Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War. By Robin Addle Greeley. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. vii, 261. $60.00.)
The meaning of surrealist art is ambivalent, art historian Robin Addle Greeley contends, even when placed within the politically polarized context of the Spanish Civil War. In her superb book, she critically interprets works by Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, Jose Caballero, Andre Masson, and Pablo Picasso to unravel tortuous correspondences between aesthetics and politics during this tempestuous era. Some of these surrealists were visionaries of socialist revolution, while others entertained fascist fantasies of domination. Some were staunch supporters of the republic; a few were tepid, and a couple resigned themselves to Franco's victory. Although surrealist art sometimes served politically didactic purposes, ultimately its modernist aesthetic lacked a coherent political ideology or the mobilizing power to safeguard the Second Spanish Republic.
Scrutinizing surrealism's self-proclaimed leftist orientation, Greeley examines the multivalent political meanings of surrealist art through five case studies. First she examines two major works by Miro commissioned for the Spanish Republican Pavilion in the 1937 Paris World's Fair, The Reaper wall mural and a Help Spain commercial poster. Yet these didactic works were aesthetically and politically less provocative, she demonstrates, than two other pieces from this period, Woman in Revolt and Still Life with Old Shoe, which more strongly fused Miro's Catalan nationalism with his theoretical project of the "assassination of painting." Turning next to Salvador Daft, his flirtations with fascism have been widely acknowledged. Greeley pushes the critique further by exploring issues of sexual violence and male domination in paintings by Dali, whose explicit content was antifascist, such as Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War and Autumn Cannibalism.
Perhaps the most intriguing Spanish surrealist in this book is Jose Caballero, whose surrealistic art "evolved and functioned" in ways, Greeley states, "that one can relate his stylistic consistencies to his wild political swings" (96). Bluntly put, Caballero worked both for the left-center Republic and the fascist Franco regime, during and after the war. Andre Masson's political affiliation, by contrast, sided explicitly with the radical left. His uniquely Nietzschean conception of communism, best expressed through the countersurrealist journal Acephale, celebrated the violent destruction of bourgeois society, particularly in its most extreme formation as Nazism. The final chapter is devoted to Picasso's Guernica as a "horrific metaphor for the physical annihilation of life" (148). Among Picasso's works, this painting displayed the strongest affinities between modernist aesthetics and contemporary politics.
Greeley's book is intellectually engaging and amply illustrated with 125 plates. Yet from a historical perspective, there are some peculiarities in relation to its subject. The Spanish painters with the strongest surrealist credentials, Caballero and Dali, had the weakest political commitments and were strongly tied to Catholic symbolism. The politically radical Masson had a contentious relationship with the surrealist movement. Miro had passed his surrealist phase, and the term only marginally applies to Picasso's art. Therefore, Greeley's discussions may speak more to contemporary aesthetic and critical theory than to historical context. Still, historians will learn important details from this scintillating study, and they should seriously ponder its implications.
Robin Walz
University of Alaska Southeast