The next artist I want to talk about which has also caused a lot of controversy in the art world is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, better known as Pablo Picasso. Picasso was a Spanish innovative artist; he was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, etching and writer. He is well known for the cubist movement, which he co-founded alongside George Braque, the term cubism came up because a French critic, Louis Vauxcelles said that Picasso and Braque’s paintings are “full of little cubes.”
Nowadays, we know that cubism has shaped the direction of the modern and contemporary art world. And for that we also have Paul Cézanne to thank for as Picasso once said “ Cézanne is my one and only master.”
Guernica as I said before is one of the most iconic artworks Picasso ever made. This painting came to life as Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to do a mural for the Paris exhibition, initially he was working on a different idea for that exhibition, but when he found out what had happened in his natal Spain he changed his idea completely and began making sketches for this new idea, he did around fifty sketches in month and a half until he finally started painting the Guernica. The name Guernica comes from a small town located in the province of Biscay, during the civil war that area was seen as the Republican Resistance Movement, it was the center of the Basque culture so attacking that city was important for the nationalists. On April 26, 1937 Guernica was bombarded for two hours by German armaments as Hitler had lent weapons to the nationalists, as Germans wanted to see how these weapons would work.
During the Paris summer exhibition where he showed off this painting, it didn’t have the powerful impact this painting has today regarding political issues. It was later on that people realized how powerful this piece is regarding the destruction war can create and the loss of many innocent lives.
Guernica is a black, blue, and white oil painting, which nowadays can be seen at the museum Reina Sofia in Madrid. But before being displayed there Picasso said to the Met to keep the painting until Spain would re-establish a democratic republic. It took quite a while, Picasso passed away before seeing his artwork in his native country, and it was until 1981 that the Spanish were able to bring the painting home. Moreover, when Picasso was working on this mural he allowed a photographer to be recording his progress on how he was approaching this commission.
This size of the painting forces the viewer to confront the atrocities of war; in this painting, you can feel the horror, pain, uncertainty, and chaos. When we look at this painting we don’t see a specific moment of the bombing, it is not about capturing that moment but more so the feelings of that moment, what that moment felt like for many people and that is something you can see in this painting. To begin with, he chose a somber palette, there is no gloss even knowing that he used oil paintings it looks rather matte which adds to the solemnity of this piece. Also, the faces in the painting have so much expression, one figure is screaming raising his hands up to the sky kind of asking for help or claiming “Why God Why!” then we have the mother also looking up at the sky with her mouth wide open you can see even her tongue for sure she is in agonizing pain holding her dead baby in her arms. At the front of the piece, there is a person laying on the ground also looking up with his mouth wide open I would assume he is part of the military or something as he is holding a broken sword, the last two people in the painting are more surprised and curious of what is happening, it feels like they arrived late to what was happening, one is holding a lamp towards the scene kind of lighting up the scene. Moreover, there are three animals in these painting one is a bull, which is very iconic to the Spanish culture as they use them for bullfighting, I think Picasso painted a bull’s face separated from the rest of the bull’s body to represent Spain and how broken it was at that time with Franco in power.
Next to the bull we have a horse with the mouth quite open and we see something coming out of the horse’s mouth, maybe it is a spear going through the horse, making the scene even more intense and horrifying. I also think that he might have chosen these animals because maybe they are more related to the Spanish culture, but also it might have been because during the day of bombing Guernica innocent animals also perished. Lastly, I think he decided to paint a dove as a symbol of peace but in this painting, we can clearly see the body of the dove but the wings are not so easy to see as they are blending with the background, for me this represents that something is missing and that is peace itself, they are not at peace with what is going on at that point in time so what a better way to represent that lack of peace by painting parts of the dove as separate things. Furthermore, in the painting we can see sort of light bulb hanging from the ceiling, but at the same thing if we look around the light bulb you could see it as an eye as well, the oval surrounding the light bulb is the eye, the light bulb becomes the pupil and under the oval, you could read it as eyelashes. This could mean that what happened at Guernica is now seen and known by everyone.
People asked Picasso several times about this painting and what the symbols meant for him, “If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are." What we know for sure is that this painting has become a political symbol, an accusation of the relentless crimes of war. Moreover, the Spanish people now use this painting as an emblem against violence.
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