Art Revolutionaries
Mayoral Gallery, London

In 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, that terrible prequel to the even bigger war that was about to engulf the whole of Europe, Pablo Picasso wrote: “I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilisation are at stake.”

Spain was the miner’s canary for a continent on the brink of disaster; and who heeded that canary? Why, it was the artists: Picasso, his fellow Spaniards Joan Miró and Julio González, the American sculptor Alexander Calder, and many more.

As war raged in Spain, these artists raged against it in their paintings and their sculptures; and in May 1937, at the International Paris Exposition, they unveiled a pavilion filled with their work as a way of alerting the world to the atrocities. Today, 80 years on from that extraordinarily powerful artistic response to a conflict, the pavilion has been recreated in a gallery in central London (to 10 February).