H5

Applied Humanities

Choices Choices in Visual Art By James Romaine 5 Module Five: Impact of the Humanities / Page 5.2.2 Choices in Visual Art On this page: 0 of 4 attempted (0%) | 0 of 3 correct (0%) Objective: Examine the implications of the choices artists make while developing a work.

A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it.—Pablo Picasso

Guernica

This oil painting is violent and chaotic. On the left-hand side is the suggestion of an opening made by a lighter shade of gray. There is a wide-eyed bull whose tail forms the image of flames standing in front of the opening. Under the bull is a grieving woman holding a dead child in her arms. The center is dominated by a horse with a large gaping wound in its side. Under the horse is a dismembered man. The hand of his severed right arm is clutching a broken sword. His left arm is stretched above his head and his left palm is open. On his left palm is a five-pointed star. Above the horse is a light bulb. The rays of the light bulb and the light bulb form an eye. To the upper right of the horse is the floating head of a scared or shocked woman. Beside her floats a disembodied arm and hand holding a lamp with a flame close to the light bulb. Under the floating head another woman is partially bent over. She is blankly looking up at the lamp and light bulb. At the very right of the painting is a woman with her arms raised. She is trapped by flames above and below her. The bull, the horse, and the woman holding the dead child have sharply pointed tongues. There is a bird on the back wall between the bull and horse. It has a slash on its body with light coming through.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso. Oil on canvas, 1937. 11′ 5.5″ × 25′ 5.5″.

Click to enlarge

© 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York. Art Resource, NY.

One of the most iconic paintings of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica has become an international symbol of the human struggle against violence, oppression, and war. Scanning the painting from left to right, we see, in black, white, and shades of gray, a bull; a grieving mother holding a dead child; a fallen warrior; a wounded horse; a female figure emerging from a window, carrying a lamp in an outstretched hand; a staggering woman; and a person with arms raised, entrapped by fire. These figures are deconstructed and shown in abstracted form to emphasize the grotesque consequences of armed conflict—and of the Spanish Civil War in particular.

On April 26, 1937, German and Italian forces supporting Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco bombed the Basque village of Guernica. The village, which had no military targets and a defenseless civilian population, was obliterated. At the time of the attack, Picasso had already agreed to make a work of art for the Spanish Pavilion organized by the anti-Franco Republican government at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris (where Picasso lived at the time). Initially, Picasso had considered a painting on the subject of “the artist and his model”—symbols, perhaps, of individual freedom and creative civilization. However, the bombing of Guernica had such a profound effect on him that he decided to address it instead.

Created between May 1 and June 4, 1937, Guernica posed several creative challenges for Picasso, not least of which were related to its monumental size: At about 11′ 6″ x 25′ 6″ it was one of the largest canvases he had ever worked on. The scale of the painting required a composition that held together as a single unit across a large span. Picasso achieved this by dividing the total image into a series of interconnected scenes. The work needed to be as big as a mural to constitute a traditional “history painting” (such as Diego Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda and Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808), in which the artist depicts an event of historical proportions. While it was not entirely unprecedented, Guernica is unusual among history paintings for depicting an event contemporaneous to its creation.

A child prodigy, Picasso had been one of the most accomplished European artists for several decades before painting Guernica at the age of 55.2 In fact, the visual language of dissecting figures and forms that we find in Guernica is based on Cubist and Surrealist techniques that Picasso himself had helped develop. Thus, the creative struggles Picasso faced when creating Guernica are not those of a young artist finding his creative voice but those of a supremely gifted artist fully confident in himself yet still laboring to find an artistic expression equal to his aspirations.

Some of Picasso’s preparatory drawings, dating from around May 1, depict subjects that had previously appeared in his art. These included weeping women and mothers, the bull, the wounded horse, and a figure holding a light. These motifs were all drawn from Picasso’s own personal history. Part of his challenge in creating Guernica was to make these motifs stand for universal experiences. In art, meaning emerges from relationships; in this sense, Guernica succeeds as much more than an assembly of characters. Picasso spent a lot of time moving, rotating, and adjusting the figures in the painting to achieve an optimal compositional and narrative relationship.

Photographs taken in Picasso’s studio by his girlfriend, photographer Dora Maar, provide us with unusual access to the artist’s creative struggle as he attempts to visualize a moral statement. Although the photographs are undated, scholars have been

able to chronologize them based on the progress toward the final work shown in each photo.

