Guernica en la escena, la página y la pantalla: Evento, memoria y patrimonio by Elena Cueto Asín

Abstract

Reviewed by: Guernica en la escena, la página y la pantalla: Evento, memoria y patrimonio by Elena Cueto Asín Douglas LaPrade Cueto Asín, Elena. Guernica en la escena, la página y la pantalla: Evento, memoria y patrimonio. U de Zaragoza, 2017. Pp. 533. ISBN 978-8-41693-561-1. Ekphrasis is an ancient Greek rhetorical device whereby the speaker comments upon a visual work of art, thereby illuminating it. Picasso's Guernica has inspired other artists to create works that allude more to Picasso's iconographic painting than to the Nazi bombardment of the Basque town on April 26, 1937. In Guernica en la escena, la página y la pantalla: Evento, memoria y patrimonio, Elena Cueto Asín argues that the painting has assumed preeminence over the bombardment itself, which is the supreme testament to the efficacy of ekphrasis. The public's imagination has been molded more by the painting than by the historical event, which justifies Cueto Asín's formidable chronicle of artistic works inspired by Picasso's painting. Cueto Asín has gathered, summarized, and analyzed countless works in all languages and genres about the bombing of Guernica and about Picasso's painting. The book is divided into three parts: works produced during the Spanish Civil War, works produced between the war and the Transition, and works produced since the Transition. Cueto Asín sustains her rhetorical [End Page 277] emphasis on ekphrasis throughout, nimbly constructing a semiotic argument featuring Picasso's painting as a cultural phenomenon that has inspired later artists. The introduction offers succinct histories of both the bombardment and the painting. Cueto Asín astutely documents the first journalistic accounts of the bombing of Guernica, which were published before the town's name became linked inextricably with Picasso's painting. War correspondent George Steer sent a telegram to The Times with the first journalistic report of the bombing. Cueto Asín refers also to Fascist accounts of the event, some of which suggested that Republicans were responsible for incinerating the town. Cueto Asín cites the famous book by anti-Franco historian Herbert Rutledge Southworth, which demonstrates how the history of the bombing of Guernica has been manipulated for propaganda. The history of the painting is likewise a story of competing ideologies and propagandistic maneuvers. The Spanish Republic commissioned Picasso to produce the painting Guernica in 1937 for exhibition in the Spanish Pavilion during the International Exposition in Paris. The painting was designed to call the world's attention to the Fascist atrocities in Spain because the US, the U.K., and France had adopted a posture of non-intervention during the Spanish Civil War. With the outset of World War II, the painting found safe haven in New York, where it became a universal anti-war emblem. During Spain's Transition after Franco's death, Spain claimed the painting as a symbol of its nascent democracy, and the painting was transferred from New York to Madrid in 1981. Cueto Asín suggests that the semiotic interpretation of the bombing of Guernica began before Picasso painted the event. Before the war, Guernica already was a metonymy of the Basque Country, as Cueto Asín calls it, because the famous tree of Guernica has been a symbol of Basque freedoms for centuries. Cueto Asín presents the tree of Guernica as a symbol of ancient traditions, and the airplane as a symbol of modern warfare that destroys those traditions. The bombardment is thus an allegorical assault on democracy, in addition to the real cruelty of the massacre. Curiously, Picasso depicts neither an airplane nor the tree of Guernica in his painting. Ishaan Tharoor wrote an article in The Washington Post on April 26, 2017, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the bombardment. Tharoor writes about the symbolism of the tree of Guernica as follows: "Guernica contained nothing of real military value. It was, and remains, a Basque cultural center and home to a sacred tree that symbolized the traditional freedoms of the Basque people—privileges Franco had little interest in defending." Like Cueto Asín, Tharoor quotes George Steer, the first journalist to report the bombardment: "Guernica was not a...