The National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) has launched a challenging new exhibition, laying bare a dark chapter in Spanish history. It displays 135 works of art, confiscated during the Franco dictatorship, which were never returned to their rightful owners. This collection, titled “Recuperado del enemigo. Els dipòsits franquistes al MNAC” (Recovered from the enemy. The Francoist deposits at the MNAC), seeks to unravel the complex story of art, war, and propaganda that has remained largely untold for decades.

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Running until 28 June, the exhibition is the result of a meticulous investigation that began in 2022 by the Catalan Institute for Research in Cultural Heritage (ICRPC). The investigation reveals how thousands of artworks, initially safeguarded from the Spanish Civil War’s destruction by the Republican Generalitat de Catalunya, became Francoist deposits. The victorious regime seized these works and placed them in museum collections, often making little effort to find their original owners.

A Contested Legacy

As the Civil War erupted in July 1936, the Republican government in Catalonia gathered tens of thousands of artworks from private collections, churches, and monasteries to protect them from bombing raids and anticlerical violence. The government stored these items in various deposits across the region. When Franco’s forces claimed victory in 1939, they took control of this vast cultural treasure.

The regime’s Servicio de Defensa del Patrimonio Artístico Nacional (SDPAN), or National Artistic Heritage Defence Service, managed these works. They labelled the items with the propagandistic tag “Recuperado del enemigo” (Recovered from the enemy), creating a narrative that they had saved the art from Republican destruction. However, the exhibition argues this was a distortion of the truth.

“They neither recovered nor saved anything,” stated Gemma Domènech, director of the ICRPC and co-curator of the exhibition, in comments reported by Ara Cat.

A letter from SDPAN worker Josep Puigdemoles Barella, displayed in the exhibition, expresses his astonishment at the term.

“I see that the service agents call this recovery,” he wrote. “Since I am still new to this service, these things surprise me very much.”

Wounds of History on Display

The exhibition, co-curated by Domènech and Eduard Caballé, deliberately presents the artworks as they were found in storage, many bearing the scars of their turbulent history. “This is a risky exhibition; it’s not easy and may be uncomfortable for some,” Domènech admitted. “The works do not have the quality that is expected in a museum like the MNAC. It requires an open mind.”

Poignant examples include a 14th-century head of Christ, violently decapitated from its body, and Roberto Fernández Balbuena’s 1920 painting, Nu (Nude), which agitated seminarians stabbed multiple times in 1940.

Reclaiming these works proved deliberately arduous. Owners had to navigate a long bureaucratic process and provide an endorsement from third parties loyal to the regime. For those on the losing side of the war – exiled, imprisoned, or executed – reclaiming their property was often an impossible task.

The Unanswered Question of Restitution

The ICRPC’s research, which is due to conclude this August, initially expected to find confiscated items in around 25 Catalan museums. “Pulling on the thread, we have been able to verify that there were more than 50,” explained Domènech. The MNAC itself holds these 135 works, but they represent just a fraction of the total across Catalonia.

Of the pieces on display, only 19 have ever been returned. For example, Emiliano Barral’s family received seven sculptures in 1990, and Miquel Viladrich’s two works were restituted in 1995. The exhibition’s press conference left unanswered the question of what would happen if descendants of the original owners came forward to claim the remaining 116 works.

This initiative is part of a wider, albeit slow, movement across Spain to confront the legacy of art seizures during the Civil War. Recently, the Prado Museum in Madrid began investigating works in its collection with similar origins.

For the MNAC, the exhibition is an important “exercise in transparency.” Eduard Vallès, a curator at the museum, commented:

According to the official source, see «Recuperado del enemigo». Deposits at the MNAC under Franco’s dictatorship | Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.