In this photograph of the earliest stage of Picasso’s Guernica painting, only the outlines of the figures are complete. The most prominent figures present in the final painting (a bull, a weeping mother, a wounded horse, and a dead or dying soldier) are also present here, but some of their poses are slightly different. For example, the horse’s head is lowered near the ground instead of raised, the bull’s body is to the right side of its head rather than the left, and the dead or dying soldier figure’s head is to the right and his feet to the left, rather than the other way around. His arm is also thrust straight up into the air instead of stretched out on the ground.

Guernica, state one.

© 2016 Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Around May 11, Picasso began to organize his figures across the canvas. Maar’s first photograph shows several figures that would remain largely unchanged in the final composition, including the mother and dead child, the woman at the window, and the figure with raised arms at the painting’s far right. The other figures would go through several more stages of development. The figure Picasso appears to have grappled with most is that of the fallen soldier: Is he meant to be an aggressor or defender? Picasso recognized that his treatment of this figure would strongly determine how viewers interpreted the painting.

The dead or dying warrior motif can be traced to classical antiquity and often represents death with dignity (see, for example, the figure of the dying warrior from the Temple of Aphaia in Greece). In some of Picasso’s preparatory sketches, the fallen warrior even wears a classical helmet. The warrior in Guernica appears to be nude, which also evokes a classical symbol—in this case, vulnerability. In Maar’s first photograph of the painting in progress, the figure holds a broken sword representing defeat in one hand and has his other hand raised in a fist. Defiant to his last breath, the warrior appears to vow vengeance for the calamity surrounding him.

In Maar’s second photograph, we see that Picasso placed stalks of grain in the warrior’s upraised fist and added a blazing sun behind it. Images of grain and the sun as symbols of renewal and resurrection have a long history in art, suggesting that the warrior in Guernica ultimately triumphs over adversity. Just as the power of the sun raises seeds into stalks of grain, the seeds of suffering might be raised into the grain of victory.

This photograph shows the second iteration of Picasso’s Guernica painting while it was in progress. About half of the painting is still in an outline form, but the lower portion of the painting is beginning to be filled in. A particular difference between this iteration and the previous one is that the warrior figure is now clutching stalks of grain in his raised hand.

Guernica, state two.

© 2016 Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

At this second stage, Picasso had begun to paint in some of the outlined forms on the canvas. His decision to restrict himself to black, white, and shades of gray is significant.

Perhaps he was inspired by photographs—both those documenting the bombing of Guernica in newspapers and those of his own work in progress. At this time, photography was still largely a black-and-white medium, and the monochromatic starkness conveyed a sense of documentary truth. The lack of color also gives Guernica an emotional coldness that evokes calculated military murder and suggests a world stripped to rock and bone. The restricted palette creates an eerie visual calm and emotional detachment that only make the horrors depicted more shocking. This, after all, is the point: Guernica is designed to make the viewer indignant.

In the time between Maar’s second and third photographs, Picasso made significant compositional and iconographic changes, especially to the fallen warrior. He turned the figure around so that the head extended toward the left and the formerly raised arm sprawled out on the ground. He also transformed the clenched fist into an open hand and detached the other hand, holding the sword, from the rest of the body. In his new pose, the warrior lies facedown, no longer defiant and vengeful, but broken and defeated.

This photograph shows the third iteration of Picasso’s Guernica painting while it was in progress. About a third of the painting is still in outline form, while the rest is being filled in. A notable difference between this iteration and the previous one is that the warrior figure has been turned so his head is on the left, and his formerly raised arm is now outstretched on the ground.

Guernica, state three.

© 2016 Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

In Maar’s fourth photograph, the painting is nearly at its final composition. The body of the bull is repositioned. The head of the horse is raised. Its mouth is open in a silent cry of horror. Its tongue is knife-like. The principal change to the warrior figure is the suggestion of a stigmata, referencing Christ as martyr, in the open palm. This stigmata would be even further accentuated in the painting’s final state.

This photograph is of a fourth iteration of Picasso’s Guernica painting while it was in progress. Most of the painting has now been filled in. The main difference between this iteration and the last is that the bull’s body has been repositioned to the left side of its head, and the horse’s head is now raised instead of lowered, with its mouth open. The warrior’s left palm is also now open.

