3.6 Visual and Performing Arts (Artes visuales y escénicas)

Francisco de Goya's El tres de mayo de 1808 (painted in 1814, now in the Prado) shows French soldiers executing Spanish civilians after the uprising in Madrid: a faceless firing squad faces a man in a white shirt with his arms raised.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, after German and Italian planes supporting Franco bombed the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. The huge black, white and gray canvas shows a mother screaming over her dead child, a wounded horse, a bull and a broken soldier. Picasso refused to let it go to Spain until democracy returned. It arrived in 1981 and has hung in Madrid's Museo Reina Sofía since 1992.

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) was badly injured in a bus accident at 18 and lived in pain for the rest of her life. Many of her paintings are self-portraits that mix Mexican folk art, Tehuana dress and personal symbols; Las dos Fridas (1939) shows two versions of her, their hearts connected. The surrealist André Breton claimed her as one of his own, but she said she painted her own reality, not dreams.

Salvador Dalí was a leading surrealist (el surrealismo), an art movement built on dream images and the unconscious; his La persistencia de la memoria (1931) is famous for its melting watches. The Colombian Fernando Botero (1932–2023) painted and sculpted people and objects with inflated, rounded volume, often with humor or social criticism.

For 2026–27, the course project comes from this unit and uses music to explore cultural products, practices and perspectives. The project's speaking tasks aren't practiced on this site, but the same thinking helps on reading questions and in essays.

Use the three layers. A product: the charango, a small Andean string instrument traditionally made with an armadillo shell, or the cajón, a Peruvian box drum that the guitarist Paco de Lucía brought into flamenco in the late 1970s. A practice: gathering at a peña to play and sing folk music together. A perspective: Nueva Canción musicians believed songs could push for social change.

Key words: el ritmo (rhythm), la letra (lyrics), el/la cantautor/a (singer-songwriter), el escenario (stage), el cuadro (painting), el lienzo (canvas), la exposición (exhibition). Music also gives Spanish some common idioms: llevar la voz cantante (to be the one in charge), sonar a chino (to be impossible to understand, like “it's all Greek to me”), tocar de oído (to play by ear) and estar en la onda (to be up to date with trends).