Aidez l’Espagne
The internationalization of the Spanish Civil War begins with the debate on the intervention or non-intervention of other countries, contributing to the spread of the notion that what was happening in Spain was a reflection of the ideological tensions running through Europe and the rest of the world. The moral and ideological issues intrinsic to the conflict attracted the attention of ordinary people, intellectuals, political activists and even celebrities, creating a massive response to the crisis that ranged from participation in the famous International Brigades to membership of the numerous committees set up in aid of the Republican cause. The artistic community generated a great many perceptions of the conflict, creating copious work in various materials that was frequently mobilized as an instrument for anti-Fascist solidarity. Fundamental among these pieces was Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Such images led to heated debates on how to adapt artistic representation to political objectives, on the role to be played by photography, and on that of the artist as spectator. All these points are crucial for an understanding of the complexity of artistic production in the 1930s. Although political condemnation is a conscious element in all these works, the Spanish conflict nevertheless also became a reserve of “plastically interesting” images framing spectacles of horror, sex and ritual, ideas underlying the production of many of these artists. In combination with the mythification of Spanishness, they led to an aestheticization of injustice, creating an uncomfortably ambiguous, mixture of celebration and denunciation.