Picasso and war is one of the most powerfully expressive pairings in the history of 20th-century art, giving rise to veritable artistic manifestos against the horrors of war such as “Guernica”.
Throughout the history of art, historical painting, which depicts the theme of war, has always played a central role. Indeed, painters often depicted military exploits and the battlefields where they took place, and this occurred primarily between the 18th and 19th centuries, during the Napoleonic era. In 1900, however, one of the artists who dedicated a large portion of his work to the theme of war was Pablo Picasso.
From the mid-1920s, Picasso’s “monstrous” period began with “The Dance,” which was ultimately nothing more than a figurative representation of the abnormalities of our century, which no one at the time wanted or knew how to see. With Guernica, in 1937 , this series of canvases reached its highest peak, simultaneously demonstrating the prophetic power these paintings had had from the beginning.
But before the series of monster-like figures takes over Picasso’s work, the artist draws together, in individual paintings, his Cubist canvases of the last years.
And they are again representations of figures, in which he fixes the conclusions he has arrived at: The Atelier of a milliner of 1926 and The Painter in his atelier of 1926-27 .
In the first work, kept exclusively in grey tones, the painting is divided by a series of curves so that the individual parts fit together like pieces of inlay.
The result is a composition in which the surface plays a dominant role, since the interplay of lines and the lack of chromatic contrasts accentuate its surface quality.
In his studio, the Painter pushes the concentration of the image on the surface even further: a painted frame accentuates this flat character, and within the flat the artist places signs that never evoke a sense of spatiality; they stand on the surface like hieroglyphics: the painter, his painting, and his model (that is, a table with a red tablecloth, a bowl full of fruit, and a plaster head), all placed against the back wall of the room, with occasional references to a door, a window, and a mirror. All this suggests a mural painting, and indeed in these years, the interest of many artists such as Léger, Le Corbusier, and Ozenfant was directed at merging the acquisitions of Cubism with architecture, creating a mural painting that began with the formal language of Cubism and, through its union with architecture, ended up reaching the boundaries of abstract art .
It is a striking fact in Picasso’s art, and a characteristic feature that makes even repeated contemplation as fascinating and exciting as the first time, that the elements of his language are used again and again, placed in new relationships, for ever different purposes.
The same flowing wavy lines that evoke an impression of harmony and grace in the milliner’s atelier are also the basic elements of the 1927 painting Seated Woman , one of the first works of the “monstrous” period.
Here, the purpose and meaning of the lines are entirely different. Together with the penetrating and violent colors, they tend to express and define a sense of oppression: they forcefully enclose the woman’s body, evoking a state of constraint, aided in this by the figure’s placement in space. This seated figure is left no freedom to change position or stand: she barely has the ability to sit as if in a cage, and this sense of imprisonment pervades all the paintings of this period.
The face, furthermore, set against a darker shape that is also part of the head, accentuates the effect of oppression and anguish: it resembles a gorgon turned away from the viewer, but with another eye located in that darker patch, it seems to gaze, stare at the viewer. With this oppressive painting, as mentioned, begins the series of monster-figures at the antipodes of the ideals of harmonious beauty, which oppose beauty, now become a lie, with demonic features that are clearly true, effective, and in many ways even prophetic .
This work is followed by a whole series of monstrous figures: the group of paintings with gesticulating bathers in their striped costumes, created in Duiard in the summer of 1928. Another painting in the series is the Head of a Girl of 1929, conceived as a large-scale monument, whose sharp features are silhouetted against the sky and whose teeth send out a menacing flash from above.
From the same year is perhaps the most harrowing painting in the entire series: Woman Seated on the Beach. Here, the human image has been transformed into that of a machine with only one function: to attack and destroy. The figure still resembles a human, but its specific features have been transformed into machine elements: the mouth is a toothed pincer, the arms are prehensile mechanisms.
