Guernica
DETAILS
Introduction (Area)
The exhibition commemorates the eightieth anniversary of Guernica’s first showing, has the great mural at his heart. It looks again at Picasso’s imagining of modern warfare – was from the air, death from a distance, aimed at the destruction of whole populations – and the special kinds of agony, bewilderment, and terror such warfare brings with it. In particular, the exhibition focuses on the roots of Guernica’s imagery in Picasso’s previous exploration, during the years following 1925, of scenes of frenzied or ecstatic human action, often tinged with menace and sometimes tipping over into outright violence: wild dancing, ominous confrontation between artist and model, monstrous sexual grapplings on the beach, women wedged in armchairs with their mouths open in a scream or a predatory roar. LEAFLET VIDEO
Room intro i. intern... ... (Area)
In April 1936, Spain was invited to take part in the International Exposition of Art an Technology in Modern Life, to be held in Paris the following year. Against the backdrop of the Civil War and the drana then affecting the country, Josep renau, Director-General of Fine Arts, devised a whole program around plastic arts, folklore and popular art. When in early 1937 Pablo was asked to produce a painting for the Spanish Pavilion, he told the Republic's delegates that he was not sure he could do the kind of picture they wanted. LEAFLET VIDEO
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On April 26, 1937, the small town of