Picasso's Guernica Research Articles

Aesthetic Preference for Nonredundant Complexity: Key to Creativity

The basic principle of all biological and social, and some physical processes is increase of interactive heterogeneity, which evolutionarily raises the sophistication level of intraspecific and interspecific systems. Primates, including humans, and other species of animals such as elephants, are known to create multicolor pictorial patterns on a canvas, holding a painting brush in a hand, or in the case of elephants, wrapping the long "nose" around a painting brush. Therefore the pattern creation has a long evolutionary history. Humans and monkeys branched off 6 or 7 million years ago. Humans and elephants much earlier. Another important consideration is the method of mate selection by females. Females prefer "minority" males. If Type A males and Type B males are mixed, females prefer "minority" males instead of "supernormal" males. The females' preference for "minority" males leads to intraspecific heterogenization, but if females preferred "supernormal" males, it would lead to intraspecific homogenization. There is heterogeneity of individual aesthetic preference types in terms of nonredundant vs. redundant complexity. Some examples of nonredundant complexity are: Picasso's Guernica, and Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Aesthetic preferences are expressions of the individual's perceptual/cognitive/cogitative/action types (abbreviated as "mindscape types"). While individuals who prefer nonredundant complexity tend to be creative, those who like redundant complexity tend to be anti-creative. Furthermore, we must become aware that the individual types are not subcultural variations, but they exit across cultural, social, gender, and professional boundaries, and are therefore transgroup occurrences. The individual types also cut across boundaries between species, and are therefore transeidosic. This knowledge is useful in multicultural management. Awareness of transgroupness of individual mindscape types will reduce self-stereotyping and ingroup homogenization, and contribute to reduction of hostility, violence and terrorism between religious, political and ideological groups. In plain language, some persons in other groups are more similar to you than many people in your own group. Psychological tests are available.

From the Editors

From the Editors

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

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...

Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Deconstructing Art and/as Ideology

Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch:Deconstructing Art And/As Ideology Colin Gardner (bio) Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda by Joes Segal. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. 176 Pp., 30 illustrations. $18.99 paper. In a now infamous speech to the US House of Representatives on August 16, 1949, Congressman George Dondero (Republican from Michigan) railed against modern art, particularly abstraction, as a communist threat to true American values. "What are these isms that are the very foundation of so-called modern art?" he asked. "I call the roll of infamy without claim that my list is all-inclusive: dadaism, futurism, constructionism, suprematism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstractionism. All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art. While not all are media of social or political protest, all are instruments and weapons of destruction…."1 Meanwhile, working covertly and independently of Congress and using secret funding provided by a number of CIA front organizations (most notably the Congress of Cultural Freedom under the leadership of Michael Josselson), these so-called "weapons of destruction"—specifically Abstract Expressionism— were being harnessed by the United States Information Agency (USIA) as the epitome of American freedom of expression against totalitarian Soviet state propaganda and its officially sanctioned artistic style, socialist realism. The innate contradictions of art's role in the Cold War context—modernism as both quintessentially American and sub-versively communist—are further [End Page 123] complicated when one considers Clement Greenberg's distinction between avant-garde and kitsch in his eponymous 1939 essay in which he lionizes abstract painting as the ultimate realization of modern art's historical mission—i.e., absolute artistic purity whereby, following the tenets of Gotthold Lessing's Laocoön (1766), painting can only be about painting as the subject of its own innate process.2 Work with an overt political or social message cannot be considered art but is instead kitsch or propaganda, which, drawing upon the simula-crum of genuine culture, merely imitates art's effects. In Greenberg's eyes, the latter's cultural philistinism would conveniently relegate socially conscious artists such as Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera, and Philip Evergood to the same level as Stalinist hacks such as Isaak Brodsky. Clearly, given these examples, any attempt to create a clear-cut opposition between "political" or "activist" art on the one hand (Greenberg's kitsch) and "purely autonomous" art on the other (Greenberg's avant-garde) is not only spurious but also irresponsibly unhistorical. In his brilliantly incisive new book, Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda, Joes Segal sets out to deconstruct this false binary by showing that "politicians and government agencies may project their own ideas, interests and fears on artworks. This is due to the fact that the visual arts cannot easily be reduced to unambiguous statements or clear-cut arguments" (8). In contrast, he argues, the political meaning of art "is in no way restricted to artworks with a declared political intention. The most interesting cases tend to be those works which at first sight are politically ambiguous or have no political meaning at all" (9). In short, "In this collection of essays I use another perspective by analyzing the political implications of the very idea of a pure and apolitical modern art" (9). Using a carefully considered case study approach, Segal traces the ambivalent relationship between art and politics over a hundred-year span from 1914 to 2014. Obviously, given the book's limited length (a very tight 136 pages of text), Segal has been highly selective and acknowledges some key omissions: the relationship of Futurism to Italian Fascism; art during the Spanish Civil War (Picasso's Guernica is thus conspicuously absent); the clash between modern, socialist, and religious imagery in 1970s Iran; the competing art traditions in North and South Korea; as well as issues of identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Nonetheless, his choices raise enough key points that they can be easily cross-referenced into other artistic and nationalist contexts, both within and outside the confines of the book. Thus Segal covers a wide range of nationalist paradigms, [End Page 124] including the public debates on art and identity in...