Once again Picasso shows us a prophetic vision of his time , and time has proved him right precisely on the point that his contemporaries refused to see: most of the monstrosities of the period that began around 1929 were committed because man has too often degraded himself into a machine, and with the technical perfection of a well-functioning machine has committed acts of murder, aggression, and destruction.
Picasso had foreseen and understood this phase of our history, he had shown himself to be a prophet , but also a moralist who had understood the errors of his time and, in his human solidarity, had not hesitated to represent in a grandiose and often apocalyptic form these dangers and threats that arose before his spirit.
The Woman Seated on the Beach is, in its terribleness, an extreme point that Picasso did not surpass even in his most anguished visions.
The next stage he took in 1930-31 represents a complete renewal, a new direction for his work. In 1930, he purchased the small Château Boisgeloup near Gisors , north of Paris, and, with the help of his friend Julio Gonzales, set about converting it into a sculptors’ studio. Before 1930, he had already carved images from small pieces of wood or modeled three-dimensional wire constructions, but he now felt the need—which can also be clearly seen in his paintings (for example, in Head of a Girl)—to work with solid, full-bodied materials.
His iron sculptures date from these years, in which we see a strange metamorphosis of form: metal planes suggest human limbs, constructions made of thin bars evoke a strong sense of space. Also in this period, but with a completely different spirit, the large, massive heads emerge, demonstrating Picasso’s ambition to create a sculptural work with the full force of the third dimension.
The iron sculptures he creates with the help of Julio Gonzales, the sculptor-blacksmith, have a completely different meaning: they are rather drawings in space evoking a multiple complexity of forms, which therefore open up possibilities for further development in both painting and sculpture.
Through the meaning that metamorphosis takes on in these works we can understand how Picasso was simultaneously attracted by the idea of ​​illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Picasso’s illustrations are characterized by an almost classical style, using thin, taut lines, as we can find in drawings from the early nineteenth century, with the addition of a great mobility and flexibility that contrasts with their tension in a wonderful way.
The illustrations to the Metamorphoses , thanks to their classical style and graphic perfection, appear, so to speak, as a point of arrival, and are nevertheless the beginning of a new phase in Picasso’s art not so much with regard to the means of expression as in a human and social sense.
In fact, they essentially mean that Picasso, by dealing with the problem of mythology (in a sort of refusal to the many irritating events he faced), was looking for a solution that escapes the randomness of everyday life and that has a universal human validity.
He had done so in the 1920s, when he had drawn inspiration from the birth of his son for a series of paintings on the theme of motherhood, thus transfiguring that individual event into a universally human symbol. He does the same now with events that not only trouble him, but that cause similar bewilderment and anguish for the most clairvoyant minds.
For this event, for this shadow that was beginning to threaten humanity, he finds figurative symbols that, with the same clarity as Ovid ‘s tales, place before the viewer’s eyes a human truth in metaphorical form . Beginning in 1934, Picasso’s personal mythology took on a clear form.
He had sought a path in the illustrations for the Metamorphoses, he had prepared a sketch for a crucifixion, intending to find a language capable of expressing dramatic, anguished events. But the solution came a few years later, and arose from reality, from his own reality.
In 1934 he travelled again to Spain, where he found, as always, the theme to which he could entrust all the emotions he felt in his soul, a theme which was in a certain way familiar, having dealt with it in the early years around 1901: bullfighting, the Spanish theme par excellence .
Also in 1934, in Boisgeloup, he painted a series of canvases with this subject in which the dramatic moment, the struggle, holds central place, where feelings such as brute force, terror and impotent compassion are given a figurative representation that directly grips the viewer.
In the following year, this subject takes on an immediately mythological meaning. The dark figure of the Minotaur, the bull-man, appears in Picasso’s work, and in this year’s masterful etching, we see his essential gesture. He shields his eyes from the light of a candle brought to him by a young girl. Furthermore, this work incorporates a number of features and figures from the previous year’s bullfight sketches: the mythological transposition is the novelty of 1935.
