art and war

So on Friday I visited two different exhibits related to the Spanish civil war. The first was in the Reina Sofia museum, which is part of the trifecta of the major art museums in Madrid (the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza are the other two), and was called "Revistas y Guerra, 1936-1939." The primary thrust of the exhibit was to show the art of propaganda materials in magazines, newspapers and other kinds of popular literature put out by all sides of the war. What this means is you get a kind of distillation of almost all major political movements at the time (communism, anarchism, fascism, bourgeois liberalism) and more regionally-specific movements (i.e. Catalan separatism) into visual propaganda. What was most interesting to me were the competing images of women in the exhibit and the apparent importance of these images to the production of propaganda. Communist propaganda was almost exclusively the image of a male countryside worker or a strong woman posing as a worker / possible soldier, while the fascist propaganda was all about the woman as a mother and protector of the traditional family (the "sagrada familia" if you will). In a war that became so much about proxy armies for different world powers and asinine infighting among different supposedly ideological movements, the power of this ideologically-oriented propaganda was pretty interesting to see.

The second exhibit about foreign newspaper reportage on the war was at the Cervantes Institute. It featured articles by reporters from Portugal, England, Russia and the United States and it was most interesting to see how the reporters were able to get much closer to the battles than reporters in the current war in Iraq, for example. On the other hand, much of the writing was unabashedly written from the bubble of the journalist corps, with a number of pieces describing life in fancy hotels in Madrid as bombs fall and fighting takes place just outside. The exhibit featured writers such as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, along with a fascinating piece by Langston Hughes written for a black newspaper based out of Baltimore about the plight of Moorish fighters on the fascist side (Franco enlisted a number of African troops to fight for his side). What the exhibit makes clear is how each foreign writer is perhaps most interested in reporting the facts of the war in a way most relevant to their audience. Relevance rather than pure objectivity seems to be the order of the day. I can't say I necessarily have a problem with that, but it's interesting to see the effect of those kinds of interests in such vivid display.

An unrelated exhibit that I also visited was a retrospective Roy Lichtenstein at the Fundación Juan March, which is about a five minute walk from my apartment. What was really awesome about this exhibit was the way it was laid out so that you can see how Lichtenstein drew direct inspiration for his work from painters like Matisse, Picasso (a lot) and Van Gogh, among others. His annotated books about works by these painters, along with studies for various paintings, show how he put his unmistakeable imprint on his own reenvisioning of these works. I've always liked what I've seen of his paintings, but this gave me an even greater appreciation for an artist who clearly values using the art of the past to create something entirely his own. Haha, look no further than Bob Dylan for the best example of that! Yeah, so I guess what I'm saying is Lichtenstein = Dylan.

Anyway, maybe I should start doing my first writing assignment for class this semester...