With regard to this painting I try to hold on to my first impression of it. Not the first time I saw the image, the first time I saw the painting itself. During the summer of 1998 I lived in Spain and had the chance to go to the Reina Sofia and view the painting.
If I had to say it in a sentence I would describe Guernica as the most real painting I’ve ever seen. I would go farther actually, and say that it’s the most real thing I’ve ever seen.
The size of the piece creates an impact in and of itself. The second thing one notices is the overall sense of disorder that is put forth by the scene portrayed. The figure of the man dragging what is presumably his own leg is the first thing that I focused on. It is a grotesque thing to behold, but it’s only the beginning of our experience.
I must make the point clearly that the mural has been painted on a scale that can only be described as massive; the sheer size of Guernica is impressive. The mural on canvas stands over ten feet high and almost thirty feet wide (totallyhistory.com). The fact that Picasso painted this mural by hand on this scale is a statement in and of itself. It is an object that cannot be ignored and one that wrenches the attention of anyone in its presence just by its dominant stature in any indoor space.
The piece has the effect of making one feel small. It is almost the same feeling as standing at the foot of a mountain. It is a humbling feeling.
Guernica inspires another feeling though, a feeling of outrage.
The painting was created to commemorate the bombing of the Town of Guernica in Northern Spain. The resulting slaughter was one of the greatest massacres of the Spanish Civil war.
During my research on this painting it came to my attention that there is a reproduction of the mural at the United Nations in New York, outside the meeting room for the UN Security Council (Jayantha Dhanapala, 2002). The mural was covered up when US officials made the case for the war in Iraq.
I am forced to wonder if it is still covered up when the members of the Security Council meet regarding the current situation in Syria. In my opinion one would do well to reflect on Guernica in light of the current atrocities being committed in Syria. The same barbarism that inspires the murder of civilians in Syria inspired Franco to murder the people of Guernica.
The overall scene is one of roiling horror. A bull assaults a dismembered donkey or horse. The man I mentioned earlier drags his severed leg. Darkness surrounds all, and the scene is presided over by a glowing light bulb eye. The figures in the painting are trapped in a building during a terrible event. A light can be seen at one end of the scene in the shape of a door. The light bulb eye seems to provide the only true light. The nameless horror that has just occurred has spurred the bull to attack the horse and dismembered the man in the foreground.
Through Picasso’s eyes we see all of this from all angles at once. The door is distant in the composition and the chaos is frontal and close. The bull is a normally docile farm animal roused to violence by pain. Much like the rebels of the Spanish Civil war in 1937 and much like the free Syrian army today the peaceful worker in the field is turned to violence and their violence is relentless and indiscriminate like the bombings of this week in Damascus.
In the actual bombing of Guernica German Bombers were sent by General Franco to stamp out the ethnic Basques in the north of Spain targeting the central town of their region. They used incendiary bombs to cause as much human casualties as possible (pbs.org). The attack was brutal and calculated. It would be reasonable to assume that the scene depicted in Picasso’s work is one of victims of the bombing attempting to take shelter in a building and finding themselves trapped. fall into a madness of panic and carnage.
Were I a member of the UN Security Council it would pain me every day to know a similar situation, albeit more drawn out and on a far larger scale was playing out in the Middle East and I was doing nothing about it. That painting that I had to walk past every day would accuse me and drive me.
The great Irish statesman Edmund Burke once said “Evil thrives when good men do nothing”.
In Guernica, Picasso says “This is what happens when good men do nothing”.
Nelson Rockefeller understood this when he commissioned the copy that stands outside the Security Council chamber from Picasso. He understood that this painting might be one of the most important paintings ever painted. Important because of what it has to say and how loudly it says it.
In the end it is impossible to put art into words. Does Guernica curry an emotional response? I hope it does from all who see it. Does Guernica achieve what it sets out to achieve? This is a more important question.
To me the answer is yes. The important thing to realize when viewing Picasso’s work is that the figures in Guernica look like the dreams I had as a child. I think they might be a lot like the dreams everyone had as a young child.
That is the beauty of Picasso’s work for me; his stretched and distorted figures look to me look not as if they were painted by a child but as if they were imagined by one. They look as if they were formed by an imagination less concerned with form and more with meaning, unpracticed at shaping the package of something but beautifully adept at portraying its soul.
This is what I love about Picasso’s work in general. It is also what makes Guernica all the more terrible and beautiful. The truth then about Guernica, my truth, is that it is not just the bombing it is a child’s eye view of the bombing. Perhaps a child who is about to die, many did. Or perhaps a child who will live on with the horror of that day in 1937 etched into their memory forever.
This painting does that for me; it disarms me and speaks to the child within me. It makes me feel small. It takes away my notions of proportion, time and distance.
Guernica makes me see, with the eyes of a child some of the worst horrors man can commit upon man.
That is all I have to say on the subject.
