Guernica

Guernica

ART AS POLITICS

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WC News Service]

MADRID -- Guernica, Pablo Picasso's masterpiece at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía here, often ranks as the artist's most famous,  if not greatest, work. The picture, depicting the anilation by aerial bombing of the small Basque peasant village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, is also frequently cited as the most famous anti-war painting in the pantheon of Western Art. With such superlatives, Guernica has become one of those iconic paintings that everyone seems to know. And everyone wants to see. It has its own immense showcase gallery. Guards are stationed at attention on either side of the canvas. No photography permitted. Something like the Mona Lisa, without, at least when I visited recently, the Louvre-like crowds.

But is Guernica really just an anti-war statement, as it is most often portrayed? Or even, for that matter, the most powerful iteration of that admirable sentiment ever rendered in 20th-century modern art? Maybe, not so much

 

Simply put, Guernica doesn't escape being, as is the case with much war-related art, politically motivated. As such, it ranks too as arguably the most famous poster child for advocacy art. In a word, propaganda. Righteous propaganda. But propaganda nonetheless.

Gassed

The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid

Carreño de Miranda

 

COURTING CONTROVERSY

By Richard Carreño

[WC News Service]

MADRID -- I have two great painters in the family.

One was my grandfather, Toribio Carreño, an early 20th-century immigrant from Cuba, who was house painter in New York.

 

The other is Juan Carreño de Miranda, a 17th-century Spanish court painter.

 

They both worked in oils.

 

That's pretty much where their artistic similarities begin and end. Toribio went on to have his ephemeral masterpieces take pride of place on several residential blocks in Brooklyn. Juan's works have proven to be more timeless, taking pride of place in the Museo Nacional del Prado here. 

 

Family legends are often dodgy, more fun to playfully indulge in than rigorously inspect, and thus it's often best not to scratch too deeply into genealogical details.

 

Still, it's more than just amusing to associate one's own DNA with a historical figure, especially a personage who can link a family's roots to a glamorous, regal past. True, Carreño de Miranda (1614-1685) wasn't as skilled, prominent, nor as well-connected as his contemporary Diego Valázquez (1599-1660). Valázquez painted kings. Carreño, for the most part, painted dukes and lesser royalty. (Though, as a royal painter, he still did get a few cracks at depicting Mad King Charles II in a few unflattering portraits). 

 

 

Francisco Goya

 Whimsy with Bite

By RICHARD CARREÑO Bio
[WritersClearinghouse News Service] Posted 16 September 2014

Philadelphia

Tony Auth's recent death got me thinking about an exhibit of cartoons by Goya I visited about a fortnight ago at the Allentown Art Museum.

 

Auth, a former editorial cartoonist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Francisco Goya, Spain's great 19th century court painter, in the same breath?

 

Yes, because Goya (1764-1828), though often best known for such full-figure portraits such as the Duchess of Alba and the Nude Maja and Clothed Maja, was also an early social realist and Spain's first, yes, first, modern painter. It's hard not to to think of the horror of war depicted in Picasso's Guernica when viewing Goya's equally horrific scene of bloodshed in his Third of May, 1808. Goya's spirit imbued a new form of political and societal criticism that flowed in subsequent centuries from the sharpened quills of such penny-press English sharpshooters as William Hogarth,  George Cruikshank, James Gilray, Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman, and Steve Bell.