Homenatge a Picasso. Vallauris, 1972

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In 1971, Picasso celebrated his ninetieth birthday. This event garnered extraordinary international visibility for the artist while at the same time revealing the fragility of his reception in Spain. Although the artist was officially tolerated, the man was not accepted at all. Despite this, Picasso had become a symbol of freedom for a wide section of society. The artist was the target of a series of attacks by far-right groups in bookstores and art galleries that wanted to celebrate his birthday. This exhibition recovers the memory of those attacks and sees them as specific and planned actions that formed part of a real campaign against Picasso.

In the absence of any official response, the attack on Picasso inspired private and often clandestine initiatives in support of the artist. Such is the case of the 1ère Rencontre Internationale Hommage à Pablo Picasso, an exhibition project promoted by Santiago Palet, who was the artistic director of the Taller de Picasso gallery, after the attack that destroyed the venue. The young gallery owner invited more than two hundred artists and figures from the world of culture for a dedication to be made on a piece of cotton with laced edges for the exhibition paying homage to Picasso that he organized in Vallaurís, in 1972. The event was a powerful collective response, formulated in artistic terms, to a political attack.

This collection, recently acquired by the Fundació Vila Casas, is a testament to the artistic dynamics in Barcelona in the seventies, and shows that Picasso was a model of attitude that encouraged the emergence of intellectual initiatives and artistic criticism of the Franco regime.

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