15 Fascinating Facts About Picasso's ‘Guernica’ | Mental Floss 15 Fascinating Facts About Picasso's ‘Guernica’ getty images Like us on Facebook You already know Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica is among his most revered works, but do you know how and why he created the anti-war masterpiece? 1. GUERNICA WAS A COMMISSIONED PAINTING. As the 1937 World’s Fair approached, members of Spain’s democratic government wanted the Spanish pavilion at Paris’ International Exposition Dedicated to Art and Technology to feature a mural that would expose the atrocities of Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his allies. Naturally, these organizers set their sights on one of Spain’s most celebrated painters, Pablo Picasso, who had first gained recognition in the 1910s with his adoption of cubist artistic expression. 2. PICASSO HADN’T BEEN TO SPAIN IN OVER THREE YEARS. Picasso didn’t have to go far to work on a piece for the Paris exhibition—he had lived in France since 1904.

An expat who was vocal about his opposition to the militant autocracy of his home country, Picasso crafted the tribute to the war-torn Spanish city without having set foot within the nation’s borders since 1934. He would never return to Spain. 3. FRANCO’S FORCES BLAMED THE BOMBING DEPICTED IN THE PAINTING ON THEIR RIVALS. Picasso’s painting depicts the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. Franco’s German and Italian allies in the Spanish Civil War carpet-bombed Guernica, a stronghold of Republican opposition to Franco’s Nationalists, for hours. Casualty estimates vary from 200 to 1000 deaths. To make matters worse, Franco and his allies blamed the horrific attack on Republican forces. 4. AN ARTICLE IN THE TIMES INSPIRED PICASSO. Picasso didn’t witness the Guernica atrocities firsthand, but he was deeply moved by a report of the event written by South African-British journalist George Steer for The Times.

The article, titled, “ The Tragedy of Guernica: A Town Destroyed in Air Attack: Eye-Witness’s Account ,” was attributed in print to “Our Special Correspondent.” 5. HE BEGAN WORKING ON THE PAINTING AT THE LAST MINUTE. Getty Images Picasso was so affected by Steer’s Guernica story that he scrapped all pending plans to devote himself to the pavilion mural. The artist began work on what would be one of his earliest politically inclined pieces on May 1, 1937, approximately three weeks before the scheduled launch of the exhibit. Guernica was not completed until early June, about two weeks after the pavilion opened. 6. PICASSO SIMULTANEOUSLY PUT TOGETHER ANOTHER CRITIQUE OF FRANCO. The fact that Picasso cranked out what is now known as one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century in just over a month is impressive enough in its own right, but Guernica wasn’t even the sole focus of the artist’s attention during this time.

In January 1937, Picasso had published a set of etching and aquatint prints, collectively titled The Dream and Lie of Franco . On June 7 of the same year, around the same time that he delivered Guernica to the Spanish pavilion, Picasso added a second batch of images to The Dream and Lie of Franco. 7. AN EARLY VERSION OF THE PAINTING WAS MORE EMPOWERING. Unsurprisingly, Guernica evolved between its inception and completion. One of Picasso’s earliest drafts of the painting included a raised fist, a universal symbol of solidarity in resistance to oppression. Opponents of Franco’s reign had embraced the emblem during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso depicted the fist empty-handed at first, then grasping a sheaf of grain . Ultimately, he deleted the image altogether. 8. ANOTHER STAGE OF GUERNICA INVOLVED COLOR. Guernica is one of history’s most recognizable grayscale paintings, but at one point during the piece’s development, Picasso entertained the idea of adding color to the project. He included a red teardrop sprouting from a crying woman’s eye, as well as swatches of colored wallpaper. None of these elements made the final cut. 9.

PICASSO REFUSED TO TALK ABOUT THE PAINTING’S SYMBOLISM. Scholars have long tried to decode the significance of the symbols in Guernica, especially the horse and bull figures. Naturally, Picasso was probed to explain the use of these creatures in his painting. He never offered anything more revelatory than “This bull is a bull and this horse is a horse,” adding , “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.” 10. EARLY REVIEWS OF THE PAINTING WEREN’T ALL POSITIVE. Getty Images Today, Guernica is celebrated as one of Picasso’s premiere achievements. But it wasn’t always hailed as a masterpiece.

