react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

To contemplate Antonio Saura’s monster paintings is to ponder over the most appropriate grid of analysis to make sense of some of the most enigmatic artworks in the history of modern art. These paintings, which in Saura’s own words, are “loaded with an air ofprotest,” could be read in relation to the dictatorial regime imposed by General Francisco Franco in Spain from 1939 to 1975. Yet in “PaintingViciously: Antonio Saura’sMonsters and the Francoist Dictatorship (1939-1975),” Claudia Grego March points to the issues that come with such an assumption: the artist vehemently rejected the view that his monster series was about the misery and suffering caused by the Spanish civil war and its subsequentposguerra. In the light of this seemingly apolitical declaration, a potentially promising avenue of interpretation for the monster paintings is one which takes into account Saura’s stay in Paris from 1954 to 1955. It was in the French capital that Saura engaged with, and permanently integrated into his oeuvre, the formal concerns of Informalism, or Art Informel.