Saturday, April 27, 2013

Pablo Picasso's Guernica




“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.
  Guernica is a mural-sized oil painting. It is 11 feet tall (3.5 m) and 25.6 feet long (7.8m). Most of the people in the painting express despair and terror. 
  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.
    Guernica was first exhibited at the 1937 World’s Fair held in Paris as part of a display of Spanish art. After this exhibition it traveled to England, Spain and Scandinavian countries. Then it toured the United States of America. It is now exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain.
 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.