Guerra aérea, modernismo y artes visuales:

Contra el Guernica

Abstract

Contemporary war and the aesthetic tensions of Modernism have some common traits that might illuminate each other’s reality. This article tries to point out some of those characteristics by analyzing a concrete case, Picasso’s Guernica, considered one of the most important examples ofpolitical art of the XXth. Century. A political analysis of air bombing based on the theories of Carl Schmitt is combined here with the consideration the Modern work of art as being situated in a fieldof forces, as Adorno stated in his Aesthetic Theory. This combination of perspectives allows a better clarification of Guernica’s difficult reception along the time. This article pays particular attention toan odd writing by the Spanish artist Antonio Saura, where he recorded his reactions when Guernica arrived in Madrid. The old relationship between war an art could be thought again considering theradical transformations of technology and the revolutions of the artistic avant-garde.