Among the piece’s leading detractors were American critic Clement Greenberg (who called Guernica “jerky” and “compressed”), French painter and communist Edouard Pignon (who maligned the painting for its misplaced political message and lack of empathy for the working class), French philosopher Paul Nizan (who shared Pignon’s sentiments, and further called Guernica a product of the bourgeoisie mentality), and American abstract painter Walter Darby Bannard (criticizing in particular the painting’s counterintuitive scale). 11. NAZI GERMANY TOOK POTSHOTS AT GUERNICA. Due to both Guernica’s antifascist message and Adolf Hitler’s personal aversions to modern art, the official German guidebook for Paris’s International Exposition recommended against visiting Picasso’s piece, which it called “a hodgepodge of body parts that any four-year-old could have painted.” 12. YEARS LATER, GERMANY USED THE PAINTING IN A MILITARY CAMPAIGN. Apparently misunderstanding the nature of Guernica and its antiwar stance, the German military used the painting in an ill-conceived recruiting advertisement in 1990.

The ad featured the slogan , “Hostile images of the enemy are the fathers of war.” 13. THE PAINTING INSPIRED A PICASSO EXCHANGE WITH A GESTAPO OFFICER. Almost as famous for his biting wit as he was for his artistic prowess, Picasso once treated a German Gestapo officer to a sharp rejoinder in reference to the painting’s depiction of the atrocities of fascism and war. When asked by an officer about a photo of the painting, “Did you do that?” Picasso is said to have replied , “No, you did.” 14. THE PAINTING WAS VANDALIZED BY AN ANTIWAR ACTIVIST. Getty Images At one point its long residency at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, Guernica suffered an act of politically-charged defacement. In 1974, Tony Shafrazi —who would later become a respected art dealer—spray-painted the words “KILL ALL LIES” over the painting. Upon his apprehension by museum security, Shafrazi famously shouted , “Call the curator. I am an artist.” 15.

THE PAINTING WAS COVERED UP DURING A SPEECH MADE BY COLIN POWELL. From 1985 to 2009, the United Nations adorned the entrance of its Security Council with a tapestry reproduction of Guernica. In February 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered a televised speech on site at the UN, testifying in favor of America’s imminent declaration of war on Iraq. A large blue curtain covered the tapestry during Powell’s speech. Conflicting reports attributed the decision to obscure Guernica both to journalists thinking the violent imagery would be unpleasant for viewers of the broadcast, and to the Bush Administration deeming the display of such a recognizable antiwar painting inappropriate for the backdrop of Powell’s promotion of military action. Guernica by Pablo Picasso Courtesy of Probably Picasso's most famous work, Guernica is certainly the his most powerful political statement, painted as an immediate reaction to the Nazi's devastating casual bombing practice on the Basque town of Guernica during Spanish Civil War. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians.

This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour helped bring the Spanish Civil War to the world's attention. This work is seen as an amalgmation of pastoral and epic styles. The discarding of color intensifis the drama, producing a reportage quality as in a photographic record. Guernica is blue, black and white, 3.5 metre (11 ft) tall and 7.8 metre (25.6 ft) wide, a mural-size canvas painted in oil. This painting can be seen in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. Interpretations of Guernica vary widely and contradict one another. This extends, for example, to the mural's two dominant elements: the bull and the horse. Art historian Patricia Failing said, "The bull and the horse are important characters in Spanish culture. Picasso himself certainly used these characters to play many different roles over time. This has made the task of interpreting the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very tough.

Their relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in a variety of ways throughout Picasso's career." Some critics warn against trusting the polital message in Guernica. For instance the rampaging bull, a major motif of destruction here, has previouse figured, whether as a bull or Minotaur, as Picasso' ego. However, in this instance the bull probably represents the onslaught of Fascism. Picasso said it meant brutality and darkness, presumably reminiscent of his prophetic. He also stated that the horse represented the people of Guernica. Art Threat | Guernica brings Picasso’s grotesque cubist forms to life through theatre Guernica brings Picasso’s grotesque cubist forms to life through theatre 2 Posted by Anne Cottingham - September 22, 2012 - Features , Performance , Reviews , Visual art I am no stranger to war history or art history, having studied both in some depth at university. So the idea of attending a play based on Pablo Picasso’s painted representation of one of the most destructive acts in the period between the world wars, the bombing of the small Basque town of Gernika, sounded interesting.

