Castelao and his eternal painting

In 1945, when he was already in exile in Buenos Aires, the Galician doctor, writer, politician and visual artist

painted a painting.

He didn't know it then, but that oil on canvas would have the capacity to

of each future era to continue denouncing the nonsense of

.

A derradeira leicion do mestre, in the city of Buenos Aires.

Castelao knew well the nature of

.

He was a deputy in the Cortes of the

and had to escape from his country because the shadow of

weighed on him .

From

, he was part of the republican government that did not give up and continued to fight from outside Spain.

That battle faded away and it is known that the dictator Francisco Franco would still govern for many more decades without being bothered by the European or American democratic nations.

But Castelao never stopped

In Buenos Aires, then, in 1945, he painted an oil entitled "A derradeira leición do mestre" (The Master's Final Lesson).

The motif was not original: he himself had drawn it in one of the ten prints of his book

, in which he portrays the

with pieces of great expressive depth.

In number six of these illustrations, the foreshortened body of the

is watched painfully by two of his little students.

Specialists have written a lot about religious references, Catholic imagery and the representation of the mourner.

Those who have stopped before it speak about the

that the painting unleashes in the soul.

Other Gernika

The writer

defined it as the Galician Gernika and says that the room in which it is exhibited, on Bartolomé Miter street at 2500 in the city of Buenos Aires, is

.

Although Castelao used this oil painting to denounce the murder of his friend, the intellectual

,

just hours after the coup d'état on August 17, 1936, it is impossible to escape the explosion of references that the painting provokes.

The print "A derradeira leición do mestre" (The final lesson of the teacher) from the book Galicia martyr, by Castelao.

There is the barbarism of the war in

, which has already caused the death of 280,000 soldiers and 30,000 civilians.

There is the madness of

with hundreds of deaths (448 until the year 2020);

or the

in the United States (1,646 people shot by the police only since the murder of George Floyd).

If we look closely, the oil can represent a father who drowned

trying to cross the

(in 2021 alone, more than 3,000 people died in those waters) and also the victim of various tortures in countries with

.

That, just that, is the power of this painting: no matter how much the world has changed since 1945, it continues to speak of

look too

They, the indecent women

look too

Simple ideas and fanaticism

look too

Mariana Enriquez and that known terror