The Edinburgh Companion to the Spanish Civil War and Visual Culture

Offers new models for interpreting the visual culture of the Spanish Civil War.

From propaganda posters to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, images of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) reemerge across the globe wherever fratricidal conflicts and crimes against humanity occur. The War’s iconic visual language continues to shape contemporary painting, propaganda and advertising – a surprisingly long afterlife for a conflict lasting less than three years. This richly illustrated Companion explains this phenomenon, examining new sources and initiating fresh approaches to studying the visuality of the War and its legacies. The thirty-three essays collected here reveal the extent to which images helped – and still help – construct meaning around the War and other civil conflicts. Drawing on disciplines including art history, anthropology, history, art therapy, memory studies and forensic archaeology, the contributors’ case studies show how visual representation united or divided wartime and postwar communities in Spain and beyond.