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"Surviving Picasso" is a
1996 film directed by James Ivory and starring Anthony Hopkins as the famous
painter Pablo Picasso. The screenplay for this film was loosely based on the
biography “Picasso: Creator and Destroyer” by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington.
Picasso Creator and Destroyer, Arianna Huffington
Plot
The young Françoise meets Picasso
in Nazi-occupied Paris, where Picasso is complaining that people broke into his
house and stole his linen, not his paintings. Françoise is beaten after telling
his father that she wants to become a painter rather than a lawyer. Picasso
often doesn't care about other people's feelings, fires his driver who has
served him for a long time, and says he can sleep with any women he wants.
Françoise Gilot
This film is seen through the eyes
of his lover Françoise Gilot. The film focused more on Picasso’s personal life
rather than his works because the producers did not get permission to use
Picasso's works, and even the paintings shown in the film are not very famous
works. Even in the scene where Picasso paints Guernica, the camera is positioned
high above the painting, with only slightly visible.
Guernica, Picasso (1937)
The film also portrays some women
who were important in Picasso's life, such as Olga Khokhlova, Dora Maar,
Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Jacqueline Roque.
Dora Maar
Movie
Review
“Expertly Crafted and
Worth Your Time!”
“Wonderfully performed
biographical piece”
“Very nice movie”
“A portrait”
“Surviving Picasso offers
fresh perspective on emotional freedom in art”
Interesting
stories about the film
1. A few years after
this film was released, Anthony Hopkins had already signed on to play Hannibal
Lecter in Hannibal (2001), but Jodie Foster had declined. When director Ridley
Scott asked Hopkins to recommend actresses for the role of Clarice, Hopkins
recommended Julianne Moore because he enjoyed working with Moore on this movie.
Hannibal (2001)
2. Reproductions of
Picasso' art works in this film was not allowed to be used. However, the
estates of Henri Matisse and Georges Braque allowed their work to be
represented.
3. The film's
production company, Merchant Ivory Productions, faced strong objections from
Françoise Gilot and her son, Claude when making the film. Claude Picasso once
met with the Merchant Ivory team, but then strongly objected to the making of
this film, petitioning the studio to stop production.
4. Marlon Brando was
once interested in the role of Pablo Picasso, so he tried to lose weight with a
banana diet.
5. This film is one of
four movies collaborated by Anthony Hopkins and Merchant Ivory Productions. The
remaining three films are Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993),
and The City of Your Final Destination (2009).
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 womanis 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.
