Présentation de la peinture Guernica de Picasso (document en anglais)

Guernica is a mural-sized oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso completed by June 1937.[1] The painting, which uses a palette of gray, black, and white, is known as one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history.[2] Standing at 11 feet tall and 25.6 feet wide, the large mural shows the suffering of people, animals, and buildings wrenched by violence and chaos.

The painting is believed to be a response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country village in northern Spain, by German and Italian warplanes at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. Upon completion, Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed, and believed to have helped bring worldwide attention to the Spanish Civil War.

Contents

Commission

Composition

Significance and legacy

Symbolism and interpretations

Historical context

Exhibition

1937 Paris International Exhibition

European tour

At the United Nations

References and sources

External links

CommissionEdit

In January 1937, the Spanish Republican government commissioned Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. At the time, Picasso was living in Paris, where he had been named Honorary Director-in-Exile of the Prado Museum. He had last visited Spain in 1934 and never returned.[1] However, it was only on May 1, having read George Steer's eyewitness account of the bombing of Guernica (originally published in both The Times and The New York Times on April 28), that he abandoned his initial project and started sketching a series of preliminary drawings for Guernica,[3] and which he would finish in early June 1937.

CompositionEdit

The overall scene is within a room where, at an open end on the left, a wide-eyed bull stands over a woman grieving over a dead child in her arms. The center is occupied by a horse falling in agony as it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. The large gaping wound in the horse's side is a major focus of the painting. Under the horse is a dead, apparently dismembered soldier; his hand on a severed arm still grasps a shattered sword from which a flower grows. On the open palm of the dead soldier is a stigma, a symbol of martyrdom derived from the stigmata of Christ. A light bulb blazes in the shape of an evil eye over the suffering horse's head (the bare bulb of the torturer's cell). Picasso's intended symbolism in regards to this object is related to the Spanish word for lightbulb; "bombilla", which is similar to the word "bomba" for bomb in Spanish.

To the upper right of the horse, a frightened female figure, who seems to be witnessing the scenes before her, appears to have floated into the room through a window. Her arm, also floating in,

...