Placard — Saura x Ullán, 1976

This 1976 lithograph by Antonio Saura, created in collaboration with poet José-Miguel Ullán and published by Galerie Maeght in Paris, is a luminous artifact of the Spanish post-Franco cultural diaspora—where visual and literary language locked into shared rebellion. Titled Placard, the work assembles nine vignettes of Saura’s automatic drawing—faces, bodies, fragments, and screaming line—alongside a printed poem by Ullán, all floating against pale fields of ochre and sage.

Saura’s graphic idiom here is at its most liberated: linear, gestural, manic, yet controlled by a precise architecture of placement. The figures dissolve into signs; the signs twitch with agitation. Framed like an archival cabinet or a protest placard, the print turns into a grid of visual outcries—each panel a variation on pain, perception, or memory. Ullán’s text sits calmly in the centre, offering a literary counter-rhythm to the violence of the images, forming not an explanation, but an echo.

Both Saura and Ullán were central to the intellectual resistance against Francoism, and Placard reads as an act of defiance in print—a bilingual protest between eye and voice. Printed on fine vélin d’Arches and signed by both artist and poet in pencil, this edition of 500 links two of Spain’s most singular postwar radicals in one dense and dynamic page.

Technical Sheet
Title: Placard
Artist / Author: Antonio Saura (drawing), José-Miguel Ullán (text)
Date: 1976
Technique / Printing Method: Lithograph and zincograph
Medium / Materials: Ink on vélin d’Arches paper
Edition: 56/500
Signed: Yes, signed in pencil by artist and poet
Framing: Wood frame with black mount
Dimensions (cm): 80 × 60 cm
Publisher / Editor: Galerie Maeght, Paris
Bibliography: Weber-Caflisch, Saura. Catálogo Razonado de Obra Gráfica, Ed. Cramer, Geneva 2000, nº 219.2, p.245
Condition: Excellent