Visions of War and the Homefront
Artists from different backgrounds shared a reliance on realism as an idiom to record the war, but not without some debate over the appropriate form political art should take. Alberto Sånchez and Josep Renau famously exchanged open letters in Nueva Cultura regarding whether or not, and how, artists should produce work in correspondence with their political commitments. While for Renau it was obvious that an artist should put his work at the service of politics, and utilize the latest artistic techniques to do so, Alberto maintained the importance of artistic independence even while he would later contribute work to government initiatives (most importantly the Spanish Pavilion of 1937) and utilized illustration as a form of political critique in his unpublished series Cinco flechas. Bombardments, evacuations, and battle scenes are recurrent themes that were depicted as generic topics of war for some, and for others as testimony of a specific event within war’s continuing cycle of bloodshed and displacement. Realism provided an artistic pattern within which artists could draft their illustrations, or contain their emotions, while still conveying the content of what they had witnessed. Because that content was often a current event, many of these paintings also appeared reproduced in the press as illustrated documents of the war, as valuable and as incriminating as any photographic proof.