jan 1, 1937 - Guernica | Pablo Picasso

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Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theater designer. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.
Guernica is a cubist oil painting, black and white. It was made in 1937, following the German bombing of Guernica, a city in Spain’s Basque region which the painting is named after. The painting was not only made by Picasso. While he painted, artist Dora Maar and poet Paul Eluard co-developed and discussed ideas. Picasso was living in Paris when the Spanish Republican government approached him with a commission to produce a mural for their pavilion in that year’s world’s fair, six months into its civil war. Picasso accepted. The painting depicts a horse at the painting’s center, stumbling over its fallen rider sprawled below and lit by the spiked rays of a light bulb above. A bull on the left seems to encompass a crying mother with her child laying slack in her arms. A figure comes from an opening to the right, holding a gaslight, while a woman closer to the foreground hangs her arms in despair. Farther back, flames and possibly ruins consume another figure. Picasso didn’t say much about the painting’s meaning, leaving interpretation to the viewers. Besides anything else it could be, it is a response to war’s senseless violence. The painting went on to travel across Europe and the United States, with the intention of raising funds to support the left-wing republicans fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Picasso declared that Guernica would not return to Spain until democracy was restored.
In 1935 Picasso painted the Minotauromaquia which is considered Guernica’s most direct relative in terms of story and subject.

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