The Ghost of Franco

On 20 November 1975, Spain’s Prime Minister Carlos Arias Navarro made a televised address to the nation that began with the words: “Spaniards, Franco has died.”

After 39 years of dictatorship, the death of General Francisco Franco marked the start of Spain’s democratic transition and, with it, a period of transgressive artistic freedom. But as the country marks the 50th anniversary of the regime’s end, the question of what to do with Franco’s legacy feels newly unsettled.

The national commemoration, running from January 2025 to December 2026, will bring major exhibitions, installations and film programmes to institutions across Spain. Yet it coincides with a changing political mood: the far right has consolidated influence in regional parliaments and democratic ideals appear to have lost some of their sheen among younger Spaniards.

In his address in 1975, a visibly shaken Arias Navarro warned that “Franco might not be among us, but he is leaving us his legacy”. Half a century later, what to do with it remains unresolved.

Rewriting Spanish History

“Spain has a complete 20th-century history - a sad and scary one - and we have its witnesses,” Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, tells The Art Journal. The museum, custodian of Spain’s principal modern and contemporary art collection, received 1.6 million visitors in 2025 and is currently reorganising its galleries. On 16 February, its fourth floor will reopen with a new presentation dedicated to the final years of the Franco regime through to the present day, featuring the work of more than 200 artists. The exhibition will include previously unseen works from the collection, and its timeline will restart three times to reflect the fragmented narratives around Spain’s recent history. “When you talk about contemporary art, what you have in the collection are not objects anymore—they are subjects,” Segade says. “They speak by themselves and have opinions, and they talk about their present, which is very close to ours.”

For Segade, few works embody this more than Pablo Picasso’s Guernica - a symbol of civilian suffering and a recurrent protagonist in anti-war protests in Spain and beyond, from the Vietnam War and the Gulf War to the current devastation in Gaza. Last November, it served as a sombre backdrop for a visit by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Picasso painted the monumental work in Paris in 1937, months after the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion, acting on behalf of Franco’s Nationalist faction. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the victory of fascism triggered one of the most significant diasporas in modern European history. Like many artists, writers and intellectuals of the period, Picasso became a political exile. So did Guernica: Picasso refused to allow the painting to be sent to Spain unless a democratic government had been established.

The Return of Guernica

It would not be until 1981, six years after Franco’s death, that Guernica left the Museum of Modern Art in New York, its temporary home, and finally arrived in Madrid. By then, it was already known as “the last exile of the Civil War”. The painting was first exhibited in an offshoot of the Prado Museum, under glass and flanked by armed security guards. “Guernica was an outsider in that museum, out of the chronology,” Segade says. After the Reina Sofía opened as an art centre in 1986, it became the primary landing site for other “exiled” masterpieces, including Maruja Mallo’s The Fair and Joan Miró’s Snail, Woman, Flower, Star. “The construction of the contemporary scene in Spain was built along with the exile coming back,” Segade says. “All the promises of a broken narrative with our avant-garde and modernity were fulfilled precisely in the moment of returning and finding this museum.”

If the return of Guernica came to embody a new democratic era, it also exposed the contradictions of Spain’s transition, which was shaped by political pacts rather than regime collapse or popular revolt. A post-Francoist Spanish identity was forged amid profound tension, as new civil liberties began to redraw everyday life: married women could work or travel without their husband’s consent, homosexuality was decriminalised, and religious censorship was rolled back. It was also the moment of La Movida, the countercultural movement whose figures - including filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and photographer Alberto García-Alix - continue to fascinate today.

Juan Genovés’s The Embrace (1976) is to this period, known as the Spanish Transition, what Guernica is to the Civil War. The painting quickly became a symbol of reconciliation that was as aspirational as it was fragile. After authorising its use on posters demanding amnesty for political prisoners, Genovés was imprisoned for a week. The Embrace, now in the Reina Sofía’s collection, was loaned to the Congress of Deputies in 2016, but returned to the museum last April as part of España en Libertad. 50 años (50 Years of Freedom in Spain, January 2025-December 2026), a nationwide cultural programme spanning both art of the Transition and contemporary work engaging with the dictatorship’s legacy.

When the Dictatorship Doesn’t End

For the contemporary artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo, however, the Franco period has not ended. It persists as one historical layer among many, percolating through the present. “Just as the Spain of the Catholic Monarchs has not ended, nor Roman Spain, nor Visigothic Spain, nor, lest we forget it, Muslim Spain,” he tells The Art Journal, “the Franco period has not ended either.” Sánchez Castillo was five years old when the Generalissimo died, “probably playing with toy horses,” he says. Equestrian statues - particularly Francoist ones - sit at the centre of his long-running inquiry into power and propaganda: who is permitted to occupy them, who is not, and what happens when authority is literally placed above the viewer.

Last November he unveiled Libre (Free) at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, as part of España en Libertad. 50 años. Visitors could exchange a written reflection on freedom for one of 25,000 small-scale reproductions of an equestrian sculpture of Franco, this time without the rider. “I wanted to turn a toy of power into a toy we can all have,” Sánchez Castillo says, “so that we may lose our fear of it and imagine a different future.” The responses ranged from a single scrawled word to longer reflections, often from those who remember a Spain in which restrictions on peaceful assembly would have made a gathering like Libre unthinkable. “Young people today can’t understand that simply standing together in a group of three could make you politically suspect back then,” Sánchez Castillo says.

To create the reproductions, Sánchez Castillo was given access to the original statue. It was removed from public view in 2005, two years before the approval of the Historical Memory Law, which officially condemned the dictatorship and required the removal of Francoist monuments and symbols from public buildings and streets.

Memory Under Threat

The legislation was expanded in 2022 by the Socialist government of Pedro Sánchez, but conservatives in the Partido Popular (PP) and the far-right Vox party have vowed to overturn it. Last October, a PP-Vox coalition in Extremadura successfully did so, passing a “Concord Law” that does not explicitly mention Franco’s regime nor includes the word “dictatorship”.

Spain has undergone a far-right resurgence that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In 2018, Vox became the first far-right party to enter a regional parliament since the Transition, sending shockwaves across the country. It is now present in all but one of Spain’s 17 regional parliaments, and its following is increasing among young people: 40 percent of men and 21 percent of women aged 18 to 34.

Sánchez Castillo is currently preparing for his solo show La Perla Peregrina at the Palacio de Velázquez, one of the Reina Sofía’s sites (24 June 2026 - 8 March 2027). The exhibition will feature a reproduction of another Francoist riderless horse. For him, the persistence of these symbols is not a matter of nostalgia but of political consequence. “Without memory, you can’t do anything,” he says. “They say that plants have memory, that the land has memory, that the climate has memory. Everything has memory.”