RIP José Luis Galicia

 

Farewell to José Luis Galicia: Picasso reunites with his Spanish friend

The painter, poet and film decorator who was instrumental in the return of 'Guernica' to Spain dies in Madrid at the age of 95

El Pais

By Borja Hermoso

June 6, 2025

 

Galicia died, that man of the suburbs and a helmet with white hair crouching between brushes and canvases, there in his little apartment in Ciudad Lineal, always ready to receive and to speak, mother of God, what this man liked to speak, and rightly so, he had a conversation that looked like a movie. His life was.

José Luis Galicia (Madrid, 1930) was several and successive things: poet, cartoonist, engraver (he sent non-stop, by post, delicious folders with drawings edited by himself or related people who wanted him), film decorator (120 films to his credit and the creation in 1962, in the Madrid town of Hoyo de Manzanares, in Golden City, a personal madness in the form of a false town in the far-west where Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood filmed For a handful of dollars, that's nothing), grandson and son of artists (his father was the painter Francisco Galicia), nephew of the writer León Felipe and cousin and friend of the bullfighter Carlos Arruza. And, of course, a painter himself with more than 60 individual exhibitions in his backpack.

Part of the frescoes in the cathedral of La Almudena are his, although we didn't talk much about that because he, intuitive and clever like the old fox he was, sensed what his colleague thought. Much more interesting, and unknown or poorly known to the general public, was his graphic and pictorial work on paper and canvas.

His house was not a museum, although it would have deserved to be. In that huge triplex and so 70s in the northwest of Madrid, mountains of books, tottering columns of art magazines, paintings and photos, lithographs and silkscreens, jars with brushes, furniture, easels and tons of souvenirs were piled up – they will continue to be piled up, we suppose: what a task lies ahead of the family. The most persistent and profound of them all marks the other thing, which was José Luis Galicia.

The condition that, perhaps beyond all the others, personal, professional and artistic, he had embedded in his head and took for a walk again and again, in a way between obsessive and nostalgic. Galicia was Picasso's friend. Picasso's Spanish friend. Pablo Picasso's last Spanish friend. And not only: the Spanish friend of Pablo Picasso who convinced Pablo Picasso that one of his greatest works and undoubtedly the most symbolically charged, Guernica, had to leave the MoMA in New York and come to Spain at once.

The French poet Paul Éluard was to blame for that friendship. It was 1952, the author of Capital of Pain had just died in Paris and José Luis Galicia, then a 22-year-old Spanish student who was seeking artistic fortune on the banks of the Seine, attended the tribute to Éluard that a group of intellectuals had organized at the Maison de la Pensée Française (House of French Thought). A visit that, without a doubt, was going to be decisive in his life.

He told it like this, as if it were such a thing, sitting between cushions in his hall-tower in Babel: "There, in a large room, they were all gathered, whether Aragon, what if the surrealists, what if those of the Communist Party, and in another room there was an exhibition with all the paintings that Picasso had given to Paul Éluard". Galicia went from the opening cocktail and entered the room directly to see the paintings. "Suddenly, Picasso enters that little room. I approached him and said: 'You are Pablo Picasso'. And he said to me: 'Yes, who are you?!' 'Well, a Spanish painter who has just arrived in Paris'. And he answers: 'Well, let's see this together.' I was quite cheeky at the time and I made a small criticism of one of the paintings. Then another from someone else, and on the third he began to discuss the painting with me. I told him the truth, and I think he liked that. When he finished, he told me that he would like to see what I painted and asked me if I knew where I lived. 'Yes, of course, on the Rue des Grands Augustins [where Picasso painted Guernica]', I told him. 'Well, come and see me tomorrow and bring me something of yours'.

The next day, the beardless and emboldened Spanish painter appeared at Grands Augustins with his folders of drawings. Jaume Sabartés, perennial secretary, and more than that, the keeper of genius, opened the door for him. "But who are you, Picasso is not here, he has gone to the Côte d'Azur," the dry and stern man snapped. It was the beginning of not one, but two great friendships. Jaume Sabartés and José Luis Galicia would end up becoming intimate. In 2018, the small publishing house Ars Valle published the delicious Correspondence of Jaime Sabartés with José Luis Galicia. "That way no one will be able to say that this Galicia invented everything," Galicia said proudly when he handed you a copy. Other books published by him are My friend Picasso, Poems, Toroafición and Hojas sueltas.

Galicia and Picasso established a relationship of trust in which the young painter entered the master's domains as Pedro did through his house. For quite some time, he went two or three times a year to visit him at his mansions on the Côte d'Azur, La Californie, in Cannes, where Picasso lived with his wife Jacqueline Roque, and Notre-Dame-de-Vie, in Mougins. He remembered it like this: "When I went I stayed for several days. And I can say that he was a simple and affectionate man with me, and that nothing I have read in the thousand books that have been written about him and his character has anything to do with what he was like, or at least I did not know that Picasso. He was someone of great sensitivity and very easy emotion, although perhaps a little difficult to understand and to bear. I have come to think that when he received people in his house he felt obliged to change, to transform himself into a character, just like the actors. We started talking at six in the evening, always after taking a nap, because he didn't forgive that, and maybe they would give us 11 at night. And I said to myself: 'Maybe I'm stealing this man's time to paint a masterpiece'.