Lost Lives: Narrative, Commemoration, and the Northern Ireland Troubles

Lost Lives:Narrative, Commemoration, and the Northern Ireland Troubles Matthew McGuire Lost Lives (1999) contains the stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Comprising almost a million words, it is an encyclopedic account of the 3,636 deaths that occurred between 1966 and 1999.1 At the time of publication, critics were quick to celebrate the scale and significance of the book's achievement. Fintan O'Toole called it "one of the most remarkable books to have emerged from any conflict."2 Nell McCafferty described it as "the print equivalent of Picasso's Guernica."3 For Kevin Myers, it was the "greatest single piece of scholarship . . . ever conducted in Ireland."4 Public reactions to Lost Lives were equally enthusiastic. In bookshops across Northern Ireland, groups of people huddled round displays, poring over the text. One storeowner discovered a copy stained with mascara where a woman had wept onto its pages (LL 22). In 2000, when Seamus Heaney was asked to open an extension to Belfast's Linen Hall library, he chose Lost Lives as the first volume to be placed on the shelves. At Clonard Monastery, priests placed a copy on a lectern in front of the altar for all to read. The Belfast Telegraph called it "a labour of Hercules," the Sunday Tribune spoke of "a magnificent achievement," while Hot Press magazine insisted, "No other book will have its enduring power."5 At a public lecture in Australia in 2015, Professor [End Page 39] Gillian Russell confirmed this view when she argued that Lost Lives remained "the most significant work of Irish writing in the last twenty years."6 The opening pages of the book explain this remarkable response while, at the same time, offering a synecdoche for the ways in which Lost Lives, as whole, seeks to represent the Troubles. The book begins in 1966, when the fuse was lit and Northern Ireland began its descent into thirty years of sectarian bloodshed. What follows is a chronological account that systematically details every Troubles-related death. This highly structured approach is significant, as it suggests a desire to impose some form of order upon the chaos and turbulence of recent Northern Irish history. At first glance, Lost Lives resembles a reference book, with the first three entries—for John Patrick Scullion, Peter Ward and Matilda Gould—establishing a formula that remains consistent throughout. Nine key facts introduce each victim. They include: a number; the date they died; their full name; where they came from; any political, paramilitary or security force affiliation; their religion, age, family circumstance and occupation. Here, for example, is the book's first entry: 1. June 11, 1966 John Patrick Scullion, West Belfast Civilian, Catholic, 28, single, storeman Lost Lives fosters an aura of objectivity, a reverence for historical fact, and a commitment to treating every victim in the same uniform and impartial manner. The critical distance that is thus established is enhanced by the twenty-two pages of graphs and statistics, the alphabetical index, and the bibliography of further reading that concludes the volume. The book's systematic approach affords readers a bird's-eye view, encouraging them to recognize the underlying patterns that characterized the conflict. Of the 3,636 people killed, for instance, we learn that the largest single category was "civilian" (56 percent). In contrast, the security forces and the army make up 28 percent, with the paramilitaries constituting a mere 15 percent.7 The book provides a snapshot of which groups were responsible for various deaths. The largest is the Provisional IRA at 58 [End Page 40] percent, followed by Loyalist paramilitaries at 29 percent, with security forces and army making up 10 percent. From the outset, Lost Lives appears concerned with establishing the truth about the Troubles, while seeking to outline an inclusive and apolitical approach to memorializing the dead. For many critics, these aspects make the book a unique and exemplary text. Writing in 2000, Karen Birchard argued in the medical journal The Lancet that Lost Lives "should sit on the negotiating table in full sight, to remind those at the table of the high price people pay for...

