El "aura" Benjaminiana y los símbolos del Guernica

Abstract

Picasso's "Guernica" still is an icon, despite of its countless reproductions which make it an example of what Walter Benjamin calls the loss of aura in modern art. The history of its reception is marked by religious metaphors which bestow a simbolic distinction upon its technical transports. Several narrations about the mural's deplacement (or the travel towards it) can thus be differenciated from a narrative model which is based on replacement, as it is put forward in Luis de Castresana's El otro árbol de Guernica, as well as from the franquist discourse, which dwells on the icons' continuity. Finally, even theft in a movie (El robo más grande jamás contado by Daniel Monzón) and in reality (concerning Richard Serra's sculpture) can be considered as illegitimate transfers which reveal the dialectics of aura as described by Benjamín.