Guernica (english version)

Author: Pablo Ruiz Picasso

Creation: 1937

Location: Queen Sofía National Museum, Madrid (Spain)

Style: Cubism / Surrealism / Expressionism

Technique: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 349,3 x 776,6 cm

Contextualization and theme

It is about a large dimensions painting made in 1937 by Pablo Picasso for the Republic pavilion in the Universal Exhibition of Paris the same year. After a lot of years placed in EEUU, it arrived to Spain being placed permanently in the Queen Sofia Museum.

The theme revolves around the war horrors. Picasso, facing the Spanish Republic order, which was immersed in the middle of the Civil War after the military rebellion, was shocked by news about the Basque city bombing of Guernica. The news were headline in all the newspapers that highlight the brutality of the action applied over a small city without military interest, disarmed and only occupied by civil population. With this leitmotiv, he begins to build the great canvas.

Through many notes and several versions of the complete painting, Picasso, little by little, is started opting for bombing specific motifs to concentrate all the violence over emblems and figures that stop referring to the specific incident. In this process, Guernica stop being a pure historic painting to turn into a shout against war from the point of view of the victims, a reflection about destruction and pain applicable to any type of conflict, changing a specific incident in a universal work, understandable without necessity of knowing the specific details. 

Characters´s symbolic interpretation

Regarding the represented characters, all of them are victims, without any soldier appearance. Its interpretation has been very questioned, being refused reiteratedly by the painter to give them a specific meaning.

The bull: reading the painting from left to right and from top to bottom the first figure with which we find is the bull. It is a recurrent symbol in Picasso´s works and, in this case, normally it is assimilated as a self-portrait. It is interpreted as the author horrified by such atrocity, with a knife shape ears listening the pain shouts and protecting the mother´s figure who is positioned just under him. So the bull is him, the same Picasso, the necessary witness to cry out for world about the war brutality.

The mother with her son: just under the bull it is found, protected by this animal, the figure of the mother who holds his dead son. This figure, as many of you have deduced, in the same way as the composition, is classical as well: The Pietà, symbol of mother´s pain per excellence.   

In this composition it is very important the characters’ heads. On one hand, child´s head, dramatically fallen and rolled child´s eyes without pupils, makes us guess he is dead. On the other hand, the mother, whose head´s position makes us guess she is looking for the impossible relief of heaven, or even the animal. Her eyes, very important for this character, have a tear shape, another more symbol of woman´s distress, besides the sharp tongue that introduces a dying pain scream in our minds.  

The warrior: drawing the triangle base of the composition it is found the dead warrior at the bottom of the painting. In the initials sketches this character was represented as a great classical hero, with his Hellenic helmet and the spear close to his body, but in the final project that idea was rejected. In this way it is transmitted that idea of characters´ vulnerability, representing that the city was defenceless against the cruel attack.

Besides, other important references to classicism in this work are the stigmas that are represented in many of the hands that appear in the work. Inevitably the reclining bodies are related with Jesus Christ´s body to change the great Christian warrior captures, Francisco Franco.    

But there is even more another symbol, classical as well, though, in this time, modernised by the shape how it is represented. It is about the ascending arrow that is found close to the warrior, symbolising his soul´s Ascension to heaven.

The lights: paying attention to the painting general composition another time, it is seen perfectly how both spotlights are at the peak of the pyramidal hierarchy. And it is that both spotlights represent both big powers and Spanish Civil War sides. On one side, the enormous lamp is introduced to us as a big controlling eye that can see all and want to dominate all. Just to its side, a small oil lamp strongly grabbed by a civilian´s beautiful and muscular arm that makes his way facing the disaster. In this way it is presented to us a duality, the Civil War duality, good and evil duality.     

Apart from the objects, the fact of dealing with the spotlights gives us cause for analysing the light itself. During a large part of the History of Art the light has been a beauty, strength, honour bearer. In this painting, by the contrary, it is introduced to us the light as an exterminating object, as the tool that is used to the night slaughter. 

Referred to the oil lamp bearer character, many experts agree with the fact that it is an allegorical figure of the Republic that, devastated by all that its eyes is seeing, is taken its hand to its chest, a universal patriotic symbol.  

The horse: it is about the painting main object, optically talking due to its location and size inside the work. In this one it is perceived a big rhomboid wound, with an extreme contrast between black and white colours, emphasising in this way the horrors and brutality of the situation. Besides the author places in the animal a spear that go through him mortally, an engraved symbol in his mind – in the same way that the bull – thanks to a bullfight the author attended in his visit to Spain in 1934.

Another essential detail to understand in a good way the painting is hidden in the texture that Picasso and Dora, his second lover, gave to the animal body. If we observe the combination, we can realize how that texture favours that the horse body is dissolved in a sea of newspapers letters. The marks are illegible but above them it is the head that dominates all the things, the force of the Art makes its way between the news buzz.