An Analysis of the Blind Variation and Selective Retention Theory of Creativity

Picasso's Guernica sketches continue to provide a fruitful testing ground for examining and assessing the Blind Variation Selective Retention (BVSR) theory of creativity. Nonmonotonicity—e.g., as indicated by a lack of similarity of successive sketches—is not evidence of a selectionist process. Although the notion of blindness originally implied randomness, it now encompasses phenomena that bias idea generation, e.g., the influence of remote associations on sketch ideas. However, for a selectionist framework is to be applicable, such biases must be negligible, otherwise evolutionary change is attributed to those biases, not to selection. The notion of variants should not be applied to creativity; without a mechanism of inheritance, there is no basis upon which to delineate, for example, which sketch ideas are or are not variants of a given sketch idea. The notion of selective retention is also problematic. Selection provides an explanation when acquired change is not transmitted; it cannot apply to Picasso's painting (or other creative acts) because his ideas acquired modifications, as he thought them through, that were incorporated into paintings and viewed by others. The generation of one sketch affects the criteria by which the next is judged, so sequentially generated sketches cannot be treated as members of a generation, and selected amongst. Although BVSR is inappropriate as a theoretical framework for creativity, exploring to what extent selectionism explains the generation of not just biological form but masterpieces such as Picasso's Guernica is useful for gaining insight into creativity.

The Nature of the Beast

Goshka Macuga's installation The Nature of the Beast was on view at London's Whitechapel Gallery April 5, 2009–April 18, 2010. The first in a series of yearlong artists' commissions, the work responded to the Whitechapel's 1939 exhibition of Pablo Picasso's Guernica in support of the Republican forces fighting in the Spanish civil war. It incorporated Picasso's tapestry version of Guernica, which was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller and which since the 1980s has hung outside the Security Council chamber at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Exhibited as a deterrent to war, in 2003 the tapestry was covered by a blue curtain in front of which Colin Powell delivered his speech on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Macuga designed her installation to accommodate meetings, discussions, and debates around a central table, with the Guernica tapestry as a backdrop. Local political groups, university classes, and other community organizations came to use the conference table and the assembled reading materials. Near the end of the exhibition, the artist designed her own tapestry, based on press photographs of the Guernica tapestry while on display at the Whitechapel. Woven in Flanders, it depicts Prince William giving a speech and questions the political efficacy of her own work, as well as placing Guernica in a longer history of social image-making.

Review of Picasso's Guernica: The genesis of a painting.

Review of Picasso's Guernica: The genesis of a painting.

