Present day
07-03-25
María Franciska Dapena
War / Autobiography of an Artist / Prison. Unpublished texts
On the occasion of the 2024 donation of an important collection of graphic works and documents of the artist María Franciska Dapena (Barruelo de Santullán, Palencia, 1924–Bilbao, 1995), the museum has published a book with a representative selection of the artist’s writings that stand out because of both their literary quality and their keen biographical and historiographic interest.
The texts that Dapena published during her lifetime—¡Sr. Juez! (Soy presa de Franco…) (1978) and Vida y muerte enfrentadas. Mujeres de la vida (1987), as well as the poems that were part of the book 17 poetas de Bilbao from 1974—are now out of print and account for just a small part of the Dapena’s literary output. Her extensive oeuvre includes stories, poems and reflections on her life and work, the art world and the political and social situation, along with several novels, notebooks and loose pages with all types of content. It also encompasses around 700 letters dating from 1949 to 1993, including more than 200 sent or received while she was imprisoned for her communist ideology between 1962 and 1964.
Now, thanks to the generosity of her heirs, their donation of the María Franciska Dapena archive will enable us to recreate her figure through a first-person story that has never before been shared with the public. The book’s publication was entrusted to the historian David Fuente, who had the chance to study and cull the Dapena archive—at that time held by her family—between 2018 and 2019 thanks to a BBK-Bilbao Fine Arts Museum artistic research grant.
This work now reveals the interest of texts which shed new light on the artist, most of them written between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. They reflect the tensions in Spain’s recent history and touch on issues like the role and status of women during the dictatorship, Dapena’s lifelong political commitment and her reflections on the artistic climate in Bizkaia in the 1950s and 1960s.
The book is divided into three sections, each focused on a specific period in her biography and featuring a main text. The first one, entitled ‘War (1935–1945)’ [Guerra], includes ‘Diary of a Postwar Young Woman’ [Diario de una joven de postguerra], a story of life events, from the fall of the republican Balmaseda to the return of her imprisoned father, filled with intimate details and social critique.
The second, ‘Autobiography of an Artist (1950–1969)’ [Autobiografía de una artista], features ‘A Bit of Mari Dapena’s History’ [Algo de historia de Mari Dapena], which describes her early days in Bizkaia’s art world, her affinities and disagreements with the community of artists and the development of her concerns within the dictatorship.
The third one, entitled ‘Prison (1962–1964)’ [Cárcel], revolves around ‘Brief Diary of a Prison’ [Diario corto de un penal], which is almost exclusively comprised of dialogues with the women was imprisoned with in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) after suffering from retaliation from the regime. These conversations provide a snapshot of society during the Franco regime in a style that resembles a play script.
María Franciska Dapena
Guerra
Autobiografía de una artista
Cárcel
Textos inéditos
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Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
Editor: David Fuente
Format: 13 x 21 cm (wide by tall). Soft cover
Number of pages: 224
Language: Spanish
ISBN: 978-84-18171-25-3
María Franciska Dapena (Barruelo de Santullán, Palencia, 1924-Bilbao, 1995)
Dapena was born in a small mining village in the north of Palencia. She was from a wealthy family that held leftist political positions and suffered from retaliation during the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Her father, Bernardo Dapena Gutiérrez, had a chemical goods factory, and her mother, Beatriz Rico Villa, came from a family of small landowners in Balmaseda (Bizkaia) who worked in retail.
Mari was twelve years old and was studying with her brother in Santander when the Civil War broke out in July 1936. Her father had to flee from Barruelo and left them in Balmaseda with her mother’s family and soon joined the rest of the family. There, she met her future husband, Gonzalo José Villate, with whom she shared political leanings.
Dapena started her career as an artist within expressionistic figuration in the early 1940s. Her work is associated with major milestones in the history of Basque art: the collective exhibitions with Agustín Ibarrola and Ismael Fidalgo in the mid-1950s which travelled around Bizkaia to bring culture to common people; her struggle with the poet Gabriel Aresti to strip Franco supporters of their influence in the Bizkaia Artistic Association until the early 1960s; her 1962 participation in the group Estampa Popular de Bizkaia with Ibarrola and Dionisio Blanco, with Blas de Otero collaborating with his social poetry. This group, which advocated the creation of graphic works as part of committed political action against the dictatorship, was only able to display their works in March, because in June, Dapena, Ibarrola and another poet who belonged to the group were arrested.
Between 1962 and 1964, she was imprisoned because she had collaborated with the Communist Party of Spain and sent information on strikes to foreign press agencies, an experience captured in numerous writings, paintings and engravings, and in the book ¡Sr. Juez! (Soy presa de Franco…).
She was a member of the artists’ groups Emen, founded in 1966, and Indar, founded in 1970s. That same year, she created the Sala Arteta in the town of Santurtzi in Bizkaia, which only had a brief life associated with young people seeking artistic and social transformations, who always saw Dapena as a role model for socially committed art.
Her increasing discontent drove her to fulfil her long-dormant desire to move to the countryside, and in 1975 she moved to the small town of Nava de Ordunte, located on the border between Bizkaia and northern Burgos in a quiet, natural setting. With retrospective disenchantment over the result of years of her necessary political and cultural anti-Franco struggle, and by then distanced from the majority of her colleagues, in her latter years Dapena’s art transitioned from social criticism to nature scenes with a mystical component.