Guernica, state four.

© 2016 Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Maar’s fifth photograph also shows Picasso’s progress painting in the figures and giving them visual volume. The evolution of the warrior is nearly complete.

This photograph is of a fifth and nearly final iteration of Picasso’s Guernica painting while it was in progress. All of the painting is now filled in, and more detail has been added to the figures. The primary difference between this iteration and the final painting is that this iteration does not yet have a lightbulb above the horse’s head. Instead, it appears to be a sun.

Guernica, state five.

© 2016 Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

In the final work, we can see two notable changes from the last of Maar’s photographs. One is the addition of a light bulb where the sun used to be. This changes the subject from a daytime event outdoors (the bombing of Guernica had occurred in the afternoon) to a nighttime event indoors. Perhaps this is a shelter in which people and animals are seeking to escape from the undepicted horror outside. Inside, the figures are claustrophobically trapped, together with the viewer.

This oil painting is violent and chaotic. On the left-hand side is the suggestion of an opening made by a lighter shade of gray. There is a wide-eyed bull whose tail forms the image of flames standing in front of the opening. Under the bull is a grieving woman holding a dead child in her arms. The center is dominated by a horse with a large gaping wound in its side. Under the horse is a dismembered man. The hand of his severed right arm is clutching a broken sword. His left arm is stretched above his head and his left palm is open. On his left palm is a five-pointed star. Above the horse is a light bulb. The rays of the light bulb and the light bulb form an eye. To the upper right of the horse is the floating head of a scared or shocked woman. Beside her floats a disembodied arm and hand holding a lamp with a flame close to the light bulb. Under the floating head another woman is partially bent over. She is blankly looking up at the lamp and light bulb. At the very right of the painting is a woman with her arms raised. She is trapped by flames above and below her. The bull, the horse, and the woman holding the dead child have sharply pointed tongues. There is a bird on the back wall between the bull and horse. It has a slash on its body with light coming through.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso. Oil on canvas, 1937. 11′ 5.5″ × 25′ 5.5″.

Click to enlarge

© 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York. Art Resource, NY.

Picasso also made some final adjustments to the warrior figure that had already gone through so many stages of metamorphosis. In the completed work, the warrior’s head is turned up, no longer buried in the ground, mouth open to join the silent chorus of pain. Guernica evolves from representations of defiance and political agitation (symbolized by the thrusting arm of the dead or dying warrior) into a ballad of suffering and misery that no context can explain or justify.

Missing from all the known stages of Guernica is any depiction of the source of the suffering and destruction. The bombing of civilians by planes that suddenly appeared on the horizon and disappeared just as quickly represented a new form of terror warfare. By not showing planes or bombs or any other form of actual violence, Picasso

requires the viewer to imagine the invisible perpetrators. Guernica presents the viewer with a moment that is isolated from the moment of destruction that preceded it or the moment of resolution that might follow it. By not showing the source of this destruction, Picasso rises above the particulars of ideology and propaganda into the realm of morality and art. (This doesn’t mean that art would have been incapable of showing the planes dropping the bombs; however, in his creative pursuit of an image beyond propaganda, Picasso arrived at this solution.)

The history of Guernica’s creation as documented in Dora Maar’s photography demonstrates how an artist, even one of Picasso’s mature talents, arrives at a final composition through a process of addition and subtraction. Rarely is the first draft also the final product. The fact that there are so many various (even contradictory) interpretations of Guernica is evidence of its success as an image that speaks to each viewer individually and directly. Pablo Picasso succeeded in creating an image of universal meaning. Guernica gives voice to the suffering of people anywhere vulnerable to death and destruction.

Multiple-Choice Question

How did Picasso begin development of this painting?

by reviewing statistics on the devastation in Guernica by reviewing photographs of Guernica to use as inspiration by outlining on the canvas by sketching on paper

Multiple-Choice Question

Which figure changed the most as the painting evolved?

the horse the soldier the figure with arms raised the bull

Multiple-Choice Question

In this essay, what is most commonly mentioned as a reason Picasso may have made these changes?

to be more controversial to better match the facts of the situation as it was reported upon to establish a visual harmony to present a different perspective on the event

Response Board What surprised you about this story behind a painting?

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2 Picasso would turn 56 on October 25, 1937.

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