In December 1959, in a particular political, cultural and institutional context, the San Sebastian Festival called its first public poster competition to celebrate its eighth edition in July 1960. This exhibition retrieves the event’s unknown pioneering initiative by showing the designs submitted, proposing an approximation to the materials used and taking an in-depth look at the competition ins and outs.

Since his appointment as director of the Festival in 1957, the figure of Antonio de Zulueta y Besson had embodied many of the internal tensions existing nationally in the political sphere. While Franco’s regime was abandoning its policy of autarky in place since the end of the Civil War, implementing a technocracy in favour of liberalisation, the Festival once again returned to the international scene on obtaining the highest category granted by the FIAPF in the spring of that same year, acting as a showcase for transformation of the Franco era. Under the mandate of Zulueta y Besson, the Festival opened for the first time to the films of the East, organising Spain’s 1st Meeting of Film Schools and seeing the arrival of numerous American productions following the agreements signed with the MPEAA. The poster competition must be understood as yet another link in that chain of controlled opening-up, a landmark apparently set to democratise a festival focused until then on a reduced upper class.

The San Sebastian Festival announced the initiative by publishing its rules and sending invitations to artist organisations and associations. This first edition of the competition received more than 50 poster designs from artists nationwide. Collage, gouache, acrylic, water colour and crayon were among the most common techniques used to create the designs. In addition, closer study of the drawings revealed the visual repetition of various aspects: references to film development, the symbol of the shell, technological tools such as cameras and spotlights, portraits of the audience and bird’s eye views of the Concha beach.

Worthy of note among the participating designs is the one submitted by a young Pascuala Campos de Michelena, entitled “Albastros”. In her drawing, the silhouette of a woman’s face looks steadily into the horizon, outlined with black brushstrokes and lines in yellow, aquamarine and burgundy colours. Pascuala Campos, one of the few female entrants to the competition, would later turn into an essential figure for the feminist militancy and architecture of Galicia, becoming the first woman to obtain a project professorship in Spain with her work Espacio y Género (Space and Gender).

Although the competition appeared to run smoothly, the choice of the winning design cast doubts on the initiative’s initial intentions. The jury, made up of artists with no connection to the festival organisation, voted for “Cinta azul” (Blue Tape) by Fermín Hernández Garbayo, designer and founding member of the Grupo 13 collective. In his proposal, a fragment of film in the caricature of a man’s face looks at little shell. Having announced the winning design, in later communications the Festival asked the author to “modernise” his design for what was to be the official poster of the event. Garbayo created and submitted up to six versions of the original design: a profile of the face, the addition of a smile and the evolution of colours from one design to the next. However, the exchanges seem to have petered out. Despite the changes, none of his versions were eventually used in the final design of the official poster for that edition which was, in the end, specifically commissioned by the organisation from Fernando Boronat.

The following year, when Zulueta y Besson had left the Festival management, its Executive Committee decided to no longer organise the poster competition, at least for that ninth edition. Although it was held for a time in other later editions, that first competition inviting designs in 1960 reflected the internal tensions of a festival obliged to keep itself in check.