conscience and conflict british artist and the spanish civil war

The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was one of the most significant European conflicts of the twentieth century. Stretching far beyond an internal political clash between the Republicans and General Franco's Nationalists, it united a generation of young writers, poets and artists in political fervour. In aesthetic terms the artistic response crossed boundaries between Surrealists and abstract artists such as Barbara Hepworth and SW Hayter, and figurative artists such as Ursula McCannell and James Boswell. This exhibition focuses on the impact of the Spanish Civil War on British visual artists such as Edward Burra, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore and John Armstrong, examining them alongside international artists such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. The Spanish Civil War (1936−39) was one of the most significant conflicts of the Twentieth Century. It went beyond being an internal conflict between the left-wing democratically-elected Spanish Republicans and General Franco's Nationalists on the right to being a battle-ground for ideas in the years before the Second World War.Described by Stephen Spender as 'the poets’ war', the Spanish Civil War inspired memorable accounts by writers such as W.H. Auden, Laurie Lee, and George Orwell but until now the extraordinary response of British artists has been largely untold. This is the first exhibition to explore how a generation of British artists in the 1930s were drawn to engage in the complex political issues of the conflict, some by travelling to Spain to join the fight against Fascism, others by designing posters for relief campaigns, or creating powerful and moving visual commentaries on the humanitarian situation created by the war. It united artists working in a variety of artistic styles from realism to abstraction, from the Bloomsbury Group to the Surrealists, and this exhibition accordingly presents artworks in all media: painting, design, printmaking, photography, textiles and sculpture. It also considers the impact of iconic works by international artists on British art, such as Pablo Picasso’s celebrated anti-war painting ‘Guernica’ which was exhibited in Britain in 1938-9 This exhibition marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and features loans from a range of public museums and private collections in Britain and abroad, including works that have not been seen in public for many years. We are hugely grateful to all the lenders, sponsors and supporters of this exhibition. The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of talks, events, performances, poetry recitals and creative workshops and will tour to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne from March to June 2015.A catalogue written by the exhibition’s curator Simon Martin, with a foreword by Professor Paul Preston, is available from the Pallant Bookshop.

The Spanish Civil War as an Inspiration to Later Artists

The Spanish Civil War as an Inspiration to Later Artists

R.B. KITAJ (1932–2007), La Pasionaria, 1969, Oil on canvas, Private Collection

In 1939 the British Government formally recognised General Franco's Nationalist Government in Spain. Franco established an autocratic dictatorship, Francoist Spain, a totalitarian state of which he remained leader until his death in 1975, at which point the Spanish monarchy and democracy were restored. The philosophical and political issues raised by the Civil War continued to fascinate artists in the decades following the conflict.

The American artist R.B. Kitaj was a regular visitor to Catalonia in the 1960s and 1970s and created a series of paintings and prints investigating themes and subjects from the Civil War, such as his painting 'La Pasionaria' of the Republican heroine and orator Dolores Ibárruri whose slogan ¡No Pasarán! ('They Shall Not Pass') had become famous after the Battle of Madrid. Kitaj produced a number of screenprints featuring the covers of books published during the Spanish Civil War. Others such as the artist Ron King have returned to the imagery of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ to explore modern conflict and political situations.

Helping them to Forget: Spanish Refugees and Prisoners

Helping them to Forget: Spanish Refugees and Prisoners

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ANNE ACLAND, Help them to Forget: Poster for the Basque Children's Committee, 1937, Off-set lithograph on paper, Courtesy of the People's History Museum  

Following the bombing of Guernica and other Basque cities in May 1937 the steam ship Habaña arrived at Southampton carrying 4000 Basque children and their teachers who were housed in tents in a refugee camp at North Stoneham in Hampshire. The lives of these children were memorably recorded in the photographs of Edith Tudor-Hart, a pioneer in British documentary photography. Groups of the Basque children were accommodated in hostels across the South of England including at Worthing, Hove and Lord Faringdon's home at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire. Over 400 remained in Britain after the war ended and stayed permanently.

After the victory of the Nationalists in April 1939, over 500,000 Spanish refugees fled over the border into France and were interned in camps. These inspired moving paintings of refugees by the child prodigy Ursula McCannell who had visited Spain in the months before the war broke out in 1936. Seeking to raise funds for the refugees and prisoners Henry Moore produced a screenprint called ‘Spanish Prisoner’. Due to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the print was never editioned or sold. However its imagery had a clear impact on his later work as one of the leading Official War Artists in the wider European conflict.

