking.

Provenance

Private collecion, Spain

Subastas Segre, Madrid, October 24th, 2017, lot. 319

Acquired from the above

Literature

Michèle Dalmace-Rognon. Equipo Crónica, Obra gráfica y múltiples 1965-1982. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 1988, p. 61, cat. no. 38.

Fernando Castro Florez (ed.). Crónica del Guernica. València: IVAM – Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Cultura, Educació i Esport, 2006, p. 93.