A play by Erika Luckert, Guernica attempts to bring life to Picasso’s grotesque cubist forms, bringing us the stories of five very different people as told to the mysteriously shirtless and watchful Candlebearer. Here’s a quick history lesson for those unfamiliar: A war fought between democracy and fascism, Christianity and communism, the elected Spanish republic and General Franco’s Nationalist rebels, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 became the bloody precursor to the Second World War. By far one of the most important moments in this war was the bombing of the small Basque town of Gernika on April 26, 1937. To this day, Gernika is the physical manifestation of the strife between the Basque and the non- Basque peoples, and the new violence that was emerging in a rapidly transforming world. It was the second experiment with aerial bombardment of the Spanish Civil War. Hugh Thomas, a historian who specializes in the Spanish Civil War estimates that 1654 people were killed and 889 were wounded, out of a population of 7000.

It was immediately clear that there was no military objective in laying waste to the town as factories producing war material and two barracks just outside of Gernika were left completely untouched by bombs. A report from the Times correspondent at Gernika two days later opined that “the object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.” Many Spanish nationalists denied the attack ever occurred well into the 1950s. The reasons for its bombing have always been unknown. The most controversial argument in Spain is that it was not selected for tactical reasons, but largely because of its significance as a sacred place in Basque culture. Up until 1937, Gernika was representative of democracy and the rights of people for Basque nationalists. Following the bombing, the name became synonymous with ‘genocide’ and ‘repression’, and was used to promote Basque culture and language, and resistance movements. To this end, Gernika was chosen for very specific, non- military reasons.

Arguably the most important painter of the 20th century, Picasso’s Guernica, a commissioned work for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair, elevated Gernika from being primarily a locally and regionally significant place to a nationally and universally recognized symbol of the horror of war. A giant rectangular mural, it is divided into three triangular panels, each with a different destructive narrative. The right-side depicts three women, one leaning out of a window holding a lantern, one falling out of a house, and one rushing to the aid of the wounded horse in the centre. On the left, a bull looks over a distraught woman holding a child. The most carnage is in the centre triangular panel, which overlaps the other two. A speared horse throws its head up in agony under a violently bright light fixture, collapsing over pieces of a man holding a broken sword by a flower. Picasso’s representation of light and lack of colour are two of the biggest visual cues shared between the painting the Luckert’s Guernica. All of the characters are dressed in neutral tones, with only spoken cues to the colours they are wearing and seeing.

In one beautiful and poignant monologue, the male character who operates a fruit and vegetable stall (in the case of the men it is never actually clear which character is which) in the weekly market speaks to the joy he gets in arranging all his colourful wares into the layers of the sunrise, from juicy oranges to tangy lemons to the pink interior surprise of a watermelon. The monologue segues into sadness and horror as the character begins to reflect on death, foreshadowing the fate of himself and his shoppers, aptly concluding “I knew when he died because the colour drained away.” The most beautifully captured symbolism in the play however is Picasso’s use of light to elevate the horror of the bombing. The set includes a large rectangular “canvas” in the background, which some or all of the characters would periodically freeze in front of in grotesque positions to flickering lights and a noise akin to all the air being both sucked and blown out of a space. It was a way of capturing, for all the senses, the kind of moment Picasso was trying to convey on a flat surface — when the bomb hits and the whole world seems to freeze.

The lighting design was the most impressive aspect of the whole play, succeeding in spotlighting the simple beauty of a quiet town and the sheer force of the violence that destroyed it. All of the various characters represent a different general type of person who may have populated Gernika — a child, a mother, a prostitute, a market stall operator, and a husband/father-to-be. They each share their stories in spurts, some more effectively than others. The prostitute, who I think is called Raquel (played by Joëlle Préfontaine), shares her jaded view of a world populated by abuse and trying fiercely to remain disconnected from it all. Her dialogue seemed the most awkward and contrived, and I couldn’t tell if that came from the actor or me. Either way, somehow I couldn’t connect with her story and really feel for her because she was too tough and out-of-place, even when it seemed she suddenly did want to remain a part of the world. I also couldn’t understand The Candlebearer (Ben Stevens), who seemed to be representative of Picasso reliving and reviving all these separate stories. He hovered, the characters spoke to him and shared their stories, but it felt more murderous and creepy than sympathetic and driven to action.

