The Broken: Spain's greatest cartoonist

Andrés Rábago. Who he?

Rábago is a cartoonist. Spain's most famous cartoonist. He is not a creator of cartoon strips, but of the usually one-off satirical, social commentary or otherwise pointed cartoon. He has gone under different pseudonyms, changing one well-known nom de plume for another well-known one and simultaneously changing the style of his message. He is now 65 years old and his oeuvre is being celebrated in an exhibition at Madrid's Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

65 years old is telling. Rábago was still a young man when Franco died, but he was active in the later years of the dictator. For a cartoonist with a satirical streak, this might have represented a dangerous occupation, but Rábago forged a reputation in the late '60s and into the 1970s nevertheless.

In truth, his satire began to emerge later. During Franco's time and for some years after, he traded in a style of cartoon that had echoes perhaps of Gerald Scarfe and of The Scream paintings of Edvard Munch. It was a style that dealt with the human condition, human fears and terrors, the subconscious and panic in particular; hence the possible link to Munch. It was one that also owed something to the surrealism of Dalí and Miró but much more to the later work of Goya, the Spanish painter more commonly thought of as a romantic but who created frightening imagery, such as in his oil on tin called the "Yard with Lunatics". Ken Russell, the film director, one would have to guess, was probably also influenced by Goya's hellish imagination and subliminal attacks on the reign of the then Spanish king.

References to artists of fame might seem strange when talking about a cartoonist, but Rábago was not and isn't a cartoonist in the way that one immediately understands the term to mean. It is only right that the Academy should honour him with a showing and only right that the art-world establishment, often haughty when it comes to cartoon works and even comic strips, should recognise the intrinsic artistic value of his contributions.

Rábago's first pseudonym was OPS. I have tried to find out the derivation of this pseudonym but without success, and Rábago himself seems to have been evasive in supplying an explanation. It might not have had anything to do with it, but put a "u" into OPS and what do you get? Opus. Rábago as OPS appears to have got away with a great deal during the final years of Franco's rule, partly because he didn't attempt to be a humorous cartoonist and so therefore didn't obviously expose himself as a critic of the regime, partly because he seemed to work in an artistic style reminiscent of Dalí who was generally sympathetic to Franco, and partly because Franco and his cronies simply didn't understand what he was doing. And among those who seemed not to have would have been fundamentalists within the church, such as Opus Dei.

OPS was killed off in the early 1980s, as the messages and style were no longer suited to a changing society. The underlying theme of allegorical repression that OPS displayed and the fears that this repression induced had given way to the more open, democratic society, but it was one that demanded a more direct political style, and so was born El Roto.

Literally meaning "the broken", El Roto is still at work, appropriately enough for an observer of the current rightist tendencies in Spain, in the left-leaning "El País". It is a time when sharp commentary, be it through cartoon, the written word or other means, is needed more than ever, especially in Spain. A desperate economy; an inadequate government; a clueless, ineffectual and anonymous prime minister; a church on the move that is seeking to regain its power; a monarchy plagued with controversy and gaffes; a banking sector in a partial state of collapse; unemployment the highest in Europe; poverty the worst in Europe with the exception of Romania and Bulgaria.

And later this year, in the Catalonian town of Hospitalet de Llobregat, there is to be a further exhibition that features Rábago's work. It will be called "a journey of a thousand demons", a nod in the direction of the OPS era. But the demons are as alive now as they were when they were symbolic of the torment of the Franco regime. Only they are different demons.

El Roto, the broken. How apt.


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