Amongst the Ruins: Guernica and the Threat of Bombing

Amongst the Ruins: Guernica and the Threat of Bombing

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ANONYMOUS What are you doing to prevent this?, November 1936- May 1937, Half- tone, lithograph on paper, Manuel Moreno  

The bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937 by the German Condor Legion on behalf of Franco's Nationalist forces led the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso to paint his iconic painting 'Guernica' within a few weeks of the atrocity. Without doubt the most famous artwork to emerge from the Spanish Civil War, it was exhibited first at the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition from July 1937, where it was visited by many British artists, and subsequently exhibited with the preparatory studies at the New Burlington Galleries in London in October 1938, and at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in January 1939 and then a car showroom in Manchester. The British exhibition was in aid of the Joint Committee for Spanish Aid and was organised by the Surrealist artist Roland Penrose, who had purchased the visceral 'Weeping Woman' directly from Picasso.

Picasso's powerful depiction of the terror of war provoked much discussion and had a profound influence on the imagery of British artists such as paintings by Merlyn Evans and sculptures by F.E. McWilliam and Henry Moore. The bombing of civilians in Spanish cities caused considerable concern amongst many in Britain. The artist John Armstrong depicted the ruins of bombed domestic buildings,  whilst in 1937 the German émigré Walter Nessler expressed his fears about  the bombing of London in his painting ‘Premonition’. These fears about aerial bombardment also led to the increased activities by the Air Raid Precaution organization (ARP) in the lead-up to the Second World War.

We Ask Your Attention! The British Surrealist Group Takes Arm

We Ask Your Attention! The British Surrealist Group Takes Arms





Photograph of the Surrealist artists Roland Penrose, James Cant, Julian Trevelyan and T.Graham wearing masks of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made by McWilliam in the May Day Procession, 1938The celebrated International Surrealist Exhibition took place in London in June 1936, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The history of the British Surrealist movement was subsequently closely linked with the conflict. In October 1936 the artist Roland Penrose travelled to Catalonia with the editor Christian Zervos and the Surrealist poet David Gascoyne to report on efforts to preserve Catalan art. Through his friendship with Pablo Picasso and other continental Surrealists Penrose played a central role in mobilising British artistic responses to the Civil War.

Although their artworks featured more subtle and dreamlike imagery when compared to the directness of the posters and paintings by their realist contemporaries, the British Surrealist Group issued a number of directly political Declarations on Spain calling for arms for the people of Spain (a criticism of the British Government’s non-intervention policy) and calling on people to ‘INTERVENE IN THE FIELD OF POLITICS, INTERVENE IN THE FIELD OF THE IMAGINATION’. At the 1938 May Day Procession in London, a group of Surrealist artists marched wearing masks of the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that had been made by the sculptor F.E. McWilliam in order to protest British appeasement of the fascists. The artist S.W. Hayter, who ran the Atelier 17 in Paris served as a direct link to many European Surrealist artists and helped to arrange print portfolios to raise funds for the Republican cause, such as ‘Solidarité’, which featured British and European artists including Picasso, Joan Miró, André Masson and John Buckland Wright.

La Guerra Civil española en el espejo británico

PABLO GUIMÓN Londres 1 DIC 2014 -








Cartel de Joan Miró que puede verse en la exposición.


El verano de 1936 la artista británica Felicia Browne emprendió un viaje en coche del que nunca regresaría. Atravesó Europa con su amiga Edith Bone para asistir a la Olimpiada Popular que no llegó a celebrarse en Barcelona. Allí les sorprendió el alzamiento militar que dio origen a la Guerra Civil.


El 3 de agosto, cuando tenía 32 años, Felicia Browne se alistó en la columna Carlos Marx que salió de Barcelona en dirección al frente de Aragón. “Dices que me evado de las cosas al no pintar ni hacer escultura”, escribió Browne a una amiga. “Pero solo puedo hacer lo que es válido y urgente para mí. Si la pintura y la escultura lo fueran más que el terremoto que está sucediendo en la revolución, o si las demandas de las unas no entraran en conflicto con las del otro, pintaría y haría escultura”.


En Tardienta (Huesca), preparando un sabotaje en la línea de ferrocarril, fueron atacados por fuerzas fascistas en agosto de 1936. Un miliciano italiano resultó herido. Felicia Browne acudió a su rescate y los dos murieron bajo el fuego de una ametralladora. La artista fue la primera, de los cerca de 2.500 milicianos británicos que lucharon en el bando republicano, que cayó en el campo de batalla. La lluvia de plomo impidió a sus camaradas recuperar el cuerpo de la artista. Pero alguien rescató su mochila, donde guardaba el cuaderno en el que retrató por el camino a milicianos y paisanos. Aquellos dibujos acabaron expuestos en Londres en octubre de ese mismo año y su historia conmovió los artistas de un país que, junto con otros 26 Estados europeos, firmó el pacto de no intervención en la contienda.


