Pablo Guernica Visual Analysis

Art is a part of our daily life and is present in numerous cultures across the world. It can affect our mood in a positive or disturbing way. Art provides us with a broad understanding of self-awareness and emotions. It allows us to express our imagination and human creative skills. Art grants us a distinct insight into our history. Pablo Picasso is one of the most profound artist of the twentieth century, but was deeply rooted in the art of the past. Guernica is powerful because of color and lighting, symbolism, and use of line. Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, in Malaga, Spain, in 1881. His full name is Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito

The work is seen as a mixture of epic and rustic styles. It relies on a central pyramidal design and is painted in black, gray, and whites. The lack of color “generates a quality as if in a photographic record” (Payne 148-149). At the center of the canvas is a dying horse penetrated by a spear dropped or slung from above. At the left stands an unmoved bull who examines the scene. Between the heads of the horse and the bull is a bird with an open beak. Above, to the right a figure slants from a window detaining a lamp which throws light upon the carnage and over all glows an eye with an electric bulb for a pupil. At the right of the picture a woman is seen with raised arms falling from a burning house, another hurrying in toward the center of the canvas. To the left a mother with a dead child and on the ground the useless fragments of a warrior’s figure, one hand grasping a broken sword near which a flower grows. Most of the drawing is flat in effect with irregular foreshortening in the mouth of the horse or in the hands of the fallen warrior. There are indications of space in the lines in the upper corners. The canvas is divided in half and the halves are cut by diagonals which form a triangle (Barr