A-Level: Pablo Picasso, Guernica

0:00:06.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in Madrid and we’ve just spent the morning at the Reina Sofía Museum looking at Pablo Picasso’s massive canvas Guernica.

0:00:15.6 Dr. Beth Harris: I remember seeing it as a teenager in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. I had no idea about the history of Guernica, the history of the painting, but I was riveted by its power.

0:00:29.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: I also remember seeing this as a teenager, and then the painting disappeared. It was taken down at MoMA and it was returned to Spain. Picasso had made clear that the painting should not return to Spain as long as it was under the rule of the dictator, under the rule of Francisco Franco. He said that it should return to Spain when Spain was a proper democratic republic. Let’s talk a little bit about the Spanish Civil War, the war that is being depicted here.

0:00:55.0 Dr. Beth Harris: Maybe the best way to do that is to actually read the reporting by the journalist George Steer, who arrived at Guernica only hours after the bombing took place. The first paragraph reads, “Fire was completing today the destruction of Guernica, ancient town of the Basques and center of their cultural tradition, which was begun last evening by a terrible onslaught of General Francisco Franco’s insurgent air raiders. The bombardment of this open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three and one quarter hours. During that time, a powerful fleet of airplanes consisting of three German types did not cease unloading bombs weighing up to 1,000 pounds and two-pound aluminum incendiary projectiles. It is estimated that more than 3,000 of these projectiles were dropped.”

0:01:46.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: Spain was in the midst of a civil war. The country was divided between radicals on the left and radicals on the right. There had been a very weak center-left government that had replaced the monarchy, but the left was always weak because the extreme left did not think that the moderate left was being radical enough. On the other side of the political spectrum, the right was a coalition of monarchists as well as people who wanted to seize power. And so the right decided to launch a civil war against the democratically elected government and quickly overwhelmed the leftists. But the bombing in Guernica by Franco and his fighters signaled a kind of sea change in warfare. Franco had asked Adolf Hitler in Germany to send planes to bomb Guernica. The Nazi military leader, Hermann Göring, was happy to accommodate this request. He had wanted to test out their strategy and their armaments. This was an opportunity to test their military power.

0:02:44.8 Dr. Beth Harris: What the German military was theorizing was a new approach, one which didn’t make distinctions between civilian and military targets.

0:02:54.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: They began with heavy bombs to destroy the structures of the town. They then dropped incendiary bombs that flooded the town with flames, and then fighter planes came in and trained their machine guns on the fleeing population.

0:03:08.1 Dr. Beth Harris: This is the event that Picasso was asked to memorialize. He was approached by members of the Republican government, and this was specifically for an international exposition that was to take place in Paris in 1937.

0:03:22.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: Picasso himself was Spanish, although he had lived for decades in Paris.

0:03:27.3 Dr. Beth Harris: So in the weeks that followed, Picasso did preparatory sketches and began to paint. It’s an image which is incredibly chaotic because Picasso was, after all, capturing the chaos of the bombing. But let’s take our time to really walk through the image right to left since that seems to be its natural progression.

0:03:49.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: It is a painting that overwhelms you. It is a public painting, and by that I mean it is on the scale of a mural painting. That is, it is meant as a kind of public statement, and it recalls the work of Picasso’s friend, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who he had known in Paris before Rivera had traveled back to Mexico.

0:04:10.6 Dr. Beth Harris: The painting starts with an open door.

0:04:13.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: That door is left open because the figures beside it have just fled from the structures there.

0:04:19.1 Dr. Beth Harris: We see one figure with her arms outstretched, a window above her, flames emerging from the roof. Everything that we are describing in this painting is within a visual language of abstraction. That is that Picasso is taking the natural visible world but exaggerating it, distorting it, reducing it to essential forms that he is using to communicate the terror of this day. And so this figure, her eyes are teardrop shapes that suggest her emotion. We see her ear, her open mouth, her prominent chin turned vertically upward toward the heavens just as her hands reach up. And her hands too are simplified and powerfully expressive. Her fingers are spread and enlarged so that we focus on this gesture of helplessness.

0:05:13.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: But there’s also a distortion of those fingers. They’re bending in ways that our fingers can’t bend. So extreme is her agony. All decorum has been lost. And Picasso has made it so stark because he’s created this light figure against this dark ground so that she’s unmistakable. It is this distillation of pure pain.

