Guernica: A painting with a powerful statement
Introduction
Probably, Picasso’s most famous work, Guernica is undoubted. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and suffering that inflicts people, especially innocent civilians. This work has won a monumental state, becoming a perpetual reminder of war tragedies, a symbol against war and an incarnation of peace.
Developing
At the end Guernica was exhibited worldwide on a brief tour, became famous and widely acclaimed. This tour helped bring the Spanish civil war to worldwide attention. This work is seen as an amalgam of pastoral and epic styles. Color discard intensifies drama, producing report quality as in a photographic record. Guernica is blue, black and white, 3.5 meters (11 feet) high and 7.8 meters (25.6 feet) wide, a wall canvas painted in oil. This painting can be seen at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.
Guernica’s interpretations vary widely and contradict each other. This extends, for example, to the two dominant elements of the mural: the bull and the horse. The art historian Patricia Failing said: ‘The bull and the horse are important characters of Spanish culture. Picasso certainly used these characters to play different papers over time. This has interpreted the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very often. ‘Its relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in various ways throughout Picasso’s career’.
Some critics warn against trusting the political message in Guernica. For example, the runaway bull, a relevant reason for destruction in this place, has thought about good, either like a bull or a minotaur, like Picasso’s ego. However, in this case, the bull probably represents the onslaught of fascism. Picasso said that he meant brutality and darkness, presumably with reminiscences of his prophetic. He also said that the horse represented the people of Guernica.
Guernica, Picasso’s most important political painting, has remained important as a work of art and as a protest symbol, and kept the memory of the nightmare of the Basque people alive. In the postwar years, he would hang along with Da Vinci’s last dinner on the walls of many Spanish houses as a silent form of silent against Franco. Guernica has attracted a number of controversial interpretations, no doubt due in part to the deliberate use in gray tones painting. Analyzing iconography in painting,
A scholar of Guernica, Anthony Blunt, divides the protagonists of the pyramidal composition into two groups, the first of which is composed of three animals;The bull, the wounded horse and the winged bird that can be distinguished in the back to the left. The second group is formed by human beings, formed by a dead soldier and several women: the one up to the right, holding a lamp and relying through a window, the mother to the left, crying while holding it dead.
conclusion
The child, the one who comes from the right and finally the one who is crying in the sky, with his arms raised while a house burns behind her. At this point, it should be remembered that two years before, in 1935, Picasso had made the Minotauromaquia engraving, a synthetic work that condenses in a single image all the symbols of its cycle dedicated to the mythological creature, which is the most direct relative of Guernica. But while Picasso himself wanted to leave the reading of his work open and never wanted to define the symbolism of each of his figures, critics and experts have tried to unravel their meaning throughout the years.
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