Matador: the disillusionment of the post-Franco generation

Matador. You’ll encounter it where you least expect it. Do not allow yourself to be influenced by the name, which rings out sharply and immediately evokes one of Spain’s most deeply rooted archetypes. The ritual of bullfighting has permeated literature and the arts for centuries: Goya, Picasso, Miquel Barceló, Ortega y Gasset, Manuel Chaves Nogales. And it brings to mind that verse in which Federico García Lorca immortalises the valour of his friend Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, bullfighter and man of letters, at the very moment when life and death face off in the arena and it is Ignacio’s sword that succumbs. “Only the bull has its heart on high at five o’clock in the evening.”

Madrid presents you with a ‘different’ Matador. Which is editorial fare. A magazine launched in 1995 with a stated ambition: to be the best. To capture, in both content and form, the finest ideas in circulation. Trends, authors, cultural connections, significant synchronicities. An open narrative, built on associations and references – a ‘spit-roast structure’, as the academic critics would put it. It is the framework whereby stories follow one another, ‘skewered’ onto the spit of the main narrative. In Spain, it is a tried-and-tested technique. One need only think of Don Quixote, universally regarded as the first novel of modern literature.

Matador was conceived as an alphabetical series. Its founder, Alberto Anaut, born in 1955 – a journalist and dynamic entrepreneur, a man who, like few others, has helped shape contemporary Spanish culture – had 28 issues in mind. One letter per year, following the Spanish alphabet. And an end already planned. Anaut had set the final issue for 2023. “Before time corrupted its identity”. As if he had sensed the disillusionment of a generation – his own – which had opened up the borders after burying the Caudillo Franco and, with him, the last dictatorship in Western Europe. As if he had glimpsed the fate of Europe, which Spain had only joined in 1986, transforming itself within a few years from a rural country into an industrial power. In 1995, when "Matador" was launched, Europe was still debating the single currency. And Anaut was already thinking about "Matador"’s expiry date. As if it were a food product. Or as if European culture were on the verge of extinction.

Then things took a different turn. The alphabet series had come to an end. Matador had too many admirers clamouring for it. Since 2024, each volume has been dedicated to a person rather than an idea. First came the Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Then, in 2025, the French playwright Yasmina Reza, a cosmopolitan Jew of Iranian and Hungarian descent. The edition currently in production is dedicated to the British fashion designer Paul Smith. Through photographs, previously unpublished essays and works commissioned specifically for Matador, the editorial team is constructing a map of images, texts and unexpected encounters. A system of correspondences, echoes and connections between artists, authors and different disciplines takes shape around the guest. Ultimately, it is the same ‘all-over’ approach with which Matador has always portrayed the world.

The accounts are consistent. Matador was Anaut’s favourite son. Anaut had no biological children, but he was a passionate man. Tireless in his work. A man who believed in culture. “In culture’s ability to build healthier and freer societies,” says Óscar Becerra, himself a journalist and custodian of Anaut’s intellectual legacy. “As editor of El País Semanal, the Sunday supplement of the newspaper of the same name, Alberto was responsible for in-depth features, reportages and investigative pieces. But he was troubled whenever extraordinary material came his way: an artist’s work, an exceptional photographic portfolio, a marvellous text that was simply too ambitious for a commercial publication – however well-curated – such as El País Semanal. He created Matador primarily to fulfil a personal need: to devote space and time to his concerns, his curiosities, and his desire to learn and share knowledge.”

Alberto Anaut belonged to that very special category of journalists capable of running a business. And of understanding that journalism and cultural management share the ability to simplify the complexity of the world around us, making it accessible to a wider audience. Without succumbing to banality, which he regarded as the ultimate evil. By 1994, he had already founded La Fábrica. Initially, it focused on publishing, and today it is an all-encompassing cultural enterprise. Matador was not just La Fábrica’s first project. It was also Anaut’s magnificent obsession. “Alberto barely had time to see the proofs of what would have been the Z issue, the final Matador in the alphabetical series he had conceived,” reveals Óscar Becerra, now managing director of La Fábrica and editor of Matador. “He died in 2023, just as his Matador had reached the end of the line. He wanted to be buried with the first issue of the magazine – the one featuring a boxer’s bandaged fist on the cover, printed full-bleed, without margins, in keeping with the publication’s graphic style.”

