ABSTRACT
Games and play as understood by Roger Caillois provide a useful framework to understand Angel Planells’ balancing of realist and surrealist production during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. In Planells’ drawing, the focus on the grandmother and the grandchild provides an opportunity to reflect on the frailty and innocence of those affected by the tragedy of Fascism. The anti-fascist drawings of Planells are perhaps better understood in the context of the great quantity of posters, drawings, photographs, and other illustrations that were produced by both Republicans and Nationalists between 1936 and 1939 as national and international propaganda of the conflict. During Franco’s dictatorship, Planells had to work on commission and produce lithographic work in order to avoid any possible encounter with Franco’s censorship apparatus. The ludic dimension of Planells’ surrealist work points to an implicit fight with Fascism in the sense described by Claudia Mesch, and this fight is bolstered by the artist’s subversion of the traditional rules of various games.
