Dictatorships on Exhibition. Official Art Shows of the Franco and Salazar Regimes and their Political Functions

Concentrating on exhibitions of visual arts, in my doctoral thesis I aim to underline the importance of official expositions organized by the Portuguese Salazar Regime (1932-1968) and the Spanish Franco Regime (1939-1975) both at home and abroad.

To shortly introduce just a few of the factors dictatorships tried to benefit from in their expositions: Visual arts have always been a crucial instrument to publicly present religious and political ideas or to implement claims to power and therefore always have contributed to the formation of collective identities or to the legitimation of new sovereignties. Yet, especially fine arts are still associated with the myth of being free and independent.

Speaking through art on the one hand helped to create a certain image but also served to express certain political and ideological ideas and messages in quite a subtle yet easily understandable way – due to the narrative element of pictures – and so to educate people according to the ideals of the new elite in power. Especially abroad art expositions were also used to establish closer bonds with potential partners by means of cultural policy. In any case boundaries between fine arts and propaganda increasingly became blurred.

In my doctoral thesis I am trying to unmask the political functions of expositions which in their majority at first glance could be qualified as completely unpolitical on the one hand while on the other hand I would also like to show how and to which extent those two long-lasting dictatorships of the Iberian Peninsula were forced to adapt their aesthetic ideas, their cultural politics and, as a result, their exhibition concepts by altering geopolitical conditions and allies in the course of time.

My final aim is to present a political analysis of the Salazar and Franco dictatorships concentrating on their domestic and foreign affairs as well as a comparison of those political systems on the basis of their exhibition policy.