The stand-out role was that of the child in search of the marzipan man, Galena (Alyson Dicey). At first she seemed horribly, annoyingly exuberant on her quest for a treat, but Dicey absolutely gave into the role and played her innocence, impatience and wonder perfectly. It is she who ultimately represents the shared hopes, dreams and futures of all the characters. While mother Lucia speaks to the names, connections, histories and traditions of the Gernika/Basque people, and the market stall operator aptly eulogizes that “one day your memory will be all that the people have,” it is Galena who most deftly emotes all that was lost on that most fateful day in April 1937. Luckert’s Guernica is certainly worth seeing – bringing such a charged painting to life is no small feat, and the result is a fascinating and chilling reminder of what people are capable of doing to each other. Image: Guernica by Pablo Picasso. International Socialist Review ISR Issue 52, MarchApril 2007 Picasso’s Guernica By SCOTT JOHNSON What do you think an artist is?

An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or nothing but muscles if he is a boxer? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter, or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it. How would it be possible not to take an interest in other people, and to withdraw into an ivory tower from participation in their existence? No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.1—Pablo Picasso MANY WORKS of art have cried out against injustice, but few have been so powerful that those guilty of the crimes it condemns avoid appearing next to it. Such was the case in February of 2003, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations (UN) to gain approval for the coming war in Iraq. Behind him hung a blue shroud—but behind that hung a tapestry of a world-famous antiwar painting.

UN officials hid this display of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a portrayal of the aerial destruction of a Basque town by fascists during the Spanish Civil War, claiming that it would be too visually confusing for television viewers.2 Reports of the attempt to hide Guernica have, ironically, led to a revived interest in the painting. Around the world, images copied from and inspired by it have appeared on placards, fliers, and t-shirts to protest Bush’s war on Iraq. After the U.S. bloodbath in Fallujah in 2004, Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times wrote that “Fallujah is the new Guernica,” and journalists Jonathan Steele and Dahr Jamail referred to the siege as “Our Guernica.”3 Not to be outdone, prowar hack Christopher Hitchens wrote that “Abu Ghraib isn’t Guernica,” going so far as to compare the Iraqi insurgency with the Spanish fascists.4 That the painting has such an effect speaks volumes to its continuing power today. Seventy years after its creation, it has remained, unfortunately, timeless.

But while the mural portrays the innocent victims of war, the story of Guernica—and its creator—is also about the struggle for their liberation. Guernica—destruction and creation In January 1937, Picasso was asked by Republican Spain to produce a painting for the Paris World Exposition. It would be his first commissioned work and—somewhat unusually for him at the time—would be overtly political. Picasso’s role as a representative of his native Spain was meant to bring the world’s attention to the coming danger of fascism—the country’s future hung in the balance as General Francisco Franco and his fascist army threatened to defeat the Spanish Republic and take over the country. Nonetheless, with weeks left before he was to deliver, Picasso remained without inspiration. That changed on April 27. For three hours the town of Gernika—as it is known to its native Basque population—was destroyed by dozens of German and Italian bombers on loan to Franco. More than 1,500 civilians were killed in a savage act of war unparalleled in European history. The purpose, as Times of London correspondent George Steer would report, was clear: Gernika was not a military objective.

A factory producing war material lay outside the town and was untouched. So were two barracks some distance from the town. The town lay far behind enemy lines. The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.5 Franco’s propagandists denied responsibility for the massacre, claiming the weather was too poor for an air raid on that day, and blamed the Basque people for destroying their own town in order to gain international sympathy. Few were fooled. It was immediately clear to Picasso that Guernica would be his subject for the Paris Expo. The work he produced over the next two months would be an enormous, devastating display of the horrors of war in stark black and white, measuring eleven feet high (twice Picasso’s height) by twenty-five feet long—so large that Picasso had to attach his paint brushes to long sticks to complete it. Missing are signs of hope and resistance—a prominent raised fist, for example, was removed from early versions of the painting. Instead, the scene is filled entirely with horror and death—from clearly defined suffering individuals to subtly placed hidden images reinforcing the overall destruction.

At the center is a horse—a strong, noble animal, probably representing the Spanish people—with a spear driven through it, recoiling in horror. But within the image of the horse is another image of a skull, with the round rear and underbelly of the horse forming the cranium and the horse’s bent front-right leg forming the jaw. The spear then protrudes from the eye of the skull, which winces and screams. Death, it seems to imply, does not stop the pain and suffering. To the left of the horse is a woman weeping over the body of her dead child. This is one of the more universal images of Guernica in its portrayal of the ultimate tragedy of war. But the woman’s body also forms a skull—with the dark, round area encircled by her body and the bull forming an eye, the woman’s skirt forming the nose, and the fallen soldiers arm stretched out below her forming the jaw. At the other end of the painting is a person crying out from within a burning house—who also appears to be being eaten alive by a monster. This home will provide no sanctuary from the attack.

