The representation of war in art

       I am going to speak about two Spanish painters who got involved on their way in the war protest.

       The first one is Fransisco Goya. He lived in the 19th century. In 1808, the Napoleonian army came to Spain. The war between the Spanish population and the French army lasted five years. Goya represented the horror of this war in two paintings called Dos de Mayo and Tres de Mayo (Prado Museum, Madrid). The first one represents a fight between French and Spanish in Madrid. The second represents French soldiers killing Spanish insurgents. He did other works on this war, gathered under the name of Disasters . These are violent engravings showing the reality of war.

       Now let's turn to second painter, Pablo Picasso. He was born in 1881 in Barcelona. He painted in 1937 Guernica (Queen Sofia National Museum, Madrid), which is the image of the bombing of this Spanish village during the civil war, opposing the Caudillo Franco to the Republicans. Guernica is a very violent painting, showing people and animals dying. Picasso belonged to pacifist groups and he also painted Massacre in Corea (Picasso Museum, Paris) in 1951, which is inspired by Goya's painting. It represents the Corean war between Communists and Americans.

       These paintings are touching because they show the horrors of war and the martyrdom of people involved in the fight for democracy, and innocents.

 Stéphanie