Pablo Picasso Rhetorical Analysis Chapter 12

Naomi Boldt
ARH 202
December 12, 2014
Chapter 24
Pablo Picasso declared that “Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy”. Art had been utilized as a means of depicting sociopolitical concerns in the past but the twentieth century artists wielded it to a much further extent. They endeavored to expose the harshness of reality. As war afflicted Europe, art became a revelation of the human condition and it had a visceral intensity never quite seen before in history.
In the turbulent social and political period leading up to and during the First World War, nationalism swept through Europe. One of the few expressions of sentimentality was through the aptly named art movement:

The scene is of a forest fire, depicting chaos and destruction. Animals fling themselves across the canvas in jarring color: a blue deer, green horses, red boars, and orange foxes. Pessimistic about humanity, Marc turned to animals in his early work to represent purity and inner truth. It is those ideals, perhaps, that are being ravaged in this apocalyptic event.
Kathe Kollwitz initially derived the theme of her most powerful piece from the Pieta. She presents a mother holding onto her dead child. Unlike the style of many expressionists, Kollwitz let the color drain from the image, letting line and form bear the ferocity and hopeless despair of maternal grief. The child is limp, the muscular body of the mother crumpled over it. The print is a penetrating view of the woman’s broken emotional state and immeasurable pain. Confronting the cruelty of loss, Kollwitz evoked compassion and conscience in her

Over time, both became disillusioned. The Night encapsulates the sadism Beckmann came to see in society. A man is being hung from the ceiling of his home. A woman is bound and raped. A child is being kidnapped. The entire scene is twisted and distorted to depict what Beckmann saw as deformed and sadistic human character. Dix’s triptych is a grim altarpiece to war. The bleak landscape shows the vast destruction inflicted upon the earth and upon humanity.
Elsewhere in Europe and years later, Spain was in the throes of civil war. In 1937, an air raid razed the city of Guernica. Cubist artist Picasso captured the violence in monumental scale. Like Kollwitz, he painted only in grayish tones. Women are fleeing from burning buildings. Another is shrieking over the body of her slain child. A maddened horse crushes a fallen warrior who still holds his broken and useless sword. The painting illuminated the horrors of the Spanish Civil War for the rest of the world. It became a plea against the savagery of war and a memorial to what occurred in