The bull on the left is a most mysterious figure whose posture both mimics the horse—their bodies and heads are both positioned in the same direction—and contrasts it—while the horse recoils and screams, the bull stands mostly still, with a slight look of alarm on its face. It has been said to represent such widely divergent subjects as the Spanish people on the one hand and Franco on the other. A more convincing argument is that this figure—standing aside from the action, not directly affected but responding to it—represents Picasso himself, especially in light of the very personal portrayals of bulls in many of his other works. The use of iconic images rather than naturalistic reproductions strengthens the power of the painting. No horse could ever look so contorted and terrified as the one in Guernica. As the Marxist art critic John Berger writes: Picasso did not try to imagine the actual event. There is no town, no aeroplanes, no explosion, no reference to the time of day…. Where is the protest then? It is in what has happened to the bodies—to the hands, the soles of the feet, the horse’s tongue, the mother’s breasts, the eyes in the head.

What has happened to them in being painted is the imaginative equivalent of what happened to them in sensation in the flesh. We are made to feel their pain with our eyes. And pain is the protest of the body.6 Picasso’s images remove us from the specifics of the devastation of Guernica to the more general and universal suffering inflicted by war. Neither spears, nor horses, nor bulls can be found in the battlefields of Iraq, but that does not stop these images from retaining their relevance and immediacy. An instrument of war Guernica was displayed in the summer of 1937 to mixed reviews. While some recognized its brilliance, it was also attacked from both the Left and the Right. On the one hand, the official German guidebook encouraged visitors to the Paris Expo to avoid the exhibit of “red” Spain and included Hitler’s denunciations of modern art.

This was a part of a campaign by Nazi Germany that included a “Degenerate Art Exhibition” in Munich, placing the works of modern German artists next to artwork by children and the mentally ill, daring the viewer to differentiate them.7 On the other hand, there was a left critique, as well: Edouard Pignon, son of a miner and member of a communist trade union, wrote [about Guernica]…“As for the working class, in fact, it never saw it.” Others, like Paul Nizan, a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, argued that Picasso’s art was both ivory tower and effete, and suggested that all attempts to bourgeoisify the workers with the art of the masters would fail.8 Nonetheless, Guernica became a means to rally people to the anti-fascist cause. In January 1939, the painting was displayed in Whitechapel Art Gallery in London’s working-class East End. In the first week, 15,000 viewers attended, raising £250. Additionally, the price of admission to see the painting included the donation of a pair of boots to be sent to the Spanish front.

“Each pair of proffered boots was placed on the Whitechapel floor beneath the enormous canvas and the collection of boots grew into the thousands by the time Guernica came down and the boots were crated and shipped to Spain.”9 Later, an American tour was organized with the support of Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, and other notable American writers, which raised money for Republican forces and helped refugees from the war. At the Washington, D.C., stop of the tour, 100 people paid $5 to attend a gala fundraiser with Eleanor Roosevelt and Simon Guggenheim, and 2,000 people paid a fifty-cent donation to Spanish refugees during the three-week exhibit.10 Like much of Picasso’s work, it provided limitless inspiration to a new generation of artists. Willem de Kooning called it “staggering.” Lee Krasner—the wife of Jackson Pollock and a significant artist in her own right—described her first encounter: Picasso’s Guernica floored me. When I saw it first at the Dudensing Gallery, I rushed out, walked about the block three times before coming back to look at it.

And later I used to go to the Modern every day to see it. But the most lasting impression was on Pollock himself, who became a devotee of Picasso’s work. His biographers write: Sometimes Jackson came alone [to see Guernica], sometimes with others, to be overwhelmed by the great, gray monolith of it. Eleven feet high and twenty feet long, it loomed in the modest gallery space like a ship run aground, its images enlarged to supernatural proportions.11 Picasso after Guernica Guernica turned out to be an important moment in Picasso’s political development. Picasso lived through the First World War, which saw battles leading to massacres unparalleled in history. Many of his friends and even close collaborators were drafted into the French military. Nonetheless, Picasso produced nothing comparable to Guernica in this period—not even a failed attempt at a Guernica. His most important work during the Cubism period, which was carried on up until the eve of the war when his collaborators were dispersed, was virtually apolitical. On the contrary, the war appears to have turned him inward, as Berger writes: Picasso was unconcerned about the war.