0:05:35.4 Dr. Beth Harris: And of course the entire image is painted in blacks and grays and whites. And so if our eye moves down below this figure, we see more flames and we see the calf and foot of a figure who appears to be fleeing that same burning building. And that leg and calf and foot are enlarged to give us a sense of the urgency with which she flees that building.

0:06:02.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: The figure’s neck is elongated and curves upward slightly as if she’s trying to drag herself off the ground wounded, her right arm hangs limply. Look at the way that the artist has used line to etch into her palm a sense of pain, a sense of violence.

0:06:19.5 Dr. Beth Harris: Her face is so simplified. It’s described really only by an outline, by these small circles and dots for her eyes, a small circle for her ear. And then we see her breasts, which suggests to me that she is in a partial state of undress, that she’s left the house not being able to get dressed properly and that she’s just running. And the nipples are described by these sharp forms that also speak of pain.

0:06:45.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: Just above and beyond her, we see another open doorway. Perhaps this is where she’s fled from. And above that, there’s a window. And out of the window comes a third figure who seems to call out into the night. She seems to have one hand against her chest between her breasts, and the other hand is outstretched and holds an oil lantern. This figure functions in two ways for me, she is both crying out in pain but at the same time that outstretched hand illuminating the night beyond seems to be trying to shed light on this event to let the world know what’s happening. This seems to touch on a set of ideas that Picasso has been interested in throughout his career that draws on mythology, that draws on his knowledge of the work of Francisco Goya.

0:07:32.3 Dr. Beth Harris: And we can think specifically about Goya’s 3rd of May, 1808, where we see the Napoleonic forces firing at innocent peasants in Madrid, and the whole scene is illuminated by a lantern. And around the face of this third figure, we see faceted shapes of different tones of grays that remind me of Picasso’s earlier Cubist paintings. And so, we have a sense of a reality that’s constantly shifting in its perspective, and above that, what looked like the tiles of a roof of a building.

0:08:05.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: The radical shifts of perspective suggest the views of these women as they run through these buildings, as they run through the streets.

0:08:12.6 Dr. Beth Harris: And even shards of glass or pieces of concrete or brick that have fallen.

0:08:17.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: All three of these figures are moving towards the center of the painting, and the center of the painting is illuminated as if by a street light that looks in Picasso’s handling like a human eye, but also as an explosion, but also with an incandescent light bulb at its center. Art historians have read this a number of different ways. It has been read as the flash of a bomb, but it’s also been read as the price of modernity. That is, we often think of modernization, of the advance of science and technology as a human good, as something that raises our standard of living. But technology has also, in this case, afforded us weapons that create human misery. And I think here Picasso is signaling this malevolent aspect of technology.

0:09:02.9 Dr. Beth Harris: Well, the light is surrounded by these angular shadows that make it appear dangerous. And below that, we see the figure of a horse. Its mouth is open. It’s turning in space.

0:09:14.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s been impaled by a spear and is distorted in its own agony. The tongue juts out, not only as an expression of the horse’s pain, but almost as a weapon itself.

0:09:26.0 Dr. Beth Harris: When we get to the horse, I feel as though my auditory senses kick in, and I can hear the sound a horse makes. And then the horse is covered with these hash marks.

0:09:37.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: And that is a particular piece of Pablo Picasso’s artistic vocabulary. Picasso had developed with Georges Braque the idea of Cubism, where both Braque and Picasso used newsprint. Here, this is not actually newsprint, but those hash marks do refer to the lines of type on a newspaper. And it’s important to remember that the horrific events that are being depicted here were events that Picasso only knew through the newspaper.

0:10:04.9 Dr. Beth Harris: The movement of the horse is reinforced by his mane, which flies back behind him, even as we see his tail moving in the other direction. The profile of the horse is silhouetted against this dark background.

0:10:18.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: As we move from those ragged teeth and that violent tongue, there is this light area that suggests the interior of the horse’s mouth. There’s a kind of revealing of the interior spaces of the horse and its pain.

0:10:30.8 Dr. Beth Harris: And there are a few places where Picasso has allowed the paint to drip. And this is one place where he makes those drips really apparent and they read to me as blood and saliva.