Teaching representations of the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a national conflict with international significance, inspired strong responses from artists and writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The bombing of the Basque town Guernica, the assassination of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and the defense of Madrid are just some of the events represented in painting, film, fiction, memoir, and history produced during the war years and since.Courses dealing with the Spanish Civil War are given regularly in literature, foreign language, and history departments, in English and in Spanish. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching helps instructors plan courses that exploit the interdisciplinary, multigeneric opportunities present in the period's aesthetic output. In thirty-five essays, contributors negotiate the complex relation between art and history in depictions of the war and its aftermath, exploring how memory is shaped. Key representations of the war, like Picasso's Guernica, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Rodoreda's La placa del Diamant, Sender's Requiem por un campesino espanol, and Capa's Falling Militiaman, find a place in this wide-ranging volume. In addition, coverage extends to less frequently taught works by Catalan, German, Irish, and Latin American novelists, poets, and visual artists. The volume concludes with a section of resources for further study and classroom use, including films, music, photography, Web sites, and course syllabi and commentaries.

Catastrophic Constellations: Picasso's Guernica and Klee's Angelus Novus

This article examines how, during the late 1930s, two paintings, Picasso's Guernica and Klee's Angelus Novus, became contextualised within discourses of catastrophe and conflict, creating what Walter Benjamin in his Passagenwerk termed 'constellations'. Besides presenting this notion and its hermeneutic potentials' I examine the positioning of the historical events during this time within aesthetic discourses. In retrospect' the inter-war years, and in particular the late 1930s, can be viewed as a desperate and finally failed attempt to find an orderly, rational discourse to depict the turbulent, even frenzied situation brought about by the combination of new technologies which in tandem with Fascist ideology made the bombings of Gernica, the first chapter of the Second World War, possible. Benjamin's own text about the Angelus Novus-drawing has become iconic for dealing with such catastrophes, but on a more universal level than the monumental Guernica mural. Picasso's work had been commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris in 1937 and almost immediately became acknowledged for its outspoken protest against the Gernica-bombings and Fascism.

FEATURED ARTICLE: The Creative Process in Picasso's Guernica Sketches: Monotonic Improvements versus Nonmonotonic Variants

A controversy has emerged over whether Picasso's sketches for Guernica illustrate a Darwinian process of blind-variation and selective-retention (i.e., nonmonotonic variants), rather than a more systematic, expertise-driven process (i.e., monotonic improvements). This issue is objectively addressed by having judges (1 pro-Darwinian, 2 anti-Darwinian, and 2 neutral) rank the figural components according to their perceived progress toward the final version of the painting. Besides strongly agreeing on the perceived order (composite progress score alpha = .85), the independent judges concurred that this order was conspicuously nonmonotonic, with minimal tendency to converge on the end result. These conclusions held not only for the sketches as a whole, but also for the sequence of sketches for the separate figural elements of the painting. Hence, Picasso's creative process is best described as producing blind nonmonotonic variants, rather than expert monotonic improvements. The general method used in this study can be extended to other documentary evidence—such as musical sketches, literary drafts, and laboratory notebooks—to determine the extent to which creativity operates in a Darwinian manner.

COMMENTARIES: Debates About the "General" Picture: Cognition and Creative Achievement

Picasso's Guernica represents a potentially useful product for investigation by students of creative achievement. In the case of studies by Simonton (2007) and Weisberg and Hass (2007), both appearing in this same issue of the Creativity Research Journal, detailed examination of this picture has provided a basis for some bold statements about creative thought. In this commentary, we question the conclusions drawn by Simonton with respect to the application of historical case analysis, the methods applied, and the substantive model underlying this effort. More generally, we argue that caution is called for in attempting to account for creative achievement based on a single model of the kind of knowledge involved.

COMMENTARIES: Darwinian Creativity in the Classroom?

The present article considers the debate between Darwinian and non-Darwinian accounts of creativity from the perspective of little-c (or everyday) creativity. Specifically, the basic arguments found in both positions are highlighted by juxtaposing Simonton's (this issue) empirical analysis of Picasso's Guernica sketches with Weisberg's and Hass's (this issue) analysis. Unresolved issues in this debate are identified and discussed. The body of the article is focused on developing an argument for how these lingering issues might be addressed by expanding empirical studies of Big C (eminent) creative processes to include little c (or everyday) levels of creative magnitude.