The lame woman: this woman, who seems to try to scape of that situation, is gone towards the light although she seems to be paralysed by the horror that this one lights up. From this figure stands out the left leg that many critics consider already dead, by the colour it has in comparison with the other leg of the same figure. Her arm seems to place in that lower extremity to cover a possible haemorrhage. Another time, another figurative character related to another war horror: the attempt of survivors´ scape.

The man (woman?) in flames: this character, represented to the left of the painting, represents, for many, the Guernica citizens who died because of incendiaries bombs rain that finished destroying the settlement. This person, placed as the main character of the executions by firing squad in 1808, the 3^rd of May painted by Francisco de Goya, raises his arms to the heaven as begging to the relentless air force that stops bombing the city.

The pigeon: in the middle of this horrible chaos the artist decides to put a small and almost indistinguishable reference to peace: a pigeon. It would be possible to wait that this one could have an essential role in the painting or, at least, a pure white colour, but it doesn´t. The artist represents in this way the broken, dirty and murdered peace of the people by the Italian-German troops. A peace that, jointly the represented characters, seems to exclaim to heaven that the violence stops.

The flower: in the Guernica initials sketches, Picasso shows quite more hope symbols that the timid represented flower at last. He starts with a raised fist, with Pegasus emerging from the horse wound… but he finishes with a simple and humble flower.

Why does hope finish repressed in that tiny flower? Because Picasso doesn´t represent the Spanish nation´s resurrection, he doesn´t represent the hope of getting a better world, Picasso represents his own version of Goya´s War Disasters. Here there is no hope, there is only space to brutality and despair. This is war. This is Art.

Compositional organization and drawing technique

The composition reminds the triptych compositions, divided in three areas. The central one is ordered in a triangular shape around the horse, including in its low area the statue and the woman who moves forward. To both sides of this central group it is created two rectangular triangles that are balanced out in their figures. Everything that has been said confirms us a strong scene study, looking for a clear organization and based in a well-delimited areas that permit a better scene comprehension, thought to its exhibition in the presence of a non-understood audience.    

The drawing takes part in these techniques renovation explained previously. Over it we can discover Picasso´s previous experiences, as cubism. Departing from the idea of negation referred to the unique point of view, the figures are studied from several places, joining after that the different visions in a more complex image (because it provides with more information) though in a different way in relation to the usual one (simultaneous vision). In this manner, the bull has both eyes at the same level or the different anatomical parts of the horse belong to opposite point of views (see the head).

Beside this technique is observed other typical references to contemporary representation. In certain places it can be appreciated the figures deformation that Picasso makes to give them more expressivity, as it happens with the horse head, the woman´s enlarged hands who hold her dead son or the woman´s on the right deformed legs. In the same way, it is produced objects attributes transfers, making into one´s another, just like it happens in the tongues that are made into sharp objects, like knifes, or in the extreme women´s eyes where the eyes have been made into their own tears.  

These two last features leave from surrealism world which Picasso frequents at the end of the twenties and in the thirties. His expressive liberty idea is patent as well in certain suggestions from the children´s drawing that appears in the painting and the painter was discovering in that moments. From that experience (the children´s drawing doesn´t draw things as it sees but as it knows) he reduces some elements to its pure visual essence, giving enough data so that the image, without being a copy from reality, was understandable, just like it happens in the statue flower or the bulb drawing.

Colour, light and space

The colour and the light work in a joint way. From the first moment, Picasso thought in the painting as a black and white image that, in its chromatic limitation, could transmit all the atmosphere of pain and tragedy. Over this background, the characters´ dramatic expressions put on hold, as terrifying shouts inside a general silence in which the pain absence collaborates, though not the tones, because the grey colour, in different gradations, calms and gives cohesion to the black and white sharp contrasts (see the horse head).

Referred to the light, already disassociated from reality naturalist recreation (classical chiaroscuro), it lights up the scene without obeying any spotlight type. It is about an unnatural light that is useful, above all, to guide us into the painting creating effects that emphasize the drawing (the hand that carries the oil lamp crossed by different shadows or the shadow effect shined by the statue hand) or the tragedy (the window strongly lighted up in the left side, too small to be able to leave the fire). In general, the main characters appear strongly lighted up, without shadows that emphasize their two-dimensionality.  

The space, over all at the beginning, can seem difficult to understand. Its strangeness is produced by the perspective disappearance, typical from Renaissance. From the first cubist experiences the idea of the painting as a window disappears. No longer it is expected the real representation of the world, and the canvas is turned into a two-dimensional space that renounce to the background, giving us all the images in the same level. No longer it is turned to the trick of doing things smaller dependent on the distance to the spectator and, in the same way, it is eliminated the chiaroscuro that modelled the shapes. Just in any places (statue neck, horse head…) it is preserved a certain traditional representation that is still good to facilitate the images lecture.