How are you?
On every Thursday, I am
introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the
title “Interesting Art Stories”.
The 6th story for this week is
"Guernica" by Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso.
Pablo Picasso is one of the
greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, and his cubist-style
works have inspired the art world.
Pablo Picasso
The “Guernica (1937)” introduced today
is regarded as one of the best and most famous works of Picasso, and one of the
most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history by many art critics.
This large piece, which is 3.49
meters tall and 7.76 meters wide, painted in gray, black and white, makes this
work more depressing and blue, and depicts the pain and impact of people and
animals from the war. The painting was drawn by Picasso
at his home in Paris, in response to the bombing to Guernica, a Basque Country
town in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on April 26, 1937.
In January 1937, Picasso, who
lived in Paris, France, was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government
to create a large painting for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris
International Exposition. Picasso, who last visited Spain
in 1934, was the Honorary Director-in-Exile of the Prado Museum.
The poster of the Paris International Exposition in 1937
Picasso did the basic sketching
for this work from January to late April, but he wasn't so passionate about it. Meanwhile, he heard the news of
the Guernica bombing on April 26, and shortly thereafter poet Juan Larrea visited
Picasso's house and urged him to draw a painting regarding the bombing.
On May 1, a few days later,
Picasso gave up the initial theme he was trying to draw when he read George
Steer's eyewitness account of the attack originally published in both the Times
and the New York Times on April 28, and then in consideration of the proposal
by Larrea, he started a series of preliminary sketches of the Guernica bombing.
Considering the historical background
for the bombing of the Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War, the Republican
forces consisted of assorted factions such as communists, socialists, and anarchist. However, they united together,
opposing the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco, who sought to return
to pre-Republican Spain based on law, order, and traditional Catholic values.
The town Guernica, the center of Basque
culture in the province of Biscay in Basque Country, is located between the front
lines, which is about 10 km away, and Bilbao, the capital of Bizkaia (Biscay). Since this town was known as the
northern bastion of the Republican resistance movement, and it was an important
place where they had to pass through when the Republican retreat towards
Bilbao, or the Nationalist advance towards Bilbao, it was selected as the target
for the bombing.
On Monday, April 26, 1937, around
4:30 PM, the warplanes of the Nazi German Condor Legion, commanded by Colonel
Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed Guernica for about two hours. At the time of the bombing, since
the majority of the men who lived here were out of town for fighting for the
Republican forces, the majority of the remaining people were women and
children. Also, since the day was Guernica’s
market day, the most of the remaining people were gathered in the center of the
city, and after being bombed, the city burned for three days. Picasso made Guernica the image
of innocent, defenseless humanity victimized through this painting.
Guernica in ruins, 1937
The work "Guernica" was
drawn using a matte house paint specially formulated at Picasso's request to
have the least possible gloss, and photographer Dora Maar, who worked with
Picasso since mid-1936, documented its creation process.
Dora Maar
Picasso, who rarely
allowed people to see what he was doing in his studio, believed that it would
help attract people's interest in anti-fascism and allowed visitors to watch his
process for the work Guernica. Picasso drew Guernica for 35 days
and finally completed it on June 4, 1937.
For the composition of this work,
on the left, a wide-eyed bull is standing over a woman in grief, holding her
dead child in her arms. In the center of the picture,
there is a horse that seems to be stabbed by a spear and have a large wound on
its side and struggle with extreme pain, and the horse appears to be wearing
chain mail armor, decorated with vertical hash marks arranged in rows.
A dead and dismembered soldier is
lying beneath the horse. The hand of the soldier's severed
right arm holds a shattered sword, from which a flower is growing. In addition, the open palm of the
soldier's left hand has a stigma, a symbol of Christ's martyrdom, and an
eye-shaped light bulb without a shade shines above the head of the suffering
horse.
At the upper right of the horse,
a frightened woman is floating through the window into the room, witnessing the
scene and holding a candle-lit lamp near the eye-shaped bulb.
On the right, a woman under the
floating woman staggers toward the center, staring at the glowing light bulb
with her blank eyes. Daggers suggesting screams
replace the tongues of the horse, the bull and the grieving woman, and a dove is
scribed on the wall behind the bull, part of its body comprising a crack in the
wall. On the far right, another woman, with
her arms up, is trapped in the fire above and below, and her right hand
suggests the shape of the plane.
The work also includes two
"hidden" images formed by horses.
The first image, the human skull,
is overlaid with the horse's body. The second image, a bull, is
formed by the entire front leg of a horse kneeling on the ground, and the knee
cap on the horse leg forms the bull's nose.
Picasso lived in Paris during the
Second World War, when Germany occupied France.
According to the claim by
Picasso, when a German officer, who saw the Guernica in his apartment, asked
him, "Did you draw this?", and then, he answered, "No, you did."
After being exhibited at the Spanish
pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, Guernica was exhibited in
many places around the world, and the incomes from the exhibitions were used as
funds for Spanish war relief, which helped bring worldwide attention to the
Spanish Civil War.
Picasso loaned the painting to the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, on condition that once the democracy is
recovered, it would return to Spain, his home country. The work was then returned to
Spain in 1981, six years after Franco's death in 1975 and is now exhibited in
the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA Moma
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Thank you.
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