Picasso prints uncovered at McMaster Museum of Art

As announced yesterday on McMaster University’s Daily News feed, a complete set of Pablo Picasso’s Sueño y Mentira de Franco prints in their original case were recently discovered in the Museum’s archives by Adam Belovari, a fourth-year art history student assigned to research some of the lesser-known portions of the collections as a Humanities 3W03 assignment.

The eighteen images that comprise Sueño y Mentira de Franco (translated as “The Dream and Lie of Franco”) were created as a prospective project for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris where he had intended to distribute postcard-sized portions of each print’s comic-like panels to visitors at the Spanish Pavilion. Picasso’s plan, however, changed following the German bombing of Guernica on May 26, 1937 and his subsequent creation of the pivotal mural Guernica that ultimately dominated the Pavilion that year (and, 60 years later, my bedroom in oversized poster format).

Given the direct lineage from Sueño y Mentira de Franco (created prior to the bombing of Guernica) to Picasso’s subsequent masterwork, this print folio is a significant find and a great asset to the McMaster Museum’s collection, one that is already renowned for its impressive archive of German expressionist prints of the same time period.

I am therefore surprised that the set had been neglected in the first place (I hesitate to declare it a “lost” treasure, as a close read of the article merely implies the possibility) when the donation by Janet Black was as recent as 1997. Whether that’s a statement on the university’s funding for collections management (such that this vital work is being conducted by undergraduate students) or a result of the folio’s declared condition as merely ‘good’ (as opposed to mint, near-mint, or excellent), I sincerely hope that the Museum gets around to exhibiting these images in the near future.

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