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Are we to paint, what is on the face, what is inside the face, or what is behind the face?” Are these famous words of Pablo Picasso his anticipation for master strokes for Guernica, his chef d’oeuvre mural, which he painted for the Spanish Pavilion in the 1937 World’s Fair? Picasso’s Guernica is his humane statement on the Spanish Civil War, which transported him to aesthetic immortality. No wonder, during the last sixty-eight years, the mural painting has generated great interest and fame across the world. Presently housed at the Reina Sofía, Spain’s national museum of modern art; Guernica is acclaimed as one of the most valued artistic masterpieces and is regarded at par with Spanish treasures of El Greco, Goya and Velazquez. It is the last in the line of formal images of battle and suffering that runs from Uccello’s Rout of San Romano through Tintoretto to Rubens, and thence to Goya’s Third of May and Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios.
Angst as inspiration
Guernica was not an overnight burst of inspiration by the painter; rather it was an expression of impotent angst and frustration against Franco’s oppressive regime. Picasso agreed to paint the mural for the Spain Pavilion, as a bold visual protest against Franco’s treachery. It can be said that with Guernica he expressed the outcries of Spain’s democratic voices, which were ruthlessly suppressed during Franco’s dictatorial rule. Thus, it assumes much greater significance than the mere depiction of carnage in the unknown Spanish village of Guernica, at the height of the civil war.
On 27 April 1937, unprecedented atrocities were perpetrated on behalf of Franco against the civilian population of a little Basque village in northern Spain. Townspeople were massacred as they ran helter-skelter from the crumbling buildings. Guernica, the village, burned for three days, claiming sixteen hundred lives. Picasso was appalled by the stark black and white photographs of the battleground. Enraged, he rushed through the crowded streets to his studio, where he immediately sketched the first images for the mural that he later called Guernica. Three months later Guernica was delivered to the Spanish Pavilion, as a reminder of those tragic events in Spain.
After the fair (Spanish Pavilion), Guernica toured Europe and Northern America to raise consciousness about the threat of fascism. From the beginning of World War II until 1981, Guernica was housed in its temporary home at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, though it made frequent trips abroad to such places as Munich, Cologne, Stockholm, and even São Paulo in Brazil. The one place it did not go was to Spain. Although Picasso had always intended for the mural to be owned by the Spanish people, he refused to allow it to travel to Spain until the country enjoyed “public liberties and democratic institutions.”
Guernica profundizado
Created by arguably the most famous and, perhaps, the least understood of modern twentieth century artistes, Guernica is one of the most potent anti-war statements. It showcases a striking collage of events, becoming a commemorative plaque of human catastrophe as Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’. It was inspired by an act of war; the brutal bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, but its latent statement is universally humanistic.
The painting has of course attracted myriad speculations. Many experts have attempted to decipher the exact significance of the jumble of tortured images. Like several works of Picasso, Guernica too flaunts the hallmark of Picasso’s art of holding on several contradictory meanings. But despite its abstractations, there is no doubt about the fact that Guernica challenges the popular notion that warfare is heroic and exposes the barbarism inherent in it.
Picasso, from the beginning of his career, has restricted any romantic or realistic imagery in his art, which is reflected in Guernica too. Rather, Guernica is a powerful invective against violence in modern art. Its motifs—the weeping woman, the horse, the bull—had been running through Picasso’s work for years before Guernica brought them together.
However, many modernists view Guernica as a receptacle for extreme sensation. The spiked tongues, the rolling eyes, the frantic splayed toes and fingers, the necks arched in spasm: these would be unendurable if their tension were not braced against the broken but visible order of the painting. The order of painting that portrays a battle sarcophagus is a general meditation on suffering and pain. Besides the archaic symbols: the gored and the speared horse that Guernica embodies, the painting also identifies with the paraphernalia of pre-modernist images like the broken sword, the surviving flower, and the dove. The most modern style that can be spotted in the painting is the Mithraic eye of the electric light, and the suggestion that the horse’s body is made of parallel lines of newsprint, like the newspaper in Picasso’s collages a quarter of a century earlier. Otherwise, its heroic abstraction and monumentalized pain hardly seem to belong to the time of photography and Heinkel 51s. Yet they do, and Picasso’s most effective way of locating them in that time was to paint Guernica entirely in black, white, and grey, so that, despite its huge size, it retains something of the grainy, ephemeral look one associates with the front page of a newspaper.
There are other uncommon interpretations too. The usage of black and white images in the painting has prompted many to reflect that the painting is about the intentions to change the way people feel about the power.
Guernica and the modern imagery
It would be apt to say that what Mona Lisa is to Renaissance art, what Nightwatch is to the Baroque school of painting, what Sunflowers is to post-impressionistic painting, Guernica is to modern art. Guernica shares many elements and similarities of his previous works like Crucifixion and Harlequins. However, despite many interpretations, the USP of the painting lies in its latent enigma; very few art critics can claim that they have fully understood the ouvre.
Picasso’s “secret” Guernica has been invoked with unseen harlequins, whom he associated with Christ due to the character’s mystical power over death; to overcome the forces of death. The Harlequin appears to be shedding a diamond tear for the victims of the bombing. The diamond is one of the Harlequin’s symbols and in Picasso’s work, it is a personal signature. Here Picasso has also permeated cubism—an art of viewing paintings from different angles—to endow his work with a magical secrecy. The figure falling across the Harlequin’s face, which is often assumed to be a woman, in fact, bears a strong resemblance to Picasso; who appears to be identifying with the victims of the bombing.
Since Guernica is a visual ode to the Spanish Civil War, death is the consuming theme in the painting. Reinforcing the death in the mural is the hidden skull, which dominates the viewer’s subliminal impressions. Below the dying horse in the centre of the painting is a concealed bull’s head, contained in the outline of the horse’s buckled front leg. Its location infers that it is plunging its horns into the horse’s belly from below—the goring of the horse in the bullfight was a favourite subject for Picasso and has strong sexual overtones. Another major edge that added to the study of the painting is the concealed caricature of Hitler. It was first identified by Mel Belcraft, the inspired Guernica scholar and author of ‘Picasso’s Guernica, Images within Images.’
However, all said and done, Picasso remained tight-lipped on being asked about the exact meaning of the painting and remarked.” It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”
In 1973, Pablo Picasso, perhaps the most influential artiste of the twentieth century, died at the age of ninety-two. And when Franco died in 1975, Spain moved closer to its dream of democracy. On the centenary of Picasso’s birth, October 25th, 1981, Spain’s new Republic carried out the best commemoration possible: the return of Guernica to Picasso’s native soil in a testimony of national reconciliation. In its final journey, Picasso’s apocalyptic vision has served as a banner for a nation, on its path towards freedom and democracy.
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