In 1936 , mythology becomes reality when the Spanish Civil War breaks out. The Minotaur not only shields his eyes from the light, but also extinguishes it wherever he finds it and strikes down the bearers of this light wherever he finds them.
Picasso, who as a man and as a Spaniard was doubly affected by this violence, immediately took a stand for the legitimate republican government, which appointed him director of the Prado Museum . The government entrusted him with the custody of Spain’s national art treasures.
At this very time he was holding a travelling exhibition in Spain itself, organised by his friend Paul Eluard , who had chosen the works, and this must have further increased his attachment to his homeland.
The events in this country, which he always feels as his own, help him break free from depression and return to himself. This depression stemmed from events in his private life, and for almost a year it barely allowed him to paint.
During this period, in Boisgeloup, he wrote some poems that clearly show how his imagination could take not only visual form but also express itself through words.
From this escape he was torn, as has been said, by the Spanish events.
At the beginning of 1937 he intervened for the first time in the civil war by publishing his etched sheets Sueño y mentira de Franco (Dream and Lies of Franco), where for the first time he directed his mythological imagination against the figure of the usurper and the tragedy he was causing.
The sheets, divided like popular prints into nine paintings in which the grim story unfolds, are accompanied by a satirical text by Picasso, who doesn’t lie.
It was perhaps these drawings that persuaded the government to commission Picasso to create a large mural in the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair, which was to open that summer. We know that Picasso had not yet begun work on this project in April.
At that moment ( April 28, 1937 ) an event occurred that profoundly shook the entire civilized world and was a hard blow for the artist.
The market-day bombing of the town of Guernica , the traditional capital of the Basque region, by Nazi German planes serving under Franco.
This feat of arms by the fascist coalition was the first terrorist bombing, aimed not against enemy soldiers but against defenseless citizens , against women and children.
Picasso’s reaction was human rather than political, more that of a moralist than a partisan. On May 1st, he began sketches for the large canvas he was to paint in his studio on Rue des Grands Augustins in early May.
The first drawings contain the entire mythological representation, as it appears in this vast and monumental work: the dying horse, the bull, the dead warrior and the fleeing woman.
And one of the first parts executed in oil paint clearly shows that the restrained anger, the hatred so strong that it takes one’s breath away for such a vile act, have lost none of their intensity from the beginning until the completion of the canvas.
Since the first drawing, although the intention and spirit have remained unchanged, the work has undergone various transformations .
The figures’ positions relative to one another are different; the bull’s body is turned halfway, and even the dead warrior has followed the change in rhythm. Picasso was interested in expressing his allegory in a universal form, and he found this shape early on during his work: the triangle, reminiscent of the pediments of Greek temples.
In the triangle he arranges the mythological figures, with the dead warrior as the basis of the composition, and the other figures, the woman fleeing from her burning house, the other woman with the dead child, the bull proudly raising its head, form the sides and the content of the triangle, of this large surface which possesses the dramatic force of ancient temple pediments and which in his conception of human destiny has a rather similar way of constituting itself.
In Guernica , which together with Calder’s Mercury Fountain and a work by Julio Gonzales gave the Spanish pavilion its passionate character, Picasso did not represent the single fact of the bombing, but rather elevated this event into the sphere of the universal, to a mythological level, as he had done before, in the series dedicated to the theme of motherhood.
This work is difficult to read, and the symbolic meaning of some figures, and especially the bull, has been the subject of extensive discussion.
It is not the work of a politician, nor even of a politically engaged painter, as Picasso certainly was, but above all of a great creator of myths, who attributes universal significance to fortuitous errors. This painting, in all its lapidary force (which arises from the vividness of the large surfaces, where color has little place, reduced as it is practically to grisaille ), is not so much an indictment of Franco and his sad clique, as a lament for murdered freedom , for free and independent life, against oppressors and murderers.
