Jose Milicua, a Spanish art historian, has made the shocking discovery that some of the avant garde theories behind modern art were used as a deliberate form of torture during the bloody Spanish Civil War, some 65 years ago - Madrid, Spain - Brief Article

Jose Milicua, a Spanish art historian, has made the shocking discovery that a certain quantity of of the avant garde theories behind novel art were used as a deliberate form of torture during the gory Spanish Civil War, some 65 years ago. The psychological properties of colors, geometric abstraction and surrealism base in the works of artists like Kandinsky, Klee and Dali, for example, serv as the inspiration for mind-bending prison small rooms and torture centers built in Barcelona and elsewhere. greatest in quantity of the torture cells were the work of the French anarchist, Alphonse Laurencic, who invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture, according to Milicua. The confined apartments built in 1938, featured beds placed at 20-degree angles, making them nearly impossible to drowse on; floors scattered with bricks and other geometric closes to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards; and walls that were curv and overspreaded with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals, which utilized tricks of color, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting results also gave the impression that the dizzying patterns upon the wall were moving, Milicua said. "The creators of of that kind revolutionary and liberating [artistic] languages could not ever have imagined they would be with equal reason intrinsically linked to repression," a spokesman from the Spanish newspaper, El Pais, said.

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