“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.” Pablo
Picasso
A couple of weeks
ago I attended an exhibition of Picasso’s work. It motivated me to read about his life and it helped me to understand how his art is connected to the social issues of his time and to the turmoil of
his personal experiences.
The reasons I found
this exhibition fascinating are the following:
-Picasso was daring. He was not afraid of innovating and he
pioneered an art movement called cubism (more on this on a future post).
-The variety of his work amazed me. His art evolved through
different phases that correlated with his life and his social setting.
-His long life-- he died at age 91 -- enabled him to create a massive amount of artwork. Interestingly, he lived in two different centuries.
Today I will focus on
his most famous masterpiece: Guernica .
When I was a child my
mother gave me a book of famous paintings by different artists. It included riveting explanations about each
of the masterpieces. One of them was Guernica .
The emotional impact it had on me must have been strong, for I never forgot this
painting.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was born in Spain , but he migrated to France . While
he was living in Paris he was shocked by the news
of the bombing of Guernica , a small Basque town
in Northern Spain .
On April 26, 1937,
Nazi airplanes, backed by the extremist right wing forces of General Francisco Franco,
bombed Guernica
and 1,600 civilians were killed. The small town burned for three days. The
attack took place on a Monday because many people who lived on the farms went
to the market on that day of the week. Those who tried to escape were shot from
airplane machine guns or were blown up with explosives.
Pablo Picasso’s rage
at this atrocity inspired him to paint "Guernica" , which is described as "the most important work of art of the twentieth century". When he painted it, Picasso intended to expose the suffering and desperation that are inevitably attached to any war.
If we go from left
to right, the first figure we see is that of a woman. You can almost hear her shrieking.
She is holding her dead baby. Her eyes express profound anguish. Her naked
bosom suggests that she might have been nursing her baby when the bombings
struck the town.
The next thing you
see is a bull. The image of it is controversial. He is merely a witness of the woman’s grief. There are different
interpretations about the bull. Some people believe that the bull could be
somebody who, like Picasso, watches these calamities as an outsider: he is not
physically wounded, but he is emotionally touched. Picasso refused to attribute
a meaning to it, but bulls are a recurrent element in his artwork (the
“minotauro" has the head of a bull and the body of a man) and he associated it with lust and behaviors or emotions that are out of control.
There is a horse
lying in agony. It symbolizes the suffering of the people of Spain, a country
ravaged by war. There is chaos all around.
A dead soldier is lying
on the ground; his eyes express pain. His fight had no influence on the outcome
of the bombings of Guernica .
His arm is grasping a sword and a bunch of flowers. The flowers may represent his ideals, or they may be a symbol of hope. On the right side of the painting there is a woman on fire.
The painting is done
in black, white and different shades of gray, most likely to depict a gloomy
atmosphere. It may also be a symbol of the fact that the news of the war spread
through newspapers.
Had it not been for Picasso, the bombing of Guernica might have been forgotten by the world. Yet the theme of this painting is timeless and powerful.
