Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 54 by Robert Motherwell

Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 54 (1957-61) by Robert Motherwell

ELEGY TO THE SPANISH REPUBLIC, 54 BY ROBERT MOTHERWELL

I like this abstract painting. It speaks on multiple levels to the social catastrophe that the Spanish Civil War represents. In its defining elements the war is a synopsis of the first half of the 20th century.

The Spanish Civil War was an ideological war conducted with modern industrial technology. The origin of the war was fundamentally ideological—the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe came into direct bloody conflict with liberal democratic forces allied with the political left, that is, anarchism and communism.

Communism had emerged in the nineteenth century as an ideological reaction against the excesses of the industrial revolution, and to the extent that industrialization during this period was joined to unregulated capitalism under the free-market regimes of liberal democracies, communism should logically have positioned itself as the ideological adversary of liberal democracy. Why then did communism join forces with those of liberal democracy in Spain?

Joseph Stalin’s mortal fear of burgeoning fascism in Europe—ideologically hostile toward communism and its chief proponent, the Soviet Union—led him to ally the Soviet Union with the Spanish Republicans, so that the war developed into a conflict between fascism and a center-left alliance between liberal democracy, anarchism, and communism.

The great wars of the first half of the twentieth century could be described as ideological wars. Arguably, during World War I the nations of Western Europe and the U.S. won and liberal democracy carried the day. In the Spanish Civil War, fascism won, and it very nearly triumphed during World War II. Ultimately, the victors of the most destructive war to date in world history were the nations that together stood for liberal democracy or communism. Afterwards, the ideological rivalry between the two reified into the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and many flashpoints in between.

The first half of the twentieth century is therefore a story of catastrophic wars that in fundamental respects were ideologically based and motivated. Motherwell’s opus evokes this abstracted—and abstract—historical understanding.