Spanish culture under Franco: Rebels with a cause Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936. By Jeremy Treglown. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages; $30. IN JEREMY TREGLOWN'S book about Spanish culture during the country's dictatorship, the most poignant anecdote comes at the very end. The British author recounts his final exchange with a woman he had accompanied to a hillside in Extremadura, where she had hoped to find the remains of her great-grandfather in an unmarked mass grave - one of many created by Francisco Franco's Nationalists during Spain's brutal civil war of 1936-39. "I last contacted her in the summer of 2012," Mr Treglown writes. But she had just had a baby, her first, and no longer wanted to talk about the past. Life goes on, he seems to say. Yet his book is nothing if not an appeal for remembrance. With "Franco's Crypt" Mr Treglown seeks to challenge some of the myths about Spain's past. Most significant, he wishes to prove that General Franco's repulsively vindictive dictatorship actually inspired - or, more often, failed to hinder - great art. "Told that the topic of this book was to be Franco's influence on Spanish culture, more than one inquirer joked that a postcard might cover it," Mr Treglown writes. The exiles who fled the Generalissimo's dictatorship after the civil war believed, and persuaded most non-Spaniards, that anyone who lived under Franco was irremediably tainted by his regime. It was commonly thought that the dictatorship was so repressive it stifled anything of creative value. Yet plenty of evidence contradicts the idea that Francoist Spain was an artistic desert. The period gave rise to a generation of internationally renowned abstract artists, including Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tàpies, Manolo Millares and Antonio Saura. Joan Miró, an overtly Republican artist, returned from exile in 1940 and produced great work. Spanish film-makers were subversive long before Pedro Almodóvar. Luis García Berlanga premiered his subtly rebellious comedy "¡Bienvenido Mr Marshall!" (pictured) in 1953. Luis Buñuel, lured back from exile in 1960, promptly made the film "Viridiana," a controversial masterpiece that was denounced by the Vatican and then banned by the regime. Berlanga, who fought alongside the Nazis on the eastern front, embodies a recurrent theme of "Franco's Crypt": that the line between supporters and opponents of the regime became increasingly blurred. Some Francoists reconsidered their support for the General's Nationalist uprising. Others broke with the Generalissimo's rigid views. Mr Treglown makes a good case, for example, for rehabilitating Eugenio d'Ors, the man who oversaw art in the Francoist provisional government. In 1942 he founded an academy of art criticism, which helped launch the careers of Tàpies and Millares. Then there was Agustín de Foxá, a Falangist reactionary and snob who was also, says Mr Treglown, a stylish writer. The author provides tempting glimpses of a string of novels that have been largely overlooked beyond Spain, notably Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio's "El Jarama" of 1955. But this book is not without its blemishes. Mr Treglown's revisionist aims are undermined by his tendency to digress needlessly (as in a section devoted to exiled novelists, which he admits has no place in his book). Oddly, his look at Spanish culture is hardly comprehensive: the author largely ignores architecture, poetry and drama. That prevents what might have been a valuable discussion about why some art forms flourished under the dictatorship, while others wilted. A visit to a state-funded exhibition offers an insight into Franco's views of the art of the time. As he contemplated a typically savage Tàpies abstract, he was nervously informed that he was in the "revolutionaries" room." The old dictator is said to have cheerfully replied: "So long as this is how they carry out the revolution."