Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. One of Picasso's best-known works, Guernica is regarded by many art critics as one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history. It is exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain.
The gray, black, and white painting, which is 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) across, portrays the suffering of people and animals wrought by violence and chaos. Prominent in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, dismemberment, and flames.
Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. Upon completion, Guernica was exhibited at the Spanish display at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, and then at other venues around the world. The touring exhibition was used to raise funds for Spanish war relief. The painting soon became famous and widely acclaimed, and it helped bring worldwide attention to the Spanish Civil War.
Guernica provides examples of:
- Artistic Licence – Anatomy: Like many Picasso paintings, people are depicted as geometric shapes. However, in this painting it is used to emphasise the chaos that befell Guernica.
- Civil War: Guernica is titled after a Basque town that was bombed as a consequence of the fighting between the Nationalists and Republicans during the Spanish Civil War by the Germans and the Italians, who had backed the Nationalist side.
- Death of a Child: To reinforce that not even innocents are spared by war, a mother cries over her dead baby.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The painting is composed entirely in greyscale. Many scholars believe that this was done to create a somber mood. Others think it's meant to evoke a newspaper photograph.
- Faceless Eye: At the top of the sky is a large eye with a light bulb for a pupil.
- One-Word Title: The painting is simply titled Guernica.
- The Place: The painting is named after Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain.
- Rule of Symbolism: While Picasso denies any intentional symbolism, artistic scholars have still tried their best to make sense of it anyway.
- The Cubist chaotic bramble of the various character's anatomy is meant as an artistic act of protest against the war.
- The collapsed buildings represent the destructive rewards of war itself.
- The light bulb in the painting represents the sun. An alternate theory is that it's a Visual Pun on bomb; the Spanish word for "lightbulb" is bombilla, a diminutive form of the word for "bomb", bomba.
- The broken sword near the bottom of the painting symbolizes the defeat of the people at the hand of their tormentors.
- The bull and horse are both animals that have strong cultural ties to Spain and have been used in various other of Picasso's pieces. With both of them in the piece, they have often been read as two different aspects of Spain itself in conflict with each other; the bull representing Fascism, the horse representing the people of Guernica, and the war their rampage.
- War Is Hell: It portrays the suffering of people and animals wrought by the violence and chaos of war. Prominent in the composition are a gored horse, screaming women, dismemberment, and flames.
