Sergeant Yoldi was appalled:
"There was nothing to be heard but the
crackle and roar of flames. No one spoke and even the cattle trotting
aimlessly through the streets made no noise. We were all dumb with horror.
I had known Guernica before the war — there was nothing left of it. It had
been a little town with red-roofed, white-walled houses. Now its streets
were strewn with charred animal carcasses." On 26 April 1937, just
twenty-four hours before Sergeant Yoldi arrived in Guernica, the town had
been bombed by the German Condor Legion. This became the most famous of
the Spanish Civil War atrocities, horrifying a world which had not yet
grown used to air attacks on defenceless cities. The war began in July
1936, when General Francisco- Franco led a revolt against the Spanish
Republic. The Spanish Left had won a parliamentary majority but was unable
to restrain those among them who were deter-mined that their turn in power
should be used to destroy the Right. Franco's revolt became a civil war,
and Franco received the support of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany,
which went so far as to send troops — using the Spanish war to try out new
weapons and tactics. The Republicans were supported by volunteers from all
over the world, as well as by Stalin's Soviet Union. Horrifying and
sadistic atrocities were committed by both sides —
Pablo Picasso, who was
a Spaniard, made Guernica the subject of one of his most famous paintings.
After Franco's victory the German painter
Max Ernst created his spectral
L'ange du foyer (Fireside angel), an apocalyptic monster bursting
with destructive energy, a King-Kong-like Angel of Death spreading fear
and terror.
Ernst was born in 1891 at Bruhl near Cologne, and as a painter he was
quite "degenerate": or this is how he was described by the propagandists
of the Third Reich. In 1921
Ernst moved to Pans, where he threw himself
into sculpture, print-making and film as well as painting. There he became
a participant in the French Dada movement, a short-lived movement from
1916 to about 1922 which declared that all established values, morals and
aesthetics had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the World
War I. Later, in 1924,
Ernst became a member of the Surrealist movement
which followed Dada and was considered one of its most innovative members. The Surrealists
still touted the importance of chance in their work, as did the Dadaists,
but added to it more control and theories borrowed from psychoanalysis,
emphasising the subconscious and the importance of dream imagery.
In 1937, the year he painted
L'ange du foyer,
Ernst learned that
the National Socialists had confiscated his early work, which he had left
behind m Germany. It was soon destroyed in the National Socialist effort
to "purify" German art. We may suppose, then, that when he painted this
work, Spain was not the only thing worrying him. When World War II began,
the French interned
Ernst at Aix-en-Provence as an "enemy alien", but
friends interceded for him. He was released and ordered to leave France.
He went to the United States of America with the help of the art
connoisseur and collector Peggy Guggenheim, who he later married.