La española fue una “guerra de poetas”, en palabras de uno de ellos, Stephen Spender. “El ensayo general para la inevitable guerra europea”, como la definió Ernest Hemingway, fue narrado desde el terreno por decenas de célebres escritores, muchos de ellos británicos, de George Orwell a W. H. Auden. Pero la lucha de sus compatriotas artistas, desde el frente o desde sus estudios, es menos conocida. Por eso resulta tan relevante la exposición Conciencia y conflicto: los artistas británicos y la guerra civil española, en la Pallant House de Chichester, al sur de Inglaterra.


“Todo el mundo conoce el Guernica de Picasso, pero si preguntas por la influencia del conflicto en los artistas británicos nadie sabe nada”, admite Simon Martin, director artístico del museo, que acoge una importante colección de arte británico el siglo XX. “Y el hecho es que sí marcó a toda una generación que se implicó, política y humanitariamente, en lo que pasaba en España y en lo que aquello significaba para Europa”.


Ahí está colgado el retrato a lápiz que hizo Felicia Browne de una campesina española, rescatado de la mochila sujeta a su cuerpo ya muerto. Desprovisto de todo sentimentalismo o ambición propagandística, como destacaría la reseña del New Statesman sobre la exposición donde se mostró el año de su muerte en Londres.


Aquella muestra la organizó la Artists International Association, y la siguieron numerosas exposiciones y campañas para recaudar ayuda humanitaria. En un intento de llegar a un público menos elitista que el de las galerías, muchos artistas británicos diseñaron carteles, pancartas y murales. Su naturaleza efímera, a diferencia de las duraderas obras de los escritores, es una de las razones de la comparativamente menor trascendencia de ese legado artístico. Pero algunos de esos documentos han sido rescatados para la exposición.


Cuando partía en dirección a España para conducir ambulancias en el bando republicano, el poeta W. H. Auden expresó un temor: "Solo espero que no haya demasiados surrealistas allí". No consta que los encontrara, pero sí los hubo. El lenguaje surrealista se reveló como un eficaz instrumento artístico para responder a los horrores de la guerra. De ello dan fe El prisionero español y El casco, un cuadro y una escultura de Henry Moore, o el Paisaje antropófago, de S. W. Hayter, que recurre a la destrucción de Numancia como parábola de la guerra moderna.


La muestra también rinde homenaje a la labor de agitación de los surrealistas en Reino Unido, documentando con fotografías y una máscara original la performance protagonizada en la manifestación del 1 de mayo de 1938 en Londres por los artistas FE McWilliam, Roland Penrose y Julian Trevelyan, que marcharon disfrazados del primer ministro Chamberlain realizando el saludo nazi. El propio Penrose, que viajó a Cataluña a finales de 1936, jugó un papel clave al ayudar a traer el Guernica a Londres, donde se exhibió a principios de 1939. Él mismo adquirió el cuadro Mujer que llora, del artista malagueño, una respuesta visceral a los horrores de la guerra que, cedida por la Tate, constituye otra de las joyas de la exposición.


Lo que trata de desmontar la exposición es el tópico del aislamiento de los artistas británicos en la primera mitad del siglo XX. Es el único ejercicio hasta la fecha de abordar con ambición el papel de los artistas de las islas en un conflicto que enseñó a una generación que el orgullo puede convivir con la derrota. Como resumió Albert Camus, “fue en España donde mi generación aprendió que uno puede tener razón y ser derrotado, golpeado, que la fuerza puede destruir el alma, y que a veces el coraje no obtiene recompensa”.

L’Affaire Reconquista de España » n’est pas une fiction

Nombreux documents d'archives, cotes et sources citées
http://espana36.voila.net/produc/LaffaireRE.html
Bibliographie complète et index

Sur demande : possibilité de conférences sur la Guerre d'Espagne, Exil et Résistance des Républicains espagnols en France

En 2009, près de 40 sessions ont déjà eu lieu
partout en France et en Espagne

contacter charles.farreny@wanadoo.fr

« L’Affaire Reconquista de España » n’est pas une fiction. C’est une histoire vraie, inédite, reconstituée ici à partir, principalement, de l’analyse d’archives policières et administratives méconnues ou inexploitées pendant deux tiers de siècles.

« L’affaire Reconquista de España » n’est pas un titre sorti de l’imagination des auteurs : ce fut l’appellation donnée par différentes autorités vichyssoises à une vaste opération répressive, qui éclata au grand jour en Lot-et-Garonne, au début de juillet 1942, à la suite de plusieurs mois d’investigations policières autour des réfugiés républicains espagnols.

Deux mois plus tard la répression rebondissait en région toulousaine et s’étendait à divers autres départements. L’affaire connut des prolongements importants pendant deux ans. Près de200 Espagnols y furent impliqués. Pendant de longs mois ils connurent la détention, la prison ou les camps. Une centaine furent déportés par les Allemands.Les auteurs Issus d’une famille de républicains espagnols, Charles et Henri Farreny agissent depuis des années au sein du mouvement associatif pour la récupération de la mémoire de l’exil républicain et notamment de la Résistance espagnole en France.