REJOINDER: Picasso's Guernica Creativity as a Darwinian Process: Definitions, Clarifications, Misconceptions, and Applications

The author responds to four commentaries on Simonton (this issue). The response deals with two sets of issues. First are criticisms of the Darwinian theory of creativity, especially as applied to Picasso's sketches for the Guernica. These criticisms range from the presumed role of associative processes to the essential nature of any Darwinian model. The second set of issues pertains to diverse methodological objections with respect to measurement and data analysis. The author responds to each and every point. The author concludes not only that Picasso's creative process is best described as Darwinian, but also that the Darwinian theory of creativity has been notably strengthened by the current exchange.

COMMENTARIES: Why the Creative Process Is Not Darwinian: Comment on "The Creative Process in Picasso's Guernica Sketches: Monotonic Improvements versus Nonmonotonic Variants"

Simonton (2007) makes the unwarranted assumption that nonmonotonicity supports a Darwinian view of creativity. Darwin's theory of natural selection was motivated by a paradox that has no equivalent in creative thought: the paradox of how change accumulates when acquired traits are not inherited. To describe a process of cumulative change in which acquired traits are retained is outside of the scope of the theory of natural selection. Even the early evolution of life itself (prior to genetically mediated template replication) cannot be described by natural selection. Specifically, natural selection cannot describe change of state that involves horizontal (Lamarckian) exchange or occurs through interaction with an incompletely specified context. It cannot describe change wherein variants are evaluated sequentially, and wherein this evaluation can itself change the state space and/or fitness function, because no two variants are ever evaluated according to the same selection criterion. Concerns are also raised as to the methodology used in Simonton's study. There are few individuals whose contribution to the field of creativity studies is remotely comparable to that of Dean Keith Simonton. His extensive body of work commands and deserves the highest admiration. The single exception to this, in my opinion, is his espousal of a Darwinian view of creativity. In this commentary I show that the flaws in this theory of creativity are so serious that it is not only unlikely, it is impossible.

Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War

How might artistic practice offer unique insight into the cataclysmic debacle of war? Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War plumbs this provocative question through an ambitious account of a pivotal period in European cultural history. The book focuses on the relation between artistic endeavor and politics during a period of social crisis. By scrutinizing the widely varying responses to the Spanish Civil War in the work of Miro, Dali, Caballero, Masson, and Picasso, the author investigates Surrealism's efforts to bridge the divide between political thought and political act. Robin Adele Greeley examines such central works as Miro's Still Life with Old Shoe and Dali's Autumn Cannibalism in the context of contemporary works and historical events. She also examines such topics as Surrealism's flirtations with fascism, the movement's relations with the Communist Party and the Popular Front, and the distinct development of Spanish versus French Surrealism. She concludes with an in-depth discussion of Picasso's Guernica.

