Greeley, Robin Adele 1958-

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Greeley, Robin Adele 1958-

PERSONAL:

Born 1958. Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, S.M.Arch.S., 1988; University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1996.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Storrs, CT. Office—University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Connecticut, Storrs, associate professor of Latin American art history. Has also taught at Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, San Quentin Federal Penitentiary, and the University of California—Berkeley.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University; also recipient of numerous other national and international grants from institutions, including Getty Foundation, Fulbright, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Program for Cultural Cooperation between the Spanish Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities, and Joan Miró Foundation.

WRITINGS:

Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2006.

Reviews editor and contributor, Art Journal.

SIDELIGHTS:

In Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, art historian and University of Connecticut associate professor Robin Adele Greeley examines the relationship between the art and the politics of mid-twentieth century Spain and the Spanish-speaking world. Surrealism was, from its beginnings after World War I, a political as well as an artistic movement. Many of its adherents were avowed Communists—an affiliation that brought them into direct conflict with the Fascist government of General Francisco Franco, victorious in the Spanish Civil War. In works like Guernica (created after the Nazi bombing of a town in northern Spain), Still Life with Old Shoe, Autumn Cannibalism, and Premonition of Civil War, Spanish artists like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí, who documented the tragic civil war that tore their country apart in the 1930s, personalized their work about the conflict in ways that had not been explored before. In doing so, they created a new way of speaking to their viewers, a new idiom, and new means of expression that tried to capture the senseless violence and horrific ferocity of modern warfare. "Ultimately," concluded Nadine Dalton Speidel in her Library Journal review of the book, "the artists and the author echo a call to humanity in such times of great distress."