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Artist: Pablo Picasso

Year: 1937

Medium : Oil on canvas

Movement: Cubism, Surrealism

Dimensions: 349.3 cm × 776.6 cm

Location: Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain

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C U B I S M

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.

The name ‘cubism’ seems to have derived from a comment made by the critic Louis Vauxcelles who, on seeing some of George Braque’s paintings exhibited in Paris in 1908, described them as reducing everything to ‘geometric outlines, to cubes’.

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“ THE STORY OF A PAINTING….”

Guernica (Spanish: [ɡeɾˈnika] is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.
It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history
It is exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

The grey, black, and white painting, on a canvas 3.49 meters tall and 7.76 meters across, portrays the suffering caused by the violence and chaos of war.
Prominent in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames.

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Guernica colors tribute to Pablo Picasso (2020)

(painted by Wabyanko)

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WHY DID PICASSO PAINT “GUERNICA”?

Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain that was bombed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists, during the Spanish Civil War, capturing the destruction, pain and suffering caused by modern warfare.

Picasso’s Guernica was the most direct and uncompromising artwork he had ever made, and it spoke to all of humanity about the horrors of war.

Painted only in black and white, the mural confronted viewers with an unfolding series of brutalities and haunting, nightmarish images: The bodies of people and animals are torn apart, while their arms are lifted up to the sky in desperation.

Although pain and horror were the core messages in Guernica, Picasso also hoped the painting would become a symbol of Spanish Democracy and civil liberty.

Picasso’s Guernica Became an Emblem for Spanish Freedom.

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THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN “GUERNICA

the bull (representing the brutality of the Civil War with a frightened look symbolising a self-portrait of Picasso)

the woman with the light (a ghostly allegory of the Republic),

the warrior lying on the ground (representing that hope persists despite the war),

the horse (for the innocent victims of the war).

the figure of the mother and child (representing pity)