History soon demonstrated how right Picasso had been in his prophetic vision. In the years that followed, the important thing was not so much Franco and the cruel way Guernica had been destroyed, but what Franco and Guernica symbolized: evil, the unleashing of dark forces.
Guernica was only the first step on a road dotted with names like Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, Sidice, Auschwitz and many others that for the men of our century sound full of curses.
Picasso is one of the few great figures of his generation who not only recognized this side of the history of his time but recognized it timely and tried to warn humanity.
He must have felt like one of those prophets of the Old Testament, who are sometimes forced to speak even against their will.
This is why the anecdote that sums up Picasso’s attitude during the war is so illuminating.
To the German officers who came to visit him, he distributed postcards with photographs of Guernica, and to the surprised question of the visitors: “Did you do this?”, he gave the lapidary answer: “No, you did it”, the response of a sphinx or one of the Fates.
Guernica is the culmination of the artist’s mythological phase, a synthesis of all his works since 1934. It also gave rise to a series of special works, which Alfred H. Barr defined as “postscripts to Guernica,” of which The Weeping Woman, with its expression of infinite fury and tragic pain, is probably the most powerful. This work, in its strength and immediacy, is closely related to the first sketch, that of the dying horse’s head.
In the next two years, 1938 and 1939, the apocalyptic mood still prevailed, and rightly so. The false Munich Peace Treaty and the events in Czechoslovakia were harbingers of events.
The figure paintings of these years, such as The Girl with a Rooster or the portrait of his daughter Maia with a Doll, continue the monstrous period that began around 1930, but by now the monsters are no longer prophetic scarecrows, but parts of a reality visible every day.
During the occupation of France, a time of oppression and silence, Picasso was in Paris, withdrawn into the solitude of his studio, completely focused on his work.
He addresses two themes: the series of female figures is evocative, especially because of the model’s pose: a young woman, always differently dressed, sits in an armchair, sometimes placed in a central spot of a room, but mostly in a corner. And when these paintings are described as “the young woman sits in an armchair,” the essence is missing: she isn’t sitting in the armchair, she’s cramped, trapped between the back and the two arms, stuck there as if in an electric chair.
The same sense of imprisonment , of the impossibility of freeing oneself from a cage, which only secondarily is also an armchair, is also expressed in the convulsively clenched hands, in the distorted torsion of the head in relation to the body, in the position of the armchair in a corner of the room, from which no escape is conceivable.
The world of this series, some examples of which, such as the Woman with the Hat with the Fish, bear witness to a strange gallows humor, is a world of despair, precisely expressing the state of mind that dominated France in those years.
The other series, that of still lifes with bulls’ heads , starting from a specific interpretation of Guernica, can be understood as another postscript to this masterpiece: of the proud bull of the large canvas, only the skull remains, whose horns, still menacing and dangerous, seem to pierce the space of a room bathed in a fearful violet, crepuscular light. The threat that everyone felt looming in those years was captured and made visible by Picasso with certain motifs such as the pose of a figure or two intertwined hands. In this way, he was not only a chronicler of his time but one of the figures who shaped the image of a century.
While the exhibition was being held in Paris, however, Picasso’s art had already taken another step forward. It is characteristic of his habit of finding figurative interpretations for the events unfolding before his eyes that, in the exciting days of the liberation of Paris, he made a free copy of Poussin’s Bacchanale, a canvas that, for his feelings, was the most appropriate expression of the exuberant joy of that moment. Later, thinking back to the years of the Resistance, he chose his side: he became a member of the French Communist Party. It was in connection with this event that the interview took place, an excerpt of which we have reproduced at the beginning of this article:
“What do you think an artist is? A fool who only has his eyes when he paints, only his ears when he writes music, who carries a lyre in every depth of his heart when he is a poet, or who is all muscle when he is a boxer? On the contrary, he is a man interested and involved in politics as well, who is well aware of the convulsive growth and the stupendous events of the world, and who responds to them with his whole being. How is it possible to remain insensitive to other men, or to separate oneself in arrogant indifference from life? No, painting was not created to adorn homes; it is a weapon in attack, a defense against the enemy.”
