Walter Taylor
AR115

In 1937, Pablo Picasso created a painting called the “Guernica”, oil on canvas. It was commissioned at the 1937 World Fair by the Republican Spanish government. Pablo Picasso’s paintings all tell a story, or reflect a personal meaning to Picasso. "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 When looking at the painting Guernica, I initially focused on the center of the mural. Many of the lines cross or meet near the middle of the work, most of which are diagonal. They start at the two bottom corners and meet toward the middle-top where the vertex is an oil lamp. The diagonals are not defined, but are created with overlapping, with dark and lightness. I noticed a woman on the bottom right she is picking herself up whose head, neck, and arm are along a diagonal. The lines tell a story and the painting is filled with sharp and jagged shapes that are used in positive and negative space. The faces are defined with light and stand out. The painting is done in black and white, there are mid-grays but I would have to say that the main focus is the contrast of the black and white. The painting gives us spatial depth. The overlapping of heads and arms and shapes are interpreted farther away, while others appear closer. Some parts of the subject’s bodies for example look closer than others. The painting has no negative space. The texture is sharp and scratchy with the dramatic contrast of the shapes. They are geometrically precise and the incised lines that are on the faces give them a soft texture. Guernica gives an illusion of movement through out the painting. It is suggested that each