High Masculine Tones

A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country's bloody civil war.

Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere, yesterday's El Pais newspaper reported.

Most were the work of an enthusiastic French anarchist, Alphonse Laurencic, who invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture, according to the research of the historian Jose Milicua.