The photograph of the boxer’s clenched fist on the verge of a fight, taken by Jimmy Fox of the Magnum Agency, was no coincidence. Like a manifesto of intent, it marked the beginning of the venture. Centred on the ‘A’ for art, it offered unprecedented glimpses into the twilight of the twentieth century. Not only the avant-garde, but also anti-art, fake art, art believed to be such only by the person who had created it. Stories were woven into this thread, such as a feature on boxing, another on Cuban identity, a musical score by Paul Bowles for a poem by Tennessee Williams, and an off-the-cuff conversation between two leading figures of the most visceral American cinema: the screenwriter and author Barry Gifford and the director Oliver Stone.

A mammoth task to effortlessly blend languages and disciplines, from the visual arts to photography, from design to architecture. Matador immediately became a cult phenomenon in Spain and beyond. Just as Alberto Anaut had envisaged.

“He loved bullfighting. He was an aficionado,” explains Becerra. “But he didn’t name the magazine solely as a tribute to Spanish tradition. Alberto was a special man, cosmopolitan like few others. The name Matador referred to his worldview. Alberto had left a successful job at El País to take on el riesgo. You see, I think Alberto must have felt like a bullfighter stepping into the arena. You know the bull could trample you and sweep you away. Alberto understood that he had to be skilful. That he had to follow his instincts. After all, is there anything in a man’s life that is truly worthwhile and free from risk?”

Matador has always been dressed in a bespoke suit, handcrafted with meticulous attention to detail, as precious as the ‘traje de luces’ that the bullfighter wears before the bullfight. The format is special, monumental, designed to give the photographs the same prominence they would have if displayed in a gallery. The paper is snow-white, substantial, made from fine fibres. 150 euros per copy “and it sells – oh yes, it certainly sells”, says Becerra. There is no digital version, because at Matador they do not believe in the end of print media. Quite the contrary. “All things considered, print is struggling, but the internet is doing even worse”. They’re banking on a publication designed to be read whilst seated, at a leisurely pace, as people used to do in a bygone era. It’s not something to be leafed through whilst standing, perhaps on the underground. Each issue is conceived as a unique piece, right down to the choice of typefaces, which are always different. The fact that it’s published just once a year gives an idea of how things are done at La Fábrica, where the exception is the rule. The print run is limited to 7,000 copies, of which 4,800 are allocated to subscribers. “A loyal following,” emphasises Becerra. “So much so that in 2013 we founded the Club Matador, which now has 2,800 members and is considered one of the major institutions of Madrid’s civil society.” An English-style club “that defines itself more by what it doesn’t offer than by what it does. It has no golf course, swimming pool, gym or tennis courts. In return, members have a venue in the Barrio de Salamanca (considered Madrid’s most exclusive neighbourhood, ed.), a place to meet, organise exhibitions, film screenings and cultural events, and discuss them together. In the name of Matador”. Members and subscribers also have the privilege of taking home the Cuaderno de artista, a “work of art in notebook form” that has always been linked to the publication of Matador. The Cuaderno alone costs 60 euros. These are editions designed to stand the test of time, to become collector’s items. Matador has become a cult publication for writers, artists, photographers and the whole diverse spectrum of humanity involved in the world of literature and the arts, particularly in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries – over 600 million people. Matador is the mirror of this universe. It reflects its tastes, aspirations and transformations perhaps better than many treatises on sociology or anthropology.

A Matador so out of the ordinary that, to find it, you need to know where to look. Because it lies within a system of signs, a geography of clues. It’s not enough simply to wander through the ancient and fascinating Barrio de las Letras, where the classics of Spanish literature and theatre still inhabit the streets, the squares, even the pavements. Where you can read passages from "Don Quixote" or poems by Góngora in the brass letters set into the paving. You can visit Lope de Vega’s house, now a museum, or the monastery where Cervantes is buried. You can pause in front of the life-size statues of Lorca or Calderón de la Barca in Plaza Santa Ana, right in front of the Teatro Español, and take the obligatory photo. Just as tourists do – and not just them.

