The Dream and Lie of Franco (Spanish: Sueño y mentira de Franco) is a series of two sheets of prints, comprising 18 individual images, and an accompanying prose poem, by Pablo Picasso produced in 1937.

[1] The individual images were originally intended to be published as postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican government, and sold at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair, although it is unclear whether any prints were made or sold in postcard format.

[clarification needed] In his review of the etchings for The Spectator in October 1937, art historian (and member of the Cambridge Five spy-ring) Anthony Blunt complained that the work could not "reach more than the limited coterie of aesthetes".

[5] Critic and author John Golding on the other hand, claimed that "more than any other work by Picasso Dream and Lie of Franco breaks down, as the Surrealists so passionately longed to, distinctions between thought, writing and visual imagery.

The Spanish dictator's appearance has been likened by various writers to a "jackbooted phallus",[7] "an evil-omened polyp"[6] and "a grotesque homunculus with a head like a gesticulating and tuberous sweet potato".