There was a time when art and culture moved according to the dictates of authority. Quite an outrage at the height of many others committed by the Franco regime. The control of all popular expression was part of that dominion over the conscience of the people of this country.
It is not necessary to travel to the Middle Ages to come across a reality like this, a lifestyle censored in its creative plot, as Salvador Compan well narrated in his novel Today is bad but tomorrow is mine. We start from the years following the victory of the Franco regime, a totalitarian state supported by the Church to insert into the popular imagination an ideology weighed down by propaganda and submission.
But the sixties arrived and the differences with a Europe that was already taking off in terms of social and individual rights began to awaken illusions and resistance. Art, never so necessarily compromised, sought its channels to reveal to the world a silenced truth.
And thanks to the collusion of artists of all kinds, Spain waited crouching to jump in life and color as soon as the situation changed due to the push of the rest of the continent. Culture had a lot of work ahead of it to free the people of this country from darkness to light, from abhorrence to democracy (when this word still made sense)
The change in mentality was cooking from within, between the cultural environments that clandestinely contacted, that conspired to defeat evil, that favored the assault on power, the silence of weapons, the return of expatriates and the compensation of the victims ( in the latter we are still spinning ...)
An interesting book to understand how and where the true transition was forged, the one that moves from the base, the one that forces politicians to reach agreements, the one that forces kings to recognize that kind of shared crown that was the parliamentary monarchy )
You can now buy the essay Spaces of freedom, the new book of Juan Pablo Fusi Aizpurua, here: