PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

Sueno y mentira de Franco, the 'Dream and Lie of Franco', was created in 1937 in protest of Franco's coup d'etat a year earlier. Rather than simply condemn the unlawfulness of this regime, Picasso chose to at once ridicule the general and expose the suffering of the people in a series of 18 cartoon-line scenes printed from two plates. The comic-strip character of the prints derived from Picasso's original idea, which was to produce a series of postcards or leaflets, to be widely disseminated amongst the Spanish people. The result is not a narrative as such, but a series of loosely connected images.

The edition of two prints with a surrealist poem by the artist was offered for sale at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World Fair in Paris, where Picasso exhibited Guernica for the first time. The prints also include the first emanation of 'La Femme qui pleure' ('The Weeping Woman'), arguably the artist's greatest print.