The artistic production of these years is closely related to this declaration and the inner attitude from which it arose. First, we have that earthy painting of a man with a lamb, a work that gives the theme of the good shepherd a new, secular form and becomes a testimony to the eternal bond between man and animal.
Also from the post-liberation period is a series of still lifes culminating in that stunning canvas depicting a jug, a candelabra, and a blue-enamelled saucepan set on a wooden panel. This painting, sober and noble in its harmony, owes its vitality to the dignity Picasso instills in the simplest things of everyday life, or rather, to the fact that he shows them to us in their true dignity. Almost everyone, during the war years, in solitude or in hiding, had discovered the dignity of single, simple objects that were often their only companions, their only consolation, substitutes for friends and family. Picasso displayed these three objects on the panel precisely in this sense—we must once again use the word “mythological”—and thus created one of his most captivating still lifes.
To achieve this effect of venerable simplicity he used a method that dates back to Cubism and which we know above all from the still lifes created around 1930: a technique whose strong black lines recall the art of stained glass, with their surfaces of colored glass each framed by thick black lead lines.
A similar technique characterizes another series, from around the same period, that of Parisian views. Each of these canvases is a tribute to the heroic city, which miraculously escaped annihilation, and which Picasso rediscovers in all its beauty: the island with the Notre-Dame Cathedral in the background, the green park at the tip of the Île de la Cité, crowned by the monument to Henri IV.
In some of these canvases, he achieves the flamboyant power of medieval stained-glass windows, especially by limiting his palette, as he sometimes does, to a single color, for example, to different shades of blue. Setting limits, even in technical terms, will play an important role in Picasso’s work at this time.
This playful inventive research was soon disturbed, as had happened before, by world events which forced the artist (the artist as he himself had described him) to take a position and proclaim it: the Korean War broke out, and Picasso’s reaction was his painting Massacre in Korea .
Once again, as with Guernica and other similar works, the painting did not become a political manifesto. He did not take sides, but rather raised his voice against evil, and in a very Spanish manner. Indeed, he based his composition on Goya’s The Execution of May 3, 1808. In this work, Goya pilloried the destruction of freedom through brute force. Except that in Picasso’s painting, the victims are not rebels. Their group consists of naked women and playing children, which gives the juxtaposition yet another dimension. But the analogy with Goya can also be found in another area.
This state of mind gave rise to this painting and the two others he created the following year. These are two enormous, monumental murals that cover the side walls of an old chapel in Vallauris , which the town hall had commissioned him to restore and which he intended to turn into a “temple of peace.” Directly in front of the chapel, in the square, stands his sculpture, The Man with the Lamb, which he had donated to the town hall. The two large canvases form a juxtaposition between harmony, Picasso’s eternal dream, and the horror he had often experienced. In the painting, which features war, an apocalyptic chariot drawn by infernal horses rains death and ruin upon a standing warrior, who defends himself with a shield from this assault. The painting is executed in violent, dissonant colors, in which black and a poisonous green contrast with a bloody red.
The other painting, representing peace on the opposite wall, shows us a world where anything is possible: the central symbol is a winged horse, the ancient Pegasus, symbolizing poetry and myth, and it is guided by a young boy holding the reins. Around it, a multitude of figures closely reminiscent of the great painting “Joy of Life” (such as the flute player on the left) form an idyllic scene against a blue background: one part immersed in calm contemplation (the Apollonian side of that happiness), the other instead immersed in an ecstatic dance, which acts as a counterweight to the moment of contemplation; and at the same time, it elevates the two sides of Picasso’s conception of life into a mythological sphere.
Even in these later works, as in Massacre in Korea, we find his answer to the question of why he depicted the horrible scenes of the Disasters of War:
«To at least have the satisfaction of continually exhorting men not to be barbarians».