But Matador is no souvenir. If you leave Guernica behind – with its bull of war and horror painted by Picasso and housed in the Reina Sofía Museum – and set off towards the Prado, you find yourself, as if by chance, in front of La Fábrica. From the outside, it looks like nothing more than a bookshop. Five shop windows overlooking Calle de la Verónica. Even the street name is a clue. Nomen omen, as always. Not just because of the altarpiece that a court dignitary had affixed to the façade of his residence centuries ago. Veronica is the woman who, according to the apocryphal Gospels, wiped Christ’s face on Calvary with a linen cloth on which the “true icon” was said to have been imprinted. What better way to enter than to see “Matador” in the very place where the magazine is conceived and displayed?

Then you step through the doorway of La Fábrica. And the space opens up. The rooms stretch back one after another until they reach the open-air courtyard. A nineteenth-century courtyard, originally intended for carriages. It is a sign of tradition. Here, it becomes innovation. Books, photographs, posters, catalogues, events. Masters and students discussing the tiniest details of an idea for hours on end, be it the Master’s in Cultural Project Management, the Madrid Design Festival, the cinema of Notodofilmfest or the literature of the Eñe Festival – not coincidentally named after the ‘Ñ’, the most distinctive letter of the Spanish alphabet. The flagship event at La Fábrica, alongside Matador, is PHotoESPAÑA – a project that has helped make Madrid one of Europe’s capitals of photography and which, since its inception in 1998, has attracted over twenty million visitors. Running in parallel with the photography festival, PHotoESPAÑA organises training programmes on visual storytelling. The courses draw aspiring photographers and established names to Madrid and culminate in a group exhibition. A fiesta. “Because culture must always be experienced as a celebration,” comments Óscar Becerra. “We are not in favour of elitist culture. Great literature and great thought have always been accessible to everyone. Ever since ancient times. The processes of engaging with culture must be attractive, accessible and understandable, so that people lose their fear of not being up to the standard of high-quality culture. La Fábrica aims to be a veritable factory of critical thinking. Meanwhile, it is a place through which, for over thirty years, many of the stories that have helped define the collective imagination of contemporary Spain have passed.”

Matador is, in fact, a key element of the narrative – the story of what Spain has become in the fifty years since the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. That death, marked with the honours befitting a sitting head of state, was not merely a turning point in the country’s history. It marked the beginning of a remarkable era. It was well worth witnessing it at first hand, as I did.

The political transition astonished the world with the speed at which Spain moved from the Franco regime to constitutional democracy. It brought with it an explosion of creative talent, which had been stifled for far too long under the regime. Spain found itself ‘transitioning’ towards postmodernity without ever having truly passed through modernity.

Madrid, the administrative heart of the state, was transformed into a narrative genre. It shed the grey cloak of the state apparatus and bureaucracy and donned a riot of colour. From the 1980s onwards, this period of experimentation came to be known as the Movida. It was a relentless succession of new lifestyles and new forms of expression that was unrivalled in Europe. Nightlife was so frenetic and the social commitments so pressing that new mottos were coined to describe the city ‘that never sleeps’, such as: ‘Madrid me mata’. At the same time, old sayings such as ‘De Madrid al cielo’ were revived. They were slogans. But they were also manifestos. Declarations of a way of being that, perhaps, did not wish to be beholden to the past. The lexicon of freedom.

There is a prominent notice on the glass of La Fábrica’s front door: Nada da igual. It means that ‘nothing is indifferent’, ‘nothing is the same as anything else’. It refers, of course, to the pursuit of perfection that is the hallmark of Matador and the company’s other projects. But it is also a warning to those living in the third millennium – to the ‘pasotas’, the young people of Madrid and beyond. They invariably reply that, to them, any choice – even whether to have meat or fish for breakfast – ‘da igual’. Óscar Becerra explains: “Today more than ever, we need to have the courage to make choices, pay attention to detail, and seek meaning in what we do.”