A law passed in Spain in 2022 has quietly set in motion a wave of restitutions of art looted during the Civil War, more than 50 years after the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
Less than a week after the coup d’état that plunged the country into civil war in 1936, the Spanish Republican government established the Board for the Seizure and Protection of Artistic Heritage. Its objective was to requisition and safeguard artworks threatened by the war, including those held in museums, palaces, parishes and prominent private collections. But Franco’s victory three years later resulted in tens of thousands of these pieces being confiscated, misappropriated or lost and never returned to their owners. Many are now in administrative buildings, churches, other private collections and museums.
The Museo del Prado alone has identified 166 confiscated artworks in its collection, including paintings by Spanish masters such as Joaquín Sorolla and Pedro Atanasio Bocanegra. In the past five years, the museum has led efforts to catalogue and return these pieces. Last month, a pair of panel paintings confiscated in 1938 were restituted to two small parishes, Yebes and Pareja, in the region of Castilla-La Mancha. The fragments of a 16th-century annunciation returned to Pareja had never been exhibited, but the artwork returned to Yebes, Christ before Pilate by Maestro de Lupiana (1450-60), hadhung in the Prado’s Spanish Gothic rooms.
The scale of the confiscations remained largely unknown until decades after the dictatorship ended in 1975. Arturo Colorado Castellary, professor emeritus of the Complutense University in Madrid and a leading expert in art looted in the Civil War and Franco era, began untangling its history in 2008. He was researching the evacuation of the Prado’s collection to Geneva during the war when he discovered that the operation included not only art from the museum, but also objects from private collections and churches. “This was practically unknown in Spain,” he tells The Art Newspaper. “The question I asked myself was: what did the Franco regime do with these thousands of works that left Spain during the war, and that returned after it?”
Prado leads the way
Colorado Castellary has so far identified over 26,000 confiscated objects, of which around a third were never returned to their owners. Much of the remainder was deposited in museums—more than 4,000 pieces—but also with the church and public administrations from universities to the ministry of justice. More than 3,300 are missing. “For example, six artworks were sent to the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia, but we have located only one,” he says. Many could have ended up in the private collections of Franco sympathisers, he says. “The internal workings of the regime were rooted in corruption.”
Colorado Castellary published his findings in 2021 and momentum quickly followed. The Prado contacted him to conduct its own internal investigation and, a year later, Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government approved the Democratic Memory Law, which broadened reparations for victims of the dictatorship and ordered the investigation of seized artworks. The Prado became the first public institution to comply, publishing its first inventory that same year. The list of confiscated pieces, which continues to be updated, is available on its website.
“The process is looking positive, in the sense that it is starting,” Colorado Castellary says, though he notes that most public administrations and museums have been slow to comply with the new law. The ministry of culture began investigating in 2024 and has so far identified more than 7,000 confiscated objects in its possession.
While the current legislation calls for investigations, it does not provide a legal framework to facilitate restitutions. Still, these began in late 2024, with the return of five artworks to the heirs of Pedro Rico, the mayor of Madrid at the time of the Civil War, from the museums of Gran Canaria. Rico was exiled to France and stripped of his property, including his art collection, by the Francoist regime. Last year, seven more paintings were handed back from the Prado, the National Museum of Romanticism and the National Costume Museum in Madrid, the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias, the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia and the Museo de Málaga.
Wartime mayor’s treasures returned
His grandchildren, Francisca (known as Paquita) and Pedro Rico Gómez, learned of the confiscated paintings through Colorado Castellary’s investigations in 2022 and set out to claim them.
“It was of extreme importance for them to fulfil what they saw as their duty, which is to fight for the legacy of their grandfather,” says their lawyer, Laura Sánchez Gaona. While many requisitioned objects were simply forgotten after decades in storage, Rico’s collection had been confiscated as part of his political persecution under the regime. It included works by prominent Spanish painters such as Eugenio Lucas Villamil, José Jiménez Aranda and Ángel Lizcano, but was also deeply personal.
“Pedro Rico was, as a mayor and as a person, a lover of the popular customs of Madrid,” his grandchildren said in a statement sent by email. “He worked to promote local celebrations, and this is all reflected in the themes of his art collection, most of it genre painting.”
Sánchez Gaona says that, due to the lack of a formal restitution protocol, the case largely depended on the museums’ goodwill and pre-existing legislation. “The first reclamations were hell to navigate, as we were doing everything for the first time,” she says. There were no precedents in Spain for extrajudicial processes for the restitution of confiscated artworks from public museums.
The change has been radical since she began working on these cases in 2018. “It was a completely sterile field. People didn’t want to discuss this,” Sánchez Gaona says.
While it might appear that her clients and the Prado were on opposing sides of a legal battle, she says this was far from the truth. “Their legal team was extremely proactive. We understand that it is for the common good.” Restitutions of Nazi-looted art in other European countries also helped to signal the importance of such efforts. “It is a point of pride to be able to say that this is also happening in Spain,” she adds.
For Paquita and Pedro Rico Gómez, recovering these paintings means closing a profound wound. Ten are still missing, but they feel at peace with their grandfather’s memory. Both are in their eighties. “At our age, it is a relief,” their statement says. They hope his collection will be known and studied, but for now, the recovered paintings hang in their homes. “We like looking at them every day because they bond us with our grandfather,” they say.
