Dictator Art - General Franco edition
September 14 2011
Did you know that Franco could paint? I didn't. Mark Hudson in The Telegraph gives an over-view of his pictures, and tries, for the sake of an alluring headline, to compare his art with Hitler's.
Hitler was a competent, if mediocre semi-professional who had hoped for a career in art, Franco a naive amateur, who took to painting as therapy.
But both choose subjects associated with well-established genres exemplifying an order, with which they identify, but which remains comfortingly outside their own experience.
Hitler’s pallid watercolours favoured grandiose buildings, pictured in an ultra-conservative style in which their massive forms remain constrained and distant. Franco’s art is at its most distinctive in hunting scenes, a genre associated with philistine masculinity – art for grandees of the past who didn’t like art.