It was not his war—another example of how tenuously he belonged to the world around him. Yet he suffered because he was left alone, and his loneliness was increased in 1915 by the tragic death of his young mistress.12 The threat of a fascist Spain, where Picasso’s family continued to live while he was in France, and the revolutionary struggle for an alternative, forced him to take sides in a way that the First World War did not. The effects of the rise of fascism on Picasso were decisive. He not only agreed to paint Guernica, but actively supported the fight against Franco. [H]e donated milk to the children of Barcelona. He signed numerous declarations in support of the Republic and became involved with several refugee relief organizations. He participated in fund-raising efforts such as exhibitions and actions to benefit Spanish refugees, and was particularly active in securing the liberation of Spanish intellectuals from French internment camps…. Picasso himself claimed that it took the experience of the Second World War to make him understand that he had to adopt a more militant attitude.13 Picasso would remain in France throughout the war and the German occupation. This was a dangerous decision, considering both his outspoken opposition to fascism and the Nazi’s hatred of modern art.

His whereabouts were known to authorities, who harassed him from time to time, but he was never arrested. There is even a story of a Gestapo officer who searched his studio and, finding a copy of Guernica, pointed to it and said to Picasso, “Did you do this?” To which Picasso replied, “No, you did.”14 Within weeks of the end of the Nazi occupation, Picasso publicly joined the French Communist Party. He did so in spite of—or perhaps because he was ignorant of—the treacherous role of the Spanish Stalinists in demobilizing the revolutionary efforts of Spanish workers opposing Franco, or of Stalin’s crimes in the Soviet Union. His direct experience with communists was through close friends involved in the French Resistance against Germany, as he stated in an article titled “Why I became a communist”: I have become a communist because the communists are the bravest in France, in the Soviet Union, as they are in my own country, Spain. I have never felt more complete than since I joined. While I wait for the time when Spain can take me back again, the French Communist party is a fatherland to me.

In it I find again all my friends—the great scientists Paul Langevin and Frederic Joliot-Curie, the great writers Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, and so many of the beautiful faces of the insurgents of Paris. I am again among brothers.15 Picasso’s relationship with the party was rocky. The Stalinist approach to art was dominated by socialist realism, a rigid theory dictated from above that artists ought to focus on portrayals of ordinary workers—and Stalin—in a “realistic” manner. Socialist realist paintings were only formally realistic—presenting muscular workers, smiling peasants, and benevolent Soviet leaders in glowing, exalted poses. This was antithetical to Picasso’s approach to art, a fact not lost on the Soviet Union’s official organ, Pravda, which denounced his work. He was often—though not always—shielded from criticism due to his importance as a celebrity. Nonetheless, his commitment was genuine and he consistently lent his name to support the cause: [Picasso] headed the Communist contingent of the 1949 May Day parade... Picasso also repeatedly expressed his support for American Communists and lent his signature to petitions for their release when leaders of the American Communist Party were imprisoned.

He was apparently among hundreds of artists, writers, and scientists who denounced the imminent imprisonment of the "Hollywood Ten."16 On top of this, he produced numerous works of art for the party and its various campaigns, most notably a dove which became an international symbol of the peace movement. He would remain a committed member until his death almost thirty years later. While one cannot help question his silence in the face of Stalin’s crimes, his commitment to the struggle against capitalism is admirable. After the war, he could have easily hidden his political sympathies and surrounded himself with the admiration of the decadent bourgeois art scene. Instead, he accepted their derision and remained committed to his ideals of a better society, in spite of the lack of an alternative to the USSR. Guernica, Picasso’s most important political painting, has remained relevant as a work of art and as a symbol of protest. Though the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would eclipse the destruction of Guernica, Picasso’s painting kept the memory of the Basque town’s nightmare alive. In the postwar years, it would hang next to Da Vinci’s The Last Supper on the walls of many Spanish households as a form of silent dissent against Franco.

Today, it continues to enrage and inspire opponents of imperialism. It is this that makes Guernica “an instrument of war”—for our side. Scott Johnson is a member of the International Socialist Organization in the Bay Area. 1 Picasso, writing in 1945, quoted in Wilhelm Boeck, Jaime Sabartés, Picasso (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1955), 505. 2 Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon, (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003), 2. Claudia Winkler disputes the Bush administration’s involvement in the shrouding in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, Winkler dismisses this “Guernica Myth” as “too good to check,” that is, too convenient a story to verify with an independent source. She demolishes the “myth” by quoting a “spokeswoman for the U.N. Secretariat”—hardly an independent source. Her writing shows no irony when her thinly veiled disgust for this institution seeps through later in the article.

