ART AND WAR:THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

The most well-known artistic reaction to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War is Picasso’s Guernica. Picasso who had publicly sided with the Republican cause, sought to convey the destruction inflicted upon the Basque town of Guernica by the German and Italian warplanes in support of Franco. There are numerous varying interpretations of Picasso’s Guernica: the use of sombre colours to express pain and chaos, flaming buildings and crumbling walls, that not only express the destruction of Guernica, but also the destructive power of civil war, and the broken sword in the painting symbolising the defeat of the people at the hand of their tormentors.

However, although Guernica was painted as a reaction to the suffering inflicted upon innocent people in Guernica, it has become much more than that. Guernica expresses the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, especially innocent civilians. It is a painting that has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war and an embodiment of peace.

Salvador Dalí also turned his attention to the social and political tragedy that had beset his homeland in paintings such as Autumn Cannibalism and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War). In these paintings Dalí updated his earlier obsessions with cannibalistic mutilation and putrefaction to conjure up his own nightmarish vision of Spain on the brink of self-destruction. However, Dalí’s response to the Spanish Civil War was very different to that of Picasso: Dalí’s message is far more ambiguous and apolitical, reflecting his belief that the Spanish Civil War was an inevitable occurrence involving instinctual forces, a “phenomenon of natural history”, rather than a political event in which one had to take sides. Dalí adopted the clinical detachment of a scientist or neutral observer who does not flinch from representing the rotting stench of a decomposing body as a metaphor for his country’s inexorable slide into internecine combat. The artist believed that his savage image of Spain ripping itself apart foretold the reciprocal killings on both sides in this bloody conflict, as he later explained: “the Spanish corpse was soon to let the world know what its guts smelled like.”

However not all artists were willing to remain neutral whilst Franco increased his Fascist stranglehold on Spain: Joan Miró produced a powerful series of eight small scale etchings known as the “Black and Red Series”, in response to the agonies and horrors of the Civil War. The series, signs and symbols in black and blood red on white backgrounds, conveys the forces of war and oppression. The second print, and one of the closest to realism, depicts a family of three fragile figures, menaced by an ogre’s head, an icon of Franco with what seem to be horns for ears. Whilst the rest of the series is more complex: the horizontal and vertical plates are manipulated to create a bewildering web of biomorphic forms that reflect the horror and mutilation in a manner not dissimilar to that of Goya’s “Disasters of War” almost 200 years earlier. However, Miró also took part in more direct propaganda for the Republican cause: in 1937 he produced a poster, showing a Catalan peasant raising a defiant fist with the slogan “Help Spain”, to raise money for the Republicans.

Many artists, not merely Miró alone, volunteered their skills for the Ministry of Propaganda and the Committee for the Defence of Madrid.
George Orwell commented in his first hand account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, that on his arrival in Barcelona: “The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud.”

The Catalan poster artist Carles Fontseré described how the artists’ union would meet with the militias while fighting continued on the streets of Barcelona. The artists who volunteered their labour designed posters without interference from the militias, political parties or trade unions, who merely added their initials, emblems or slogans before sending the finished product to the printing presses. The Republican government used posters printed in Spanish, French and English to advertise the desperate plight of the Republic, encouraging volunteers from outside Spain to join the International Brigade and fight Fascism. These posters by pre-eminent artists such as the Communist artist Josep Renau, illustrate the dynamics of a debate about the efficacy of a committed political art that was as aware of avant-garde, expressionist and popular models as it was of Soviet socialist realism. However, the most important aspect of the posters of the Spanish Civil War was that they lasted after the war had ended. Members of the International Brigade collected them and took them home, or sent them home as postcards, whilst the Republican government gave the posters to visiting dignitaries, and they were also frequently reproduced in the press.

Therefore, art has ensured that the Spanish Civil War- its horrors and tragedies - lives on, not only in history books, but also in the visionary work that it inspired.