Guernica

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Guernica


The piece I chose is Guernica, the mural painted for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris’s World Fair by Pablo Picasso. Standing at 11'6" x 25'8", its massive size does not help mask the symbolic brutality from its viewers. Using only black, white and grey oil paints, this mural is riddles the canvas with symbolism, begging its viewer to decipher its underlaying message.
The Guernica uses its images as a language with Picasso playing narrator the story unveils. Everything in the piece has something more to say than what it is presenting. The inspiration from Guernica came from the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica . This town was destroyed by German aircraft at the request of Spanish Nationalist commander Gen. Emilio Mola. They used a technique called saturation bombing which was later used on a larger scale in World War 2. The bombing killed a countless amount of people. The horse representing the people is being stabbed with a spear, to show the people of Guernica dying. The soldier with the broken sword representing resistance. The candle and lightbulb aluminate the horrific scene and the eye tells all to view what is before them. A woman holding her dead child reminiscent of the pieta and the bull behind her representing brutality .
Desperate attempts to escape and people being burned alive only magnify the horrific reality that the of Guernica lived through. Guernica was done in black white and grey to capture the drama. What seems to be newspaper text is almost completely covering the horse. Picasso used this to tell us the truth. All the lines seem to intersect and play a part in each others space.
“ The Cubists threw out the traditional techniques of perspective, rejected foreshortening and the imitation of nature. They represented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects in multiple views” -Pioch
Cubism gained it name from an art critic by the name of Luis Vaux...