Guernica does not Affect Picasso, Picasso Effects Guernica

Guernica (1937) by artist Pablo Picasso is one of the most powerful and disturbing anti-war paintings ever produced. 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? Guernica is unique and unlike any other photograph or painting of a historical war scene. According to Herschel B. Chipp, historical photographs show scenes and capture moments in time, but when viewing them an intangible “wall” exists between the viewer and the photograph. The difference between photographs and original paintings is that the painting allows the viewer to break through the “wall” and actually experience the feelings and emotions expressed in the painting.[1] Guernica was a unique painting for Picasso to create because he never wanted to be influenced by the outside world. Historians argue that Guernica is the exception and Picasso allowed him-self to be influenced and expressed his views. However, after deeply known about Guernica and Picasso, you may think that Guernica does not affect Picasso, instead, Picasso effects Guernica. Guernica is a town in the province of Biscay in Basque Country. During the Spanish Civil War, it was regarded as the northern bastion of the Republican resistance movement and the epicenter of Basque culture, adding to its significance as a target. The Republican forces were made up of assorted factions with wildly differing approaches to government and eventual aims, but a common opposition to the Nationalists. The Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, were also factionalized but to a lesser extent. They sought a return to the golden days of Spain, based on law, order, and traditional Catholic family values. At about 16:30 on Monday, 26 April 1937, warplanes of the German Condor Legion, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed Guernica for about two hours. According to Anthony Blunt, Germany, at this time led by Hitler, had lent material support to the Nationalists and were using the war as an opportunity to test out new weapons and tactics. Later, intense aerial bombardment became a crucial preliminary step in the Blitzkrieg tactic.[2] After the bombing, Picasso was made aware of what had gone on in his country of origin. Blunt states, Picasso was working on a mural for the Paris Exhibition to be held in the summer of 1937, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government. He deserted his original idea and on 1 May 1937, began on Guernica.[3] This captivated his imagination unlike his previous idea, on which he had been working somewhat dispassionately, for a couple of months. It is interesting to note, however, that at its unveiling at the Paris Exhibition that summer, it garnered little attention. It would later attain its power as such a potent symbol of the destruction of war on innocent lives. On May 1, 1937, news of the atrocity reached Paris. Eyewitness reports filled the front pages of local and international newspapers. Picasso, sympathetic to the Republican government of his homeland, was horrified by the reports of devastation and death. Guernica is his visual response, his memorial to the brutal massacre. According to Klaus Maier, after hundreds of sketches, the painting was done in less than a month and then delivered to the Fair’s Spanish Pavilion, where it became the central attraction. Accompanying it were documentary films, newsreels and graphic photographs of fascist brutalities in the civil war.[4] Rather than the typical celebration of technology people expected to see at a world’s fair, the entire Spanish Pavilion shocked the world into confronting the suffering of the Spanish people. In Maier’s article, later, in the 1940s, when Paris was occupied by the Germans, a Nazi officer visited Picasso’s studio. “Did you do that?”he is said to have asked Picasso while standing in front of a photograph of the painting. “No,”Picasso replied, “you did.”[5] When the fair ended, the Spanish Republican forces sent Guernica on an international tour to create awareness of the war and raise funds for Spanish refugees. It traveled the world for 19 years and then was loaned for safekeeping to The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso refused to allow it to return to Spain until the country “enjoyed public liberties and democratic institutions,” which finally occurred in 1981. Today the painting permanently resides in the Reina Sofia, Spain’s national museum of modern art in Madrid. "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. [6]
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. The Guernica sketches explore various characters. According toW. J. H. B. Sandberg, Upon looking through the sketches, creativity researcher and historian Subrata Dasgupta noticed their connections with Picasso’s previous pre-Guernica artworks and “the artist’s remembrance of things past.” Picasso used his life experiences and previous artworks as a resource for creation, such that the painting displays “the artist’s rich knowledge of his personal past.”[7]
However, the family of Guernica sketches are not easily diagnosed, containing many themes, experimental deviations, historical references, epochs of different creative directions and much more. On first glance, Guernica’s composition appears confusing and chaotic; the viewer is thrown into the midst of intensely violent action. Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust to the frenetic action, figures begin to emerge. Everything seems to be in flux. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in pain and grief, holding the lifeless body of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and unforgettable images in the painting. To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the only unharmed and calm figure amidst the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest of his body is obscured by the overlapping and scattered parts of other figures. According to Rachel Wischnitzer, in the center stands a terrified horse, mouth open screaming in pain, its side pierced by a spear. On the right are three more women.[8] One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the scene. Another leans out of the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp, while the third woman appears trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their faces are distorted in agony. Eyes are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers. The space is compressed and ambiguous with the shifting perspectives and multiple viewpoints characteristic of Picasso’s earlier Cubist style. Images overlap and intersect, obscuring forms and making it hard to distinguish their boundaries. Bodies are distorted and semi-abstracted, the forms discontinuous and fragmentary. Everything seems jumbled together, while sharp angular lines seem to pierce and splinter the dismembered bodies. However, there is in fact an overriding visual order. Picasso balances the composition by organizing the figures into three vertical groupings moving left to right, while the center figures are stabilized within a large triangle of light.There has been almost endless debate about the meaning of the images in Guernica. Picasso chose to paint Guernica in a stark monochromatic palette of gray, black and white. This may reflect his initial encounter with the original newspaper reports and photographs in black and white; or perhaps it suggested to Picasso the objective factuality of an eye witness report. Wischnitzer states that a documentary quality is further emphasized by the textured pattern in the center of the painting that creates the illusion of newsprint.[9] The sharp alternation of black and white contrasts across the painting surface also creates dramatic intensity, a visual kinetic energy of jagged movement. 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. 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. However, in Wischnitzer’s article states that Picasso's Guernica does not depict the traditional Spanish bullfight you might expect to see in a "nationalistic" painting.[10] 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. Just like Picasso said, "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."[11] Guernica is unique. Picasso brings Guernica to life. Picasso’s Guernica shows the aspect of how paintings capture the viewer and draws them into the image. Picasso successfully takes the viewer into Guernica. The viewer can almost feel the same heartache and terror that the people of Guernica felt. Picasso’s Guernica is truly unique because he was “simply painting” and not “pasting ideas” or freezing. Guernica is a rather complex intermingled collage of emotions felt by Picasso. Just like He has called the painting an allegory—but never fully explained the symbols he had used and this is probably because they have too many meanings for him. 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. As so, Picasso who has effects Guernica is a real hero.

Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso.
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Sketch of Guernica.
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[1] Herschel B. Chipp, “Picasso's Guernica. History, Transformations, Meanings”, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 133, No. 1059 (Jun., 1991) , p. 396

[2] Anthony Blunt, “Picasso's Guernica”, Leonardo, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), pp. 111.
[3] Ibid, 112.
[4] Klaus Maier, “Guernica, Fakten und Mythen”, German Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Oct., 1995), pp. 465
[5] Ibid, 468.
[6] Eugene B. Cantelupe, “Picasso's Guernica”, Art Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 18
[7] W. J. H. B. Sandberg, “Picasso's "Guernica"", Daedalus, Vol. 89, No. 1, The Visual Arts Today (Winter, 1960), pp. 245.

[8] Rachel Wischnitzer, “Picasso's "Guernica". A Matter of Metaphor”, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 6, No. 12 (1985), pp. 154.

[9] Ibid, 160.
[10] Ibid,156.
[11] Kathleen Brunner. “'Guernica': The Apocalypse of Representation.”, The Burlington Magazine Vol. 143, No. 1175. Feb, 2001 pp. 80.

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