Anti-War Images

Influenced by her friend, Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco (1943–1949), along with other artists who fled to Mexico to escape war in their homelands, Hood embarked on a series of pen and ink drawings exploring the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. With these relatively unknown drawings Hood built on the legacy of Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s (1746–1828) haunting series of etchings, The Disasters of War, 1810–1820, and works created by German artists George Grosz (1853–1959) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) that revealed the atrocities of World War I.

Hood’s images symbolically and evocatively portray the brutality, bloodshed, and horrors inflicted upon Loyalists, women, and children in protest of war crimes. She explained, “The drawings were of demonic horses and beasts attacking women and children, all against war, in time of war; death came rushing out, skeletons impelled, pushed other skeletons through doors, all exaggerated in the way [John] Tenniel (1820–1914) did Alice in Wonderland.”