Guernica By Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born into a poor family in southern Spain in 1881. He started as a child prodigy and ended as the greatest painter of his time. Picasso received early training with his father, a small-town drawing teacher. Picasso showed that he had natural talent and had taken his father’s teaching to a new level. After some time in and out of sessions at art school in Madrid and Barcelona, Picasso spent the rest of his adolescence associating with a group of Catalan modernists who met and worked together at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. After some time there, he moved to Paris, where he quickly found of like-minded poets and painters. His work during that time began to attract serious critical attention and acclaim by the time he was twenty.

The lack of color brings so much more out of it. The lack of color intensifies the drama, causing one to remember it so clearly. Guernica is blue, black and white, 3.5 meters (11 ft.) tall and 7.8 meters (25.6 ft.) wide, a mural-size canvas painted in oil. This painting can be seen at the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid. The disaster caused by the bombing in Guernica can be seen so clearly in the painting. Humans and animals scrambled together in a background of broken and very harsh geometric shapes, sending us back to Picasso’s Cubist period. The newspaper print background texture of the horse in Guernica also takes us back to Picasso's early "Journal" Cubist artwork. The painting is monochromatic and the predominant "color" is mostly black, symbolizing perhaps death

What did Picasso really intend to portray when he created such a powerful piece? Did he simply do it as his own way of dealing with grief, or was it a stance he wanted to make on the horrific acts of war? When questioned about the possible symbolisms of Guernica, Picasso said it was simply a plea to people about massacred people and animals. Picasso said, “In the panel on which I am working, which I call Guernica, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain into an ocean of pain and death.” Two very strong figures in Guernica re the horse and bull, which are images that Picasso used for most of his career. This goes back to when he was a child and first saw life and death in Spanish bullfighting. Some scholars depict the horse and bull as characterizing the horrible battles between the Republican fighters and Franco’s fascist army. When asked, Picasso said that the bull portrayed darkness and sadness. He said, “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words. The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.” Picasso created this as homage to Guernica and hoped people would make their own interpretations of his symbols and creations in the