Thursday, April 9, 2020

Interesting Art Stories: 6. Guernica, Pablo Picasso, ACJ Art Academy


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 eyesDaggers 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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