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Junkie
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Artwork of the Day - 26 November 2004
Pablo Picasso
Guernica
1937
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
Guernica is perhaps Picasso's masterpiece and certainly the world's most famous anti-war painting.
Commissioned in 1937 (by the Republican government) to paint a piece for Spain's display at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, this was the result. It is based upon a drawing he created in 1934.
The symbolism is famous, but also mysterious as Picasso refused to talk about it during his lifetime. It is generally considered representative of man's inhumanity to man and the terrors of war.
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Symbolism
The symbolism of Guernica is as diverse as the number of people who view it. When asked to explain the tortured images he used, Picasso remarked, "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them." (To the left we see Picasso in the process of painting Guernica.)
With the unveiling of Guernica in 1937, the overwhelming response at first was that of overwhelming criticism. Many dismissed it as the dreams of a madman, while others claimed that a political statement could only truly be made by more overt imagery, and a more realistic production would have been better. Nonetheless, the piece is still being discussed and interpreted today, proving that Picasso's images, however complex, have held their stance in time as well as their importance.
Interpretations
The painting itself depicts a scene with dead, mutilated people, a horse in the center and a bull on the left. Slightly left off center at the top there is a lamp, whose rays of light pierce jaggedly outward. The limbs of both animals and people are scattered across the ground. To the far right, a woman screams towards the sky as she and her home are engulfed in flames. Far left there is a woman holding her dead child's head in her lap, as she too screams towards the sky in pain (see right).
In this painting we can almost see the light becoming an instrument of violence. The rays coming from the ceiling lamp are jagged spears. But most importantly, the "cone" of light coming from the ceiling down to the floor in the middle interrupts the legs of the horse, (who is seen as a symbol of the common people), and illuminates an arm on the ground holding a flower and a broken weapon.
The bull to the left can be understood as a symbol for the attackers brutality, as is stands off to the side, apparently unharmed by the death and destruction all around. Almost all of the heads in this picture are turned upward, and if we take into consideration the actual bombing of Guernica, they could possibly be looking towards the sky as their attackers fly off safely, like the bull.
The women in Guernica are said to have the features of then mistress Dora Maar, though her connection to the piece itself is nothing more than as a figure model. She documented the making of Guernica through photographs. In its entirety, Guernica did not take that long to making, taking into account it's size. And though it is almost impossible to come up with a definite meaning and interpretation, the simple fact that Picasso treated it with such intensity and emotion only serves to heighten it's importance and is one of the primary reasons it is still as important today as it was the day it showcased in Paris.
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REF: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwf/project5.html
Guernica itself is a small town in Spain that was bombed by Franco's Nationalist forces in conjuction with Fascist forces from Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany's Condor Legion.
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it was market day in Guernica when the church bells of Santa Maria sounded the alarm that afternoon in 1937. People from the surrounding hillsides crowded the town square. "Every Monday was a fair in Guernica," says José Monasterio, eyewitness to the bombing. "They attacked when there were a lot of people there. And they knew when their bombing would kill the most. When there are more people, more people would die."
For over three hours, twenty-five or more of Germany's best-equipped bombers, accompanied by at least twenty more Messerschmitt and Fiat Fighters, dumped one hundred thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, slowly and systematically pounding it to rubble.
"We were hiding in the shelters and praying. I only thought of running away, I was so scared. I didn't think about my parents, mother, house, nothing. Just escape. Because during those three and one half hours, I thought I was going to die." (eyewitness Luis Aurtenetxea)
Those trying to escape were cut down by the strafing machine guns of fighter planes. "They kept just going back and forth, sometimes in a long line, sometimes in close formation. It was as if they were practicing new moves. They must have fired thousands of bullets." (eyewitness Juan Guezureya) The fires that engulfed the city burned for three days. Seventy percent of the town was destroyed. Sixteen hundred civilians - one third of the population - were killed or wounded.
News of the bombing spread like wildfire. The Nationalists immediately denied any involvement, as did the Germans. But few were fooled by Franco's protestations of innocence. In the face of international outrage at the carnage, Von Richthofen claimed publicly that the target was a bridge over the Mundaca River on the edge of town, chosen in order to cut off the fleeing Republican troops. But although the Condor Legion was made up of the best airmen and planes of Hitler's developing war machine, not a single hit was scored on the presumed target, nor on the railway station, nor on the small-arms factory nearby.
Guernica is the cultural capital of the Basque people, seat of their centuries-old independence and democratic ideals. It has no strategic value as a military target. Yet some time later, a secret report to Berlin was uncovered in which Von Richthofen stated, "...the concentrated attack on Guernica was the greatest success," making the dubious intent of the mission clear: the all-out air attack had been ordered on Franco's behalf to break the spirited Basque resistance to Nationalist forces. Guernica had served as the testing ground for a new Nazi military tactic - blanket-bombing a civilian population to demoralize the enemy. It was wanton, man-made holocaust.
Note: On May 12, 1999, the New York Times reported that, after sixty-one years, in a declaration adopted on April 24, 1999, the German Parliament formally apologized to the citizens of Guernica for the role the Condor Legion played in bombing the town. The German government also agreed to change the names of some German military barracks named after members of the Condor Legion. By contrast, no formal apology to the city has ever been offered by the Spanish government for whatever role it may have played in the bombing.
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REF: http://www.pbs.org/treasuresofthewor...1_bombing.html
Mr Mephisto
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