3 Pepe Escobar, “From Guernica to Fallujah,” Asia Times, December 2, 2004, and Jonathan Steele and Dahr Jamail, “This is our Guernica,” Guardian (UK), April 27, 2005. 4 Christopher Hitchens, “Abu Ghraib isn’t Guernica,” Slate.com, May 9, 2005, For no apparent reason, Hitchens demands the reader appreciate the “potency” of the painting, “even if you agree with the Marxist and Third-Worldist art critic John Berger, in The Success and Failure of Picasso, that it was one of the master’s crudest works.” Unsurprisingly, Berger says no such thing in his excellent overview of Picasso. Hitchens would do well to avoid concocting lies about art and stick to regurgitating lies about the Iraq War. 5 Russell Martin, Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World (New York: Plume, 2003), 51.

6 John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 169. 7 Martin, 118–19. 8 Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003), 72. 9 Martin, 38. 10 Ibid., 149–51. 11 Quoted in van Hensbergen, 169–70. For an overview of Picasso’s influence on these artists, see Michael Fitzgerald, Picasso and American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006). 12 Berger, 83. 13 Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 25. 14 Utley claims that this widely reported story is apocryphal, but van Hensbergen quotes an interview with Picasso in which he claims this episode did occur. 15 Utley, 43.

Guernica Meaning: Analysis & Interpretation of Painting by Pablo Picasso Guernica Meaning: Analysis & Interpretation of Painting by Pablo Picasso by K Shabi PUBLISHED 31 July 2013 Guernica (1937) by artist Pablo Picasso is one of the most famous paintings of all time. Like so many famous works of art, the meaning of Picasso's Guernica is not immediately clear and left wide open to analysis and interpretation. What is the meaning of Guernica, the mural by Pablo Picasso? A careful analysis and intepretation of the painting reveals the importance of Spain, war, and most of all bullfighting in Picasso's Guernica. Guernica and Spain: Nationalist Art? Picasso's homeland of Spain is central to the meaning of Guernica, a mural the artist was commissioned to paint for the 1937 World Fair in Paris. Although Picasso expatriated to Paris and never did return to Spain during his life, the artist's connection to his homeland of Spain is evident in Guernica, named after a small country town in north Spain that was the target of a terror bombing exercise by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War.

"My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. In the picture I am painting — which I shall call Guernica — I am expressing my horror of the military caste which is now plundering Spain into an ocean of misery and death." Pablo Picasso Analysis of Picasso's Guernica: An Anti War Painting As Picasso's quote suggests, Guernica is primarily a war painting, offering a visual account of the devastating and chaotic impact of war on both men and women, in this case specifically on civilian life and communities. Picasso completed the painting of Guernica in 1937, a time of widespread political unrest not just in Spain, but worldwide. World War II would begin just a couple years later and would further decimate the European continent as a whole. In Guernica, we see several victims of the bombing--some still living, some already dead. A figure sprawled supine in the foreground of the painting appears to be a corpse and is framed on both sides by living victims with their heads thrown back, wailing in agony. The figure to the left is a mother clutching a baby who appears to have died during the bombing.

Pablo Picasso's Guernica Painting Influences & Cubism The chaos caused by Europe's political instability is evident in Guernica's composition, with humans and animals jumbled together into a background of broken hard-edged geometric shapes, reminiscent of Cubism. The newspaper print background texture of the horse may also be a throwback to Picasso's early "Journal" Cubist artwork. While art critics enjoy analyzing the use of color in Picasso's "rose" or "blue" periods, in the mostly monochromatic painting Guernica the predominant "color" is mostly black, reminiscent perhaps of death itself. Picasso's Guernica is most likely influenced by another Spanish artist, Francisco de Goya, who often painted not only war paintings, but also bullfighting art. How does bullfighting influence the meaning of Picasso's Guernica? Tauromachia: Guernica & Traditional Spanish Bullfighting Symbolism Humans and animals are on an equal footing in Picasso's Guernica, with the artist perhaps illustrating not only the simultaneous brutalization and dehumanization of humanity during wartime, but also the base, animalistic response that all living things, animals and humans, share in the face of fear and death.

