Picasso

Picasso's Guernica was the focus of study in October together with a couple of anti-war songs: The Cranberries "Zombie" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2.

The artist’s eye (From "Think Teen" B Class, Advanced)

It was 1937. Spain, Pablo Picasso's home country was suffering from

a civil war, while he was living in Paris. On April 26th, the Spanish government sent planes to bombard a small village in northern Spain called Guernica. Guernica was completely destroyed. 1600 civilians were killed.  The next day, George Steer, a reporter working for The Times revealed the destruction. By May, news of the massacre at Guernica had reached Paris. Eyewitness reports filled the front pages of Paris papers.

Picasso was stunned by the photographs. He rushed to his studio, where he quickly sketched the first images for the mural he would call “Guernica”.

The cubist painting by Picasso, called “Guernica”, is an immense black and white mural painted in oil. The mural depicts a scene of death, violence, brutality, and helplessness. It shows the suffering people and animals experience in the violence and chaos of a war. The overall scene is within a room. There are humans, animals and buildings in this scene but there seems to be no background. On the left side of the painting we can see a mother holding her dead child. A wide-eyed bull stands over the woman. At the bottom lies a fallen soldier, still holding his broken sword from which a flower grows. In the centre above the soldier is a horse whose body is pierced with a spear.On the right, there is another woman trapped in a burning building.  

 The painting is very large: 349 x 776 cm. Despite its great size, it was painted in less than two months. Picasso was so angry about what had happened in Guernica that he wanted everybody to immediately take notice of the brutal event. All the figures in the painting seem to be crammed together and their mouths are open as though they are crying out. We get the feeling that they can't get away from the horrors of war; they are trapped in their suffering. 

   Some people criticized Picasso's cubist style because they could not understand his symbolism. Picasso answered his critics, “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols.The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them”. Even though opinions about the exact meaning of the images of the painting are numerous, there is no doubt that the painting sends a strong antiwar message, not only about what happened in Guernica but about the kind of suffering that takes place in any war.

  After reading the article above we watched this 3-D video of Guernica which is quite impressing: 

   

Let's find out more about Picasso: