L'œuvre d'art en tant que témoignage: les artistes confrontés à la guerre

This article springs off as an answer to the question of whether we can consider art, as a testimonial source like the written documents that historians use to manage for their studies? But this issue, related to art, is rather complex. We have the universal example of Goya, giving testimony of what he saw during independence war, and we have several drawings made by jews at the Nazis extermination camps or those of republican Spanish artists at the French concentration camps. But there is also the example of Picasso painting « Guernica ». To what extent this example, that portraits the yearnings of people, can be considered testimonial? Undoubtedly this is an interesting subject nowadays, with the ongoing debate about historical memory that is tacking place in Spain and in some other European countries, and the new young artists that make the Spanish civil war or Franco’s regime their subject without having lived the