But the two animals in Guernica, the bull and the horse, may have more meaning than just that. Is the meaning of Picasso's Guernica somehow related to bullfighting? Guernica can be classified as a "war painting," but the painting also features many symbols--including a bull, horse, and a man with a sword--that would fit well into traditional bullfighting art, much like Picasso's own later art and sketches like Tauromaquia (1957). The bull is the unofficial national symbol of Spain, and bullfighting is a traditional pastime or spectacle sport in Spain, with this bullfighting symbolism connecting Guernica with a specifically nationalistic meaning. But Picasso's Guernica does not depict the traditional Spanish bullfight you might expect to see in a "nationalistic" painting. Rather than depicting a victorious matador bowing to the crowds before a slaughtered bull, in Guernica the bull remains stoically standing to the left side of the painting while the matador lays dead in the foreground, the sword or spear he might have used to slaughter the bull broken off in his hand. Like the fallen matador, his horse is also dying and anguished.

Only the bull remains peaceful in Guernica, with the other figures and the entire composition of the painting turned toward the bull, an unlikely peaceful "center" for the war painting on the left side of the canvas. "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." Pablo Picasso Interpretation & Meaning of Guernica (1937) & Kristen Stewart's Tattoo Even though Picasso did not like to discuss the "meaning" of his art, the nationalistic symbolism of Guernica is difficult to deny. As the unofficial national symbol of Picasso's homeland and the most resilient figure in Guernica, the bull most likely is a symbol of Spain itself, the country still "standing" even after a brutal attack. While the bull is triumphant in the painting, the overall meaning of Guernica is less optimistic, with chaos and brutality reigning over civilization, much as it did during the real life Guernica bombing attack.

Still, Guernica lives on as one of the most famous war paintings in history and has even been commemorated in tattoo form by celebrities like Kristen Stewart. LEGOMENON: Pablo Picasso (Pablo Ruiz Picasso) - Guernica Guernica Pablo Picasso (Pablo Ruiz Picasso) Malaga, Spain, 1881 - Mougins, France, 1973 Date: 1937 (May 1st-June 4th, Paris) Technique: 1992 Observations: The government of the Spanish Republic acquired the mural "Guernica" from Picasso in 1937. When World War II broke out, the artist decided that the painting should remain in the custody of New York's Museum of Modern Art for safekeeping until the conflict ended. In 1958 Picasso extended the loan of the painting to MoMA for an indefinite period, until such time that democracy had been restored in Spain. The work finally returned to this country in 1981.

Register number: Room 206.06 An accurate depiction of a cruel, dramatic situation, Guernica was created to be part of the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris in 1937. Pablo Picasso’s motivation for painting the scene in this great work was the news of the German aerial bombing of the Basque town whose name the piece bears, which the artist had seen in the dramatic photographs published in various periodicals, including the French newspaper L'Humanité. Despite that, neither the studies nor the finished picture contain a single allusion to a specific event, constituting instead a generic plea against the barbarity and terror of war. The huge picture is conceived as a giant poster, testimony to the horror that the Spanish Civil War was causing and a forewarning of what was to come in the Second World War. The muted colours, the intensity of each and every one of the motifs and the way they are articulated are all essential to the extreme tragedy of the scene, which would become the emblem for all the devastating tragedies of modern society. Guernica has attracted a number of controversial interpretations, doubtless due in part to the deliberate use in the painting of only greyish tones.

Analysing the iconography in the painting, one Guernica scholar, Anthony Blunt, divides the protagonists of the pyramidal composition into two groups, the first of which is made up of three animals; the bull, the wounded horse and the winged bird that can just be made out in the background on the left. The second group is made up of the human beings, consisting of a dead soldier and a number of women: the one on the upper right, holding a lamp and leaning through a window, the mother on the left, wailing as she holds her dead child, the one rushing in from the right and finally the one who is crying out to the heavens, her arms raised as a house burns down behind her. At this point it should be remembered that two years earlier, in 1935, Picasso had done the etching Minotauromaquia, a synthetic work condensing into a single image all the symbols of his cycle dedicated to the mythological creature, which stands as Guernica’s most direct relative.

Incidents in Picasso’s private life and the political events afflicting Europe between the wars fused together in the motifs the painter was using at the time, resulting both in Guernica itself and all the studies and ‘postscripts’, regarded as among the most representative works of art of the 20th century. Paloma Esteban Leal

Question: What war was depicted in Picasso's painting "Guernica"?
Answer: Spanish Civil War