Idealistas bajo las balas: Corresponsales extranjeros en la guerra de España (Spanish Edition)

Photojournalism in both Francoist and Republican presses was a crucial means of publicity; each one used photographs as evidence and then conveniently interpreted them according to their preferred point of view Ortiz, This denial is one reason for the lack of details about the atrocity such as the exact number of dead, the person directly responsible for the attack order, and the purpose of the bombing, which could be either "attacking a military objective for strategic reasons or terrorizing the civilian population, bombing a Basque symbolic village and trying to accelerate the surrender of Bilbao" Pablo, , pp.

The denial did not end the controversy over the bombing, from which Franco could not separate himself. Soon, the argument that overcast skies prevented the air attack disappeared as discussion focused on the bombing version of the fire. The conservative press broadcast ambiguous versions that depended on partial information distributed by Havas, the French information agency.

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Another French newspaper, Le Jour 29 April , p. These arguments were reinforced by photographic documentation. Fotos magazine 8 May , p. The message was clear from the headline: Marxist barbarism in Guernica. Photographers who insisted on the fire explanation showed walls that had stood to deny the possibility that there had been a bombing. A year later, on June 18, , Fotos published an image that had previously been published in another magazine, with a significant title: Dante's Vision of Guernica.

In contrast, as Ortiz pointed out, graphic magazines echoed the tragedy and symbolized the innocent victims of Francoism and fascism. On June 2, for example, the Communist magazine Volks Illustrierte reproduced the aforementioned statements of Aguirre, in the context of a John Heartfield graphic composition depicting a mother with her son next to a house in ruins Evans, News of the terrible bombing reached and shocked the international audience thanks to the chronicles of G. The attack on Guernica inspired books, poems, pictures, films, and other works of art.

This outcry started in the press and on the radio, after April 26, and immediately went to the cinema: The legacy of the town needed images filmed in situ, which later would be mounted in a different way, and even opposed, by filmmakers from countries and ideologies very different from each other. Since no images of the bombing were known to be preserved, journalistic accounts resorted to shots of the ruins of the town including smoking buildings, shocked citizens, and feverish rescue, filmed before or after the conquest of Guernica by the Franco army, which took place on April Of these camera-operators, only the first of them shot from the Republican side.

In just three days between 26 and 29 April there was almost no time to film anything. Had the resistance in Guernica lasted longer, more coverage would have captured the Francoist advance in detail Matud, So, it is difficult to know what, if any film images, influenced Picasso—and others.

In May , a sack containing eighteen coils impressed with a film of 16 millimeters Agfa positive direct or reversible was received at the Delegation of the Basque Country in the French capital, where the works of a Basque cinematography were coordinated i. On the outside of each reel, Ugartechea had written the generic theme referred to in the film "Guernica. Crucial to the role played by Guernica, the Republican side accused the pro-Franco side. The news of the bombing was broadcast the same day it happened.

Basque government President Juan Antonio Aguirre said a bombardment of the civilian population had been carried out by German aviators Fontaine, As journalists and propagandists battled over the event, the fact was that Guernica had been subjected to indiscriminate destruction. Eventually it became known that the town was a symbolic objective an attack on one of the fundamental places of the Basque nationalist imagination , and for experimental purposes Ortiz, However, while other cases such as that of Hiroshima were subject to censorship Leo, , that of the Spanish town was public from the beginning which gave rise to a huge media debate.

Franco's propaganda used the photographs of Guernica to prove that the city had not been bombed; it turned the blame to the Republican side. Meanwhile, on the Republican side and in the international press, images of the atrocity circulated quickly and broadly. With a fixed plane of this snapshot began the film of Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens titled Guernica The image had become one of the icons not only of the destruction of Guernica, but of the Spanish Civil War and of the international antifascist struggle.

Inspiring a Masterpiece Exact details of the journalistic influence over Picasso in Paris are obscure and circumstantial. To understand the motivating idea behind the painting that Picasso was going to create to express his outrage, we must put ourselves in his place and move to his Paris studio where he received the terrifying news through the radio and the competing versions in the daily newspapers. Media reports of what happened in Spain were distorted by French newspapers, which were heavily politicized and openly partisan.

The visceral empathy with the Spanish cause was not generated, by actual facts, but by images from newspapers. For the left and right European press, war became a transmitter of doctrine, and it was only learned later that the heroes, victories, and defeats of the headlines were often not only fictitious but also much more indicative of the international politics that of the reality prevailing in the Spanish front Failing, , p.