The Public Life of Painting

American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. By Steven Biel. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 215 pages. $21.95 (cloth). To explain what he means by the "the biography of things," the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff points to a typical Zulu hut, metamorphosing from its life as a house to its life as a guest house, as a kitchen, and finally as a chicken coop, before collapsing, ravaged by termites. Monumental objects become biographical subjects more readily. The year after Andy Warhol turned a building into a movie star (in the eight-hour Empire), Alan Trachtenberg published Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965), a path-breaking example of the biographical genre that includes Marvin Trachtenberg's The Statue of Liberty (1976), for instance, and Eric Darton's Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York City's World Trade Center (2000). These are biographies that tell the history of both physical and metaphysical (symbolic, allegorical, ideological) lives.1 Kopytoff also points to the example of artworks, explaining that "a biography of a painting by Renoir that ends up in an incinerator is as tragic, in its way, as the biography of a person who ends up murdered."2 Picasso's Guernica has inspired a record number of biographies, recently and importantly Gijs van Hensbergen's Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (2004).3 However complex the history of the mural's composition and exhibition, the history of its iconicity resolves into the simple fact of its worldwide symbolic value: the protest against unwarranted military violence. Guernica might be understood not simply as the twentieth century's most iconic painting, but as the one painting that the century could hardly live without, an image reproduced as a tapestry to hang outside the U.N. Security Council. In this century, it has already become an icon that proves somewhat difficult to live with. On the day (in February 2003) when Colin Powell explained to the Security Council why the United States must wage war on Iraq, blue drapery veiled the dramatic reminder of the human capacity to inflict chaos and suffering. Humbler, comparatively diminutive paintings deserve biographies too, as Steven Biel demonstrates in his charming, lively American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. I think it's debatable whether (from a non-American [End Page 485] perspective) Grant Wood's portrait is America's most famous painting. But for Americans, it is no doubt the most recognizable painting that is recognizably American, and recognizable not just as a portrait of two Americans, but also, it seems, as a portrait of America. As Wanda Corn put it, in the catalog that accompanied the retrospective (1983–84) that reestablished Wood's importance, few people agreed about what American Gothic was supposed to be saying, but "everyone agreed" that "the painting said something fundamentally American."4 For part of the art world, silence would have preferable. In the catalog, Corn quotes Hilton Kramer's confident 1974 dismissal of Wood as a "corpse" one need not "disinter."5 In response to the exhibition, Kramer strained to exorcise this return of the dead, describing Wood's oeuvre as "a calculated lie from start to finish—the fantasy of an emotionally retarded, adolescent sensibility desperately seeking refuge from the realities of life in a dreamworld of his own invention."6 The invective updated the "Grant Wood Controversy," as it was already called in 1942, the year of the memorial Wood retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.7 On the one hand, it's easy enough to accept the controversy as part of the "system of art" that sustains itself by drawing and redrawing boundaries (between good and bad, inside and out, legitimate and illegitimate, art and not art);8 on the other, the stakes of the controversy extend beyond that system. Indeed, having turned its back on modernist aesthetics, Regionalism has never been granted anything like aesthetic autonomy; this is art that is supposed to perform representational, historical, ideological work...

Expressions of National Crisis: Diamela Eltit's E. Luminata and Pablo Picasso's Guernica

Expressions of National Crisis: Diamela Eltit's E. Luminata and Pablo Picasso's Guernica

Text to Images: The Aesthetics of Pictorial Signs

A text is the set of lexical or visual signs that act as cues to guide a reader's mental decoding and meaning-making operations. This article explores how the meaning-expressive potential of the lexical and pictorial forms of signification are defined on multiple levels. Semiotics provides a theoretical and methodological framework for isolating and explaining the levels of meaning, both of language as text and the image as pictorial text. This article highlights some philosophical and theoretical implications of semiotics, language, meaning-making, and pictorial text with a view towards the development of a viable semiotic methodology for analyzing pictorial text. Pablo Picasso's Guernica is used as an example of how signification works on multiple levels.

Understanding Propaganda: The Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art

Pablo Picasso's Guernica, Francisco de Goya's Fifth of May, Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, are all examples of expressly political art. Historically some art has been not only an object of aesthetic appreciation, but has also embodied and imparted a political message. Understanding the way art can be used to further political aims is an important part of art education. I contend that it is as important to investigate the political and cultural uses of art as it is to engage in the more traditional inquiries of form and style. To further this end, I propose a new model of that can better accommodate the phenomenon of art propaganda. Propaganda, in current usage, has a pejorative sense; however, at one time propaganda was understood to mean mere persuasion. My aim in this essay is to rehabilitate as a term of analysis while accounting for the pejorative sense has come to have. First, I provide a conceptual analysis of propaganda. In doing so, I develop a new model of the epistemic merit model. I argue that this model will enable us to identify and assess in general. Second, I show that my definition is especially well-suited to cases where the in question is also a work of art, since art, from posters and pamphlets to films and novels, has been a particularly prevalent means for the dissemination of propaganda.