Word: catalonia
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...brigade of intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, had their lives and work shaped irrevocably by their experiences in Spain. "As a militiaman," George Orwell later wrote in Homage to Catalonia, "one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between political theories." Albert Camus observed afterwards: "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this...
...growth of embryonic political parties, he was apparently overruled by Franco hardliners, alarmed by the leftward turn of events in Portugal. The promised "freedom of political association" never materialized. Almost inevitably, muted anti-Franco opposition turned to violence. Separatist movements in the four northern Basque provinces and in Catalonia gained momentum, and this summer FRAP emerged, gunning down policemen in Madrid and Barcelona...
Spain attracted men like George Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia Orwell writes of his ecstasy on entering Barcelona in the early days of the war. The city was then controlled by the Anarchists, who set on instituting socialist revolution simultaneously with waging the war against Franco. Leaving behind the stultifying atmosphere of England's rigidly stratified society, Orwell exulted in the vitality of Barcelona's blossoming egalitarianism, in the salutations of "Comrade" to strangers and the notices in barber shops proclaiming that barbers were no longer "slaves." In one of his finest passages Orwell describes his flash encounter with...
...three great modern artists Spain has produced. Both Picasso and Gris immersed themselves in the cosmopolitan culture of Paris. They became European rather than "Spanish" artists. But, as Miró pointed out in a letter to a friend, he remained "an international Catalan." Miró without Catalonia would no longer...
...Catalan dust, is a matter of detail and observation: getting the nose in and keeping it there. When he was working on one of his first great paintings, The Farm, a compendium of animal, vegetable and human life at Montroig, Miró even brought back some dried grasses from Catalonia to Paris to serve as a model. Ernest Hemingway, who bought the painting, later wrote, "It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there...