Lecture 48: Art between Two Wars—Kandinsky to Picasso
“personage.” Miró’s metamorphosis of the human form into the grotesque
elevates it to the epitome of elemental aggression. Miró abandoned beauty of
surface and substituted a rubble ¿ eld of cheesecloth collage, a nest of looped
string, sand, and tacks!We next see a work by Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904–1989), Soft Construction
with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936). A monstrous ¿ gure
rears above the plain of northern Spain and literally tears itself apart in
grotesque frenzy. At the bottom left, the tiny professorial ¿ gure of a man
peering over the giant hand supplies the scale and with it the enormity of
civil war, which Dali anticipated with this painting. Dali said that he aimed
at the “materialization of concrete irrationality” in his paintings, and he
succeeded here, in his most personal and universal creation.The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 engaged the sympathies of liberals
in Europe, Britain, and America to an extraordinary degree. Some 35,000
foreign nationals fought in the International Brigades on behalf of the
Republicans against Franco’s army. We will close with Picasso’s Guernica
(1937). On April 26, 1937, Guernica, a small market town in northern Spain,
was bombarded by German warplanes—dive bombers under Franco’s
command, allowing the Nazis to test their new toys in Spain. It was the
¿ rst time a civilian population had been subjected to military air power, and
Picasso was outraged over the killing of civilians.Just as Salvador Dali had raised his brand of Surrealism to its highest level
under the impetus of the civil war, so, too, did Picasso discover a previously
unseen expressive power in the inventions and experiments of Cubism. At
the right, a building is in À ames, with a woman falling into them. Another
woman, dragging her wounded leg, struggles toward the center, toward the
light that emanates from a candle thrust into the scene by an astonished
head that comes through a window. A horse—its body impaled by a spear—
screams, while a fallen warrior lies broken, like a statue, on the ground. At
the left, a mother holding her dead child raises her grief-wrenched upturned
face to the implacable bull immediately above. In Picasso’s personal but
unmistakable symbolic language, the bull is unmovable power and the
horse is innocence. In this stark black-and-white image, the victims and the
aggressors are locked into a tight composition by a large triangle that leads