0:10:41.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: The horse is in its own pain and seems unaware that it is trampling a figure who has fallen below it. This figure’s arms are outstretched. His right arm, which has been severed, holds a broken spear. His eyes are not teardrops but they are as displaced as the eyes of the figure on the extreme right. Picasso has reduced the face to what appears to almost be a human skull. It is abstraction in the service of the demonstration of human agony. And if we look under the neck of the figure, we can just make out the horseshoe and the hoof and the leg of the horse, uncomfortably close to the man’s face. The man’s left hand, open, fingers spread, again with a kind of linear crisscrossing at his palm that speaks to the violence of his death.

0:11:30.6 Dr. Beth Harris: As we look across the bottom of the painting, I’m noticing the tiles on the floor, but of course, there is no recession into space here. Everything is happening very close to us. Everything is in the foreground. As we move leftward, between the horse’s open mouth and the figure of a bull, we see a passage of darkness with a streak of white paint and the outline of a bird with its beak open, pointing toward the sky.

0:11:57.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: I think most people don’t actually notice this bird. It’s painted against one of the darker gray areas, and it’s painted in a black outline that seems to have almost been painted over, so that it is almost invisible. And because of Picasso’s other work, I think we can stand on fairly firm ground when we say that it is likely a dove as a symbol of peace. And so I think it’s important that Picasso has made it recede in our visual space, that peace is not accessible to us. This symbol of peace has its mouth open as if it is in agony.

0:12:29.6 Dr. Beth Harris: Just beneath the head of the bull, we see the upturned profile of a woman’s face, those teardrop-shaped eyes, simple shapes for her nostrils, her open mouth, her tongue and her teeth visible, her neck is elongated, these lovely curves, except that these curves indicate a long cry, and she holds in her arms the lifeless body of a child. In fact, I think that this may be the only figure in the painting whose eyes are closed. The face of the child is clearly upside down. We see the simple shapes of the ear, of the chin, its small arm reaching toward the right, and the mother’s enlarged hands signifying the way that she’s grasping her child with a kind of disbelief that her child could be dead. Its small feet emerge from its clothing.

0:13:26.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And this woman and her dead child are framed by the image of a bull. The bull had been for many years an important motif for Picasso. The bull is so interesting here. As we’ve decided to read the painting from right to left, the bull seems to be the figure that we end with. And this figure stands solidly, is not in motion, is not in agony in the way that all of the other figures are. The bull is, for me, mostly its eyes, the bull is looking out at this scene as we’re looking in. It seems to be observing, to be taking in, and in some ways, to also be responsible for what’s taking place. Picasso represented himself often as a bull. Look at the head of the bull.

0:14:12.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s too human. It’s not only a bull, it’s also a minotaur. It is speaking to the human propensity to violence, not just at Guernica, this small town, in this particular battle, in this particular war, but a more universal view that forever humanity has caused terrible suffering. And I think the bull is asking us to step back and see both the horrors of this event, but also our culpability for the violence through history. And it’s one of the reasons that this painting has become one of the great symbols of inhumanity.

0:14:47.6 Dr. Beth Harris: And if we continue our trajectory to the left, I’m noticing the woman’s breasts that of course speak to her motherhood. Her breasts hang down and beside those breasts are the bull’s testicles. And so perhaps this idea of opposites, of male and female, of nurturing and of violence.

0:15:07.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: It is a phenomenal painting, but it’s even more incredible that Picasso was able to finish it in a matter of weeks and in time for the opening of the exposition. The exposition is in the tradition of 19th-century world’s fairs. These were utopian ideas where the manufactured goods and the arts of many countries would come together. But 1937 was a year when politics had become extreme in Europe. And in some ways, the utopian ideals of the fair were overshadowed by the growing militarism that was creating great stresses in Europe. So for example, there is a famous photograph of two pavilions that are facing each other on the Trocadéro in Paris at the fair. One is the Soviet Union and one is Hitler’s Nazi Germany. And ideologically both extreme, but on opposite sides of the political spectrum. And then the Spanish Pavilion, well, by the Republicans, that is the democratically elected center-left government that Picasso was working with.

0:16:06.6 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s very hard not to think about the future and the horrific nuclear bombs that will be dropped in Japan toward the end of the war.

0:16:16.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: This painting has become the great icon of the horrors of war. It is the first painting that people think of when they think of the tragedy that befalls civilian populations during war. And I think that Picasso produced it with a kind of optimism that painting had the power to change people’s minds, that painting could at least remind people of the cost of war. And in fact, a tapestry of this painting hangs in the United Nations in New York, directly outside of the Chamber of the Security Council, a reminder to all of the world leaders who enter into that room and make decisions that affect innocent people on the ground.