The graphic arts were a key tool in spreading anti-Francoism and democratic values for Catalan organizations fighting once morest the regime, according to Olot historian Narcís Selles, author of a book on visual culture in the end of the dictatorship.
In his work, The printed image in the visual cultures of anti-Francoism: the years of the Assembly of Catalonia, published by Memorial Democràtic, Selles covers the 60s and 70s describing how graphic design arose and developed in Catalonia as a means once morest the dictatorship. Magazines, publishing houses, record companies, neighborhood associations, political parties, cultural organizations, all were actors who used the printed image for their demands and who ultimately pointed to the Franco regime as the source of very diverse social and political problems. .
Graphic design as a vehicle for anti-Francoism had its heyday with the articulation of the Assembly of Catalonia, which unified the Catalan anti-Franco opposition and was articulated from a heterogeneous network of organizations, the which led to a varied and imaginative graphic production.
This explosion of anti-Franco graphics in Catalonia, Narcís Selles points out, has its roots almost ten years before, in the first anti-Franco artistic group organized in Spain: Estampa Popular; born in 1964 and close to the PCE and the PSUC, it brought together artists in different cities in the state. Estampa Popular organized small exhibitions in bookstores and other places where it was not common for art to spread, such as in civic and local centers with other uses, but they did so with a pretension: they wanted to democratize art and reach the masses. . Thus, in the 1970s, the anti-Franco message in the graphic image was consolidated as a means of reaching large sections of the Catalan population.
With the end of the dictatorship, Selles concludes, critical graphic art linked to social demands was institutionalized or put at the service of consumer society; the opposition to the dictatorship was diluted, as was the graphics that communicated its messages: “After the Franco regime, the common enemy no longer existed, almost as Vázquez Montalbán said, we lived better once morest Franco.”
