There is little argument that Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is the Twentieth Century’s greatest and most influential artist. Picasso was a genius. His paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures reveal endless creativity and passion for life. His works range from realistic to abstract: the Blue, Rose, and African periods, Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, Neo-Classicism, Surrealism. Picasso was not true to a style. He was true to the power of personal expression.
Picasso was born and educated in Spain. Although Picasso spent much of his career in the avant-garde capital city of Paris, he had a strong emotional and cultural connection to his Spanish roots.
Picasso was not a political artist. However, he was so enraged by the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War (a conflict created by the Fascist coup, of General Francisco Franco and the Nationalists, of the elected Republican government), that he became political. In support of Spanish Republican forces, Picasso painted a mural for the 1937 World’s Fair, in Paris. The inspiration for the subject of the mural occurred on April 26, 1937.
With General Franco’s approval, Nazi and Italian Fascist forces brutally attacked the small town of Guernica, in the north of Spain. Ancient Guernica was an important political and cultural center of the Basque region, the area most resistant to Franco’s Fascism. The men of Guernica were off fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The remaining citizens were unarmed civilians.
The attack of Guernica came on a Monday afternoon. It was market day. Many people gathered in the center of town to shop for the week. From about 4:30 in the afternoon until 7:30 in the evening, German and Italian planes dropped twenty-two tons of bombs on a village measuring only 3 square miles. Military forces then swooped down to machine gun the fleeing population. Fires burned for three days. Roads and bridges to escape the inferno had been destroyed. Contemporary records estimate 1,650 people were killed. Most of them were women, children, the sick, and the elderly.
The purpose of the bombing of Guernica was to terrorize and intimidate the Basque population. For Nazi forces, it also served as a practice exercise in the technique of saturation bombing. The result was international outcry—and an artistic attack by the greatest living artist. Eyewitness accounts and photographs of the violence appeared in newspapers within days of the attack. Picasso was enraged by the slaughter of innocents and he immediately began work on his composition. Fueled with conviction and urgency, Picasso’s abstract masterpiece with a message took little more than a month to complete. At the time, Picasso wrote, “…painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
Picasso’s mural, Guernica, is enormous. It measures approximately 11’ X 25’ feet (349 cm × 776 cm) and has a stunning physical presence. Just as tragic news reports and photos appeared in newsprint, the mural is limited to monochromatic tones of black, white, and gray. The viewer is overwhelmed by the drama; there is no escape from facing the horror.
Picasso fills the wide rectangular canvas with abstracted human and animal forms. The chaos and panic of the bomb scene is shown in flat, Cubist planes. Animals and humans are reduced to simple, angular shapes that increase the tension and frantic movement. Body parts are disjointed from violent destruction. Facial features are distorted in pain. Figures are shown from multiple perspectives. The viewer is aware of all aspects of their suffering. No matter their pose, the dead and living communicate their situation with a pair of eyes. The viewer is overwhelmed by the carnage; there is no escape from seeing the horror.
Guernica is filled with a variety of characters. Picasso carefully organizes the suffering and chaos around a central triangle. A fallen warrior forms the base of the triangle, his severed arm holds a broken sword. A horse, with a spear in her side, shrieks in agony and forms the top of the triangle. Above the horse is an electric light bulb, a reference to bombs, and perhaps a negative reference to technology. From the far right, a woman rushes into scene with hands open to help, but is weary from the struggle. Above her, a frightened woman leans out a window with a candle to light the scene with a flicker of hope.
The central triangle in the mural is balanced by the strong vertical emphasis of the right and left sides. On the far right, a woman screams as she falls through the floor of a burning building. On the far left, a woman holds her dead child and howls in pain. The intact figure of the bull looks upon the violence without emotion. According to the artist, the bull represents the power of “brutality and darkness.” The viewer is overwhelmed by the pain; there is no escape from hearing the horror.
Picasso said: “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” The attack on Guernica inspired the passion and genius of Pablo Picasso to reveal his truth about war: war is not about power and glory, war is about pain, suffering, and death. Although Guernica was created in 1937, the universal truth of the work transcends decades and borders. It is as powerful an iconic image in the Twenty-First Century, as in the Twentieth. Picasso’s Guernica insists that viewers remain overwhelmed by the horrors of war.
