CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Since it was first presented in public during the Universal Expo in Paris in 1937 in the pavilion of the Spanish Republic, Picasso´s Guernica has produced intense controversy. It generated discussion regarding whether it was art or propaganda, its aesthetic value was analyzed and the meaning of its iconography´s associations was debated. The painting traveled the world, activating local contexts along the lines of the specific issues it raised everywhere it was exhibited. Guernica gained renown as the 20th Century´s most important painting, constituting a paradigm in any analysis of the relation between art and politics (above all in Latin America during the early sixties), and in this sense, it delimited a scale of values by marking the superlative solution. However, is this image significant only in terms of its own history, and its own meaning? Does its current significance lie only in the fact that it has been unfurled in so many anti-war expressions as the flag most capable of summarizing a protest?s meaning? We will sustain that the image has undergone other developments in contemporary art. It constitutes the point of departure for a new relationship between art and human rights that has expanded during recent years in museums, memorials, and sites of memory. Taking certain of the painting?s formal qualities and the effect that its own history has projected upon it as our central focus, this paper investigates in what sense and in what way its productivity can be considered as a function of the most contemporary policies related to memory.

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