By Shiri Revital Bilik

In early 1937, with the Spanish Civil War well under way, Pablo Picasso set to work on a series of cartoon-like panels called "The Dream and Lie of Franco." Picasso depicted the fascist general Francisco Franco, who often portrayed himself as the savior of Spanish culture and society, as a "polyp," or cancerous growth.

PICASSO THE POET Picasso also titled a poem "The Dream and Lie of Franco" and meant it to accompany the piece. According to UMMA curator Sean Ulmer, it is as unpredictable and lively as the art itself. It begins: fandango of shivering owls souse of swords of evil-omened polyps scouring brush of hairs from priests' tonsures standing naked in the middle of the frying-pan-placed upon the ice cream cone of codfish fried in the scabs of his lead-ox heart- his mouth full of the chinch-bug jelly of his words É. And ends: Écries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of timbers and of stones cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of pots of cats and of papers cries of odors which claw at one another cries of smoke pricking the shoulder of the cries which stew in the cauldron and of the rain of birds which inundates the sea which gnaws the bone and breaks its teeth biting the cotton wool which the sun mops up from the plate which the purse and the pocket hide in the print which the foot leaves in the rock. (Reprinted from Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, 1972.)

Visitors to the U-M Museum of Art's upcoming show, Picasso: Masterworks from the Collection will get a rare look at the Franco-polyp as he appears in both of the "Dream and Lie" prints. They are among 31 pieces spanning Picasso's career from 1905 to 1968. UMMA will display them in the museum's apse and lower level from June 8 - Sept. 15.

Sean Ulmer, UMMA's curator of modern and contemporary art, and the Picasso show's curator, says the last few panels of "Dream and Lie" can be seen "inherently linked to Picasso's famous 'Guernica,'" the 1937 masterpiece commemorating the bombing of a city in Picasso's native Basque country by Nazi planes under the order of Franco. "One can see the parallels in the figures of the women who look heavenward, crying out in anguish at the horrors of the bombing," Ulmer notes.

Until the Spanish Civil War period, Picasso's politics tended toward neutrality, Ulmer says, but in pieces like "Dream and Lie" he was beginning to make bold statements about the looming specter of fascism spreading across Europe.

The pieces were originally designed as small prints to be sold at the Paris World Fair to raise money for the Spanish Republican cause. At the time of the fair, the Republicans, who were fighting for democratic rule, were exiled from Spain by Franco's troops.

According to the artist Francoise Gilot, Picasso's former lover and the inspiration of much of his portraiture work, "Dream and Lie" was Picasso's way of siding with democracy. "The pieces were not distributed very broadly," she says. "They were meant to vent his spleen, so that he could say what he had to say."

Unlike the dark and anguished "Guernica," the "Dream and Lie" series has elements of caricature and theatrics, typifying Picasso's unconventional portrayal of war.

Picasso's somewhat flexible relationship with the politics of the time echoed his complex rendering of the civil war. The Nazis classified him as a "degenerate Bolshevik" while he was living in occupied Paris during World War II. They kept his work out of the public eye except for one minor show between 1939-1945. Yet Picasso accepted patronage from Hitler's favorite sculptor, Arno Breker, and unlike some of his intellectual colleagues who were executed and exiled, Picasso did not make outward displays of resistance.

In the UMMA's "Dream and Lie" prints, however, which he completed before most of the genocidal crimes of WWII had occurred, Picasso's disdain for fascism had not yet given way to cynicism. "The figures have an extraordinarily lively quality, communicated through his manipulation of line," Ulmer says. "The work is full of energy and excitement."

The exhibition's drawings, prints and oil paintings are drawn principally from the UMMA collection, "one of the few, if not the only, university collections with this kind of depth in its Picasso holdings," Ulmer says. "And this project will mark the first time such a large body of these works have been shown together."

Shiri Revital Bilik '02 is Michigan Today's 2001-02 intern.