In one of the endless conversations between the god of modern art and the daring sorcerer's apprentice, the subject of Guernica came up one day. A masterpiece about which, by the way, Galicia always defended the thesis that it was actually a bullfighting painting that Picasso later retouched on the fly to satisfy the wishes of the Republic. "Every time Guernica came up in conversation," Galicia said, "I always told Pablo that the painting had to end up in Spain, but he replied that the painting belonged to the Spanish Republic, which was the one that had commissioned it for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. I was tired of those explanations and one day I told him: 'Look, Pablo, when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel he also had a tremendous fuss with the popes and with other artists..., and that... Now... who remembers? People today look at the Sistine Chapel and marvel, period!' I told him that he had to forget a little about politics, that politics was a one-off thing, but that Guernica was forever."

So that day, he assured, he convinced him to change the clause "when there is a Republic in Spain" to "when there is a democratic State". "Pablo called Jacqueline and told her: 'Call Dumas [Roland Dumas, the French lawyer Picasso's executor] and let him come as soon as possible because I am going to change this.' So no, I didn't bring Guernica to Spain in 1981, Javier Tussell and the Spanish government brought it..., but of course I convinced him to change that clause. And, if it hadn't been like that, who knows, maybe the painting would still be in the MoMA in New York."

Only one thorn was left in José Luis Galicia's side. He tried to convince his friend to donate his famous Meninas to the Prado Museum, so that they would be next to Velázquez's, instead of sending them to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. "He was silent for about a quarter of an hour, thinking. And suddenly he shouted angrily: 'No! With those of Velázquez, the Prado already has enough." Word from Galicia, which has now gone to sleep for a while to dream placidly about its things. His bulls and his bullfighters, his easels, his adored family, his folders of poems. His Picasso.

GALICIA, José Luis

Born: 6/1/1930, Argüelles, Madrid, Spain

Died: 6/5/2025, Madrid, Madrid, Spain

 

José Luis Galicia’s westerns – art department, art director, set designer, production designer, costume designer:

The Shadow of Zorro – 1962 [set decorator]

The Terrible Sheriff – 1962 [art director]

Zorro the Avenger – 1962 [art department]

Gunfight at High Noon – 1963 [art department]

Implacable Three – 1963 [production designer]

The Sign of the Coyote – 1963 [set decorator]

Ride and Kill – 1964 [set decorator]

Seven from Texas – 1964 [art director]

Tomb of the Pistolero – 1964 [set decorator]

Welcome Padre Murray – 1964 [production designer]

A Coffin for the Sheriff – 1965 [production designer]

A Fistful of Knuckles – 1965 [production designer]

Outlaw of Red River – 1965 [production designer]

Kid Rodelo – 1966 [art director]

Mutiny at Fort Sharp – 1966 [art department]

Ringo and Gringo Against All – 1966 [production designer]

Ringo the Face of Revenge – 1966 [set decorator]

Seven Guns for the MacGregors – 1966 [set decorator]

Sugar Colt – 1966 [production designer]

Vengeance Ranch – 1966 [set decorator]

Adios, Hombre – 1967 [production designer]

Django Kill – 1967 [art director]

For a Few Bullets More – 1967 [art director]

Rattler Kid – 1967 [costume designer]

Two Crosses at Danger Pas – 1967 [set decorator]

Death Knows No Time – 1968 [set decorator]

Fedra West – 1968 [set decorator]

Go for Broke – 1968 [set decorator]

Killer Adios – 1968 [production designer]

One by One – 1968 [set decorator]

A Pistol for 100 Coffins – 1968 [production designer]

Ringo the Lone Rider – 1968 [set decorator]

A Taste of Vengeance – 1968 [set decorator]

Death on High Mountain – 1969 [production designer]

$20,000 for Seven – 1969 [costume designer]

Apocalypse Joe – 1970 [production designer]

Arizona Colt Returns – 1970 [production designer]

Gunman in Town – 1970 [set decorator]

Matalo! – 1970 [art director]

Reverend Colt – 1970 [set decorator]

Bad Man’s River – 1971 [production designer]

The Bandit Malpelo – 1971 [set decorator]

Dead Men Ride – 1971 [production designer]

In the Name of the Father, of the Son and of the Colt – 1971 [production designer]

Cut Throats Nine – 1972 [set decorator]

His Name was Holy Ghost – 1972 [costume designer]

Kill the Poker Player – 1972 [set decorator]

Fast Hand is Still My Name – 1973 [set decorator]

Tequila – 1973 [production designer]

Stop Over in Hell – 2016 [art department]