Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Born in Huesca, Spain, Saura was self-taught as an artist. Between 1953 and 1955 he lived in Paris, where, influenced by late Surrealistic ideas, he developed automatist techniques. However, he quickly became disenchanted by the lack of control inherent in automatism, and, returning to Madrid, reduced his means and imagery to black and white and the human figure respectively.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (no. 179 – the title is taken from a 1959 film directed by Alain Resnais) is a bitter comment on man’s abuse of his own intelligence. A wreck of a figure stands in the middle of a void, but whether the figure is to be pitied for its suffering, or congratulated on its survival, is by no means clear. In an annotated catalogue of prints of the same title produced in 1959 and 1961, Saura reiterated Goya’s dictum, ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’ (Stadler, 1965).