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Interested parties suffered anguish at the impossibility of finding out from Paris what really happened in Spain. These circumstantial elements become the essence of the gestation of the work itself. The first journalistic report arrived in Paris on April 27 in Ce Soir based on little more than a simple telegram sent by the correspondent of the newspaper in Bilbao. The report described the attack as the most horrible bombing of the war.

Headlines of Le Figaro, strictly following the Francoist line, proclaiming: His narrative was all the more powerful because he belonged to an authority, the Church, which supported the Nationalists in the conflict. While some newspapers were trying to silence the fact, other kept it alive: French Catholics, hitherto sympathetic to the Spanish nationalists, now condemned their acts. One of the signatories of this manifesto, Emmanuel Mounier, founder and editor of the magazine Esprit, was committed to the defense of the Basque cause.

In the June issue of the journal, a page dossier of documents and evidence was published on the destruction of Guernica: An article by Jacques Klein in Le Petit Journal of May 8, provided further evidence of the destruction of the city by German aircraft. This controversy caught Picaso's attention and triggered his imagination. On Saturday, May 1, , only five days after the bombing of Guernica, and coinciding with Labor Day, the largest demonstration of its kind ever was held in Paris.

Instead he took a pencil and a small pad of blue paper and drew a simple sketch of a bull, a horse and a woman Martin, On June 6, the large mural, Guernica, was finished. Then he produced a post-production set of drawings, with a marked emphasis on the head of a suffering woman. Atrocity as Rhetorical Problem: Because the majority of European states had signed the Non-Intervention Agreement, except the Soviet Union, the Republican government found itself at a clear economic and military disadvantage Van Hensbergen, The coalition needed allies and international aid.

The Spanish Republican government had been formed by a coalition of socialists, communists, republicans and representatives from regional Basque and Catalan administrations. Toward this end, the Republic had to demonstrate its stability and solvency, including its religious tolerance and independence from the Soviet Union. The Pavilion broadcast news and expressed moral outrage of this conflict.

After receiving the commission, Picasso was indecisive and did not paint anything, although he toyed with an idea as the subject of the work: The Studio, an allegory of painting represented by the painter and the model Tejeda, Although Guernica became of focal point of the Spanish Pavilion, Picasso did not introduce the atrocity to the world or express any particular facts about it.

Without the news coverage of the event, his paining would have lacked meaning. Without the moral rage of his painting, the atrocity would have lacked soul.

Although he lived in Paris at the time, his sympathies were with the Republican cause, and he believed art can be expressly political as he said in a famous interview: What do you think an artist is? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, fiery or happy events to which he responds in every way.

How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory indifference to detach yourself from the life which they so copiously bring you? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. Van Hensbergen, , p. The intention was to persuade. Those who commissioned the painting had a voice in its ultimate presentation. The painting was scheduled for the opening of the exhibition in April As that day approached, it was seriously behind schedule Van Hensbergen, ; Ross, It describes one version of the mural as covered in color and visually incoherent.

Renau wrote that he had never seen so much shit in his lifetime. He further described the encounter: And I tell you that it seems there was clutter everywhere and colors and charcoal used on the mural, but we did not say anything. When we saw this we all applauded spontaneously. This extremely revealing letter shows the power the commissioners had on the ultimate shape of the mural. The message seems to be epistemically merited; however, its original audience did not consider it so. This is where a closer examination of the audience is called for as Guernica did influence those with money and political power.

Picasso expressed his ultimate intentions for his work: If peace wins in the world, the war I have painted will be a thing of the past… The only blood that flows will be before a fine drawing, a beautiful picture. People will get too close to it, and when they scratch it a drop of blood will form, showing that the work is truly alive. Addressing the rhetorical problem in Spain, the chaos in the mural represents the literal destruction of civilization; women and children are not safe.

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The light in the middle of the canvas shows the dual faces of modernity to illuminate and destroy. Technology which enables one to supersede nature by illuminating the darkness has been twisted and used to enable the darkness of death, mass death. The painting addressed a universal political condition as chaos and agony. The reaction sought is moral outrage as motive for coalition building based on interest alignment, opposition to war and the Nationalists. The Spanish Pavilion served the Republican government, not to manipulate but to show the world what was happening Martin, The government wanted to influence the international community to support its cause Palombo, Strategically, Picasso wanted his mural to publicize the atrocity he saw captured by what photojournalists had published in different media, including the new medium of film Chipp, If no atrocity had occurred, then there is no need for moral outrage.

This meaning was narratively enacted though three main visual elements: Universal images and cinematic influence Picasso was part of an artistic revolution dedicated to updating the plastic language of art while maintaining a classic theme Posada, This approach is evident in the long iconographic tradition —religious and profane— in Western art, of the massacre of innocents.

In this way, Picasso may have been influenced by the scene of the massacre on the Odessa staircase in Sergei M. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin Although avant garde, the painting used classic narrative variations and adjustments. The mother is in front, motionless, shouting and holding —she does not protect, but rather shows— the child, who is dead.

Chipp claimed that Picasso was inspired by similar photographic images of refugees, women and children who fled Guernica, that appeared in newspapers days before the painting. The posture of the child head and arms hanging lifeless is exactly the same as that of the child in the Battleship Potemkin which premiered in Paris at a cinema-club on November 12, Picasso, of course, viewed it. His close friend, Christian Zervos, published in the first issue of Cahiers d'Art a selection of frames of the film.

Picasso had direct access to them. Her mouth is ajar in a gesture of pain.

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She is the model for the series of heads of a crying woman who performed both during the execution of the Guernica and for several months later in various materials. The scene represented by Guernica might take place inside or outside, day or night. Rather than a compelling antagonist, the indifferent and distant bull, the focus is on the protagonist, the people, the populace. The scene represents gesticulations of pain, of panic.

The antagonist in Potemkin, in contrast is the cold, unforgiving and rhythmic advance of the compact mass of the platoon. In the film, Eisenstein used in the sequence of the staircase a syncopated rhythm of shots, of crossed images. Picasso used planes of light and shadow another technique characteristic of the expressionist cinema to achieve dramatic effects , that intersect each other by highlighting, overlapping, or separating others into the different figures that make up the scene.

The terror of the horse Animals in Guernica symbolize the massacre in Guernica. The impaled horse with a massive laceration on its belly signifies the unjustified slaughter that took place Ross, The injured horse alludes to the thousands of people who died and the hundreds who were devastatingly hurt. To paint the horse, Picasso drew on his previous works entitled Caballo Destripado Gutted Horse, The similarity of form and content between the two suggests, according to Barbadilla , that the horse of Guernica is a picador horse with the head raised to represent the pain and suffering from the Spanish Civil War.

It is victim of the hecatomb of Spain, the sacrificial victim. In contrast to the screaming horse is the passive bull, which Gaya , Wischnitzer, reasoned, represents Nazi aggression, the dark forces. The question of the symbology of Guernica has been controversial. Indeed, According to [Jerome] Seckler, Picasso said that the bull represented barbarism and, therefore, Franquismo, and the horse the people, that is, the Republican people.

Victims and victimizers had changed places.

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The suffering horse was an obsession for Picasso and became the central image of the painting. It screams and shrieks from pain. For Picasso, the horse represents the passive victim of bullfighting. Its lacerated and torn body occupies the center of the composition. Its skin is represented by short parallel lines that energize the center of the picture: Spasmodic animal, monster mad with pain, muzzle open, scream of anguish, bristling with knives in the wind that twists the neck Barbadilla, Thus, the horse is a tormented animal.

It carries a spike in its back. Between its legs appears the corpse of a dismembered warrior who holds a broken sword. The horse can be a mare; the cut vertical rhombus takes the form of a vagina. It is Spain wounded by fascism, it is the victim of the picture. The horseshoe is inside the helmet, a symbol of bad luck. In contrast to the anguishing horse, the bird in the painting fades into the dark background as a symbol of hope for the future, just as the dove carrying an olive branch in the Bible is a symbol of peace.

The bird signifies a longing for peace and prosperity, which seemed unattainable, flying away, during that time of war and violence, which is why it can barely be seen in the painting Potter, Indifference of the bull In , Picasso told Jerome Seckler: It possibly refers to bullfighting, the traditional blood sport of Spanish culture, during which bulls are successively sacrificed in the ring. The bull had symbolic capital for Picasso. He was born in the Andalusian city of Malaga — the ancient home of bullfighting Tsai, For Picasso, being a true Andalusian included having an obsession with suffering, wounds and the proximity of death.

As Tsai pointed out, in January of , Picasso made two aquatints titled the Dream and Lie of Franco, which were reproduced on postcards and sold for the benefit of the Spanish Republican Government. Each print is subdivided into three rows of three scenes that all together form an eighteen-scene narrative. Despite the surrealist absurdity of the narrative, his prints were intended as an attack on Franco and his regime. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

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Idealistas bajo las balas: corresponsales extranjeros en la Guerra de España

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