Sueno y mentira de Franco were cut on the 8th and 9th of January. The etchings are cartoons and were not reverse compositions, requiring them to be viewed from right to left. The composition resulted from the artist's earlier studies of surrealist possibilities in artistic expression. The central figure is a polyp. The polyp that is a non-descriptive creature represents the Caudillo. Some of the scenes of the et chings are comical, some are obscene, while some evoke a horror in the viewer.
Picasso received the Spanish pavilion commission January of 1937. With the energy and emotion that the bombing brought to Picasso, he completed the preliminary drawings in ten days. Guernica is in shades of gray and measures eleven feet, six inches by twenty-five feet, eight inches.
The painting is not from the perspective of the entire town and the fascist attack. Guernica is about human tragedy. A dark background surrounds what appears to be a representation of a public square in Guernica. A lamp, fashioned as an eye, has an electric bulb for an iris.
Picasso did not paint crowd scenes so there is no "grouping by function." The participants are a bull, a wounded horse, a winged bird, a dead soldier, and a woman leaning out of a window with a lamp to illumine the scene below. According to Arnheim, the characters are specific expressive attitudes and sentiments. The bull represents courage, pride, and stability. The horse is a figure of agony while the mother and perhaps the bird are representative of lamentation. The child symbolizes death. The warrior embodies a sense of collapse. The light bearer and the fugitive connote concern, anxiety, and quest. Panic is signified by the woman falling out of the building. Blunt (Picasso's Guernica)calls the female participants a Greek Chorus: A mother carrying her dead baby, a woman hurrying from the right, and one woman falling in a house that is in flames. This chorus is what carries forth the drama.
For the artist, women represent truth. An attack on women and children is an attack on the "the core of mankind." Women and children embodied innocence." They were defenseless victims. Women and children populated Guernica, at the time, since the men were all fighting at the front. The soldier is no more than a mannequin, whild the bull also remains rigidly in place. Picasso, like Chagall, was reticent about the meaning of his work. The symbolism found in the imagery of Guernica is not singular to Picasso. They have a long and complicated history in European art. According to the artist the horse represents the opele while the bull represents brutality and darkness. He refused to identify the bull with fascims; which shows the fluidity of Picasso's symbols.
The dominate motif of the painting, despite the action being carried out by the women, is the struggle between the horse and the bull. From his childhood, bullfights captivated Picasso. His earliest drawing, at age ten, was of a bullfight. Additionally, a number of oils executed subsequent to 1900 were also of bullfights; however, the symbolism of Picasso's work of the twenties and thirties was not present in these early representations. A difference in the bullfighting paintings of the artist's early career and his later work, beginning about 1917, concerns the style of the horse and bull. The fugures of the ezarly paintings were docile and painted in a contradictory scene of calmness in the midst of the arena. A scene of horror became commplace in Picasso's bullfight paintings and drawings at the beginning of the thirties. At the breakup of his marriage, Picasso virtually abandoned painting for a period and issued forth his emotions in a number of drawings and etchings. Sometimes the savageness of the bull dominated, or the figures breakup into a cubistic style with bull, horse, and matador in a distorted fashion. The audience, in attendance, becomes a more important factor in the paintings of the twenties.
By the next decad Picasso began increasingly to use images that would reappear, particularly in Guernica, such as the girl with a lamp in The Bullfight, drawn in 1935. The Minotaur begain to appear, already quite popular with the surrealist. The Minotaur sometimes is meancing and vicious and other times portrayed as a calm and tame beast. During this period in the artist work the juxtapostion of good and evil became an imprtant theme. The bull or Minotaur on one hand and on the other a horse or girl portrayed the two opposites.
Picasso generally avoided paintings of direct religious subjects; however, just prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he produced a number of etchings and one painting depicting the crucifixion. Picasso's thirties painting Crucifixion contains all of the normal elements of such a depiction: Christ on the cross, the soldiers, and the women present at the crucifixion. His departure from traditional painting, however, allows for a distortion of the figures. A man is shown pulling the nails from Christ hands and Mary Magdalen is shown without arms, an image to reappear in Guernica. The series of crucifixion drawings, completed in 1932, are from a study of the Isenheim altarpiece by Grunewald. Blunt states that Picasso would continually turn to the Grunewald altarpiece when faced with a period of stress; although none of the elements found in these drawings appear in Guernica.
Dora Maar recorded the progress of Picasso's masterpiece. Of the preliminary studies, forty-five remain intact. Picasso numbered the photographs made in sequence on a single day. The preminiary drawings for the painting took ten days with actual work on Guernica beginning on 11 May, 1937.
Interestingly, the scene presented shows none of the population of Guernica, which at the time of the bombing had a population of 10,000 people. The composition does not include the attackers. This absence allows the painter to focus on the true intent of the painting, which is not a recording of the brutal attack on a defenseless town but on the greater motif of suffering and of hope.
The attack took plac e at four in the afternoon; yet Picasso chose to paint a black sky. The only part of the town is the schematic buildings around the image of a perceived town square. The bull to the left of the canvas looks away from the woman with the lamp. The horse is in front of the bull and has a twisted head and neck extended forwad and down. To the right is a burning building with a woman falling out of the window, with outstretched arms. To the left and underneath the head of the bull is a mother with a dead child. On the right a woman thrust her head forward in terror. In the foreground is a woman lying next to a dead bird, next to her arm, and a plant growing near her head. To her left is a dead soldier. The focus of the foreground is the soldier whose left hand is gripping a sword. He raises his right arm with a clenched fist. The raised fist takes on a greater significance in the final composition than it did in preliminary studies. It becomes a strong perpendicular element in the composition that is stronger with the parallel axis of the lamp. Guernica does follow a tradition geometric scheme. There are several triangular patterns formed early in the execution of the compostion and maintained throughout its completion. After the exposition Guernica exhibited in Scandinavia, England, and the United States, with hope that it would awaken the world to the dangers of Franco in Spain.
For the artist, Guernica was "an offensive and a defensive weapon in the fight against the enemy." The painting, however, was too late to affect the outcome of the Civil War in Spain; but remains a symbol of suffering and hope in the world.
