Picasso was a very present absence in the first years of the Franco regime. While successive exhibitions, publications and tributes, in the United States as well as in Europe made him increasingly aware of his entrance into history, his image brought him back to Spain’s present in various ways. To artists in exile he seemed an ethical beacon, while to those inside he was a reminder of the hazy modernism of the thirties that survived into the forties, and that became stronger and even official in the fifties with the beginning of the Cold War. In parallel, from the regime’s point of view, his image metamorphosed from the forties to the fifties, becoming more and more multifaceted: the dangerous communist dissenter and creator of Guernica turned into a paradoxical object of desire and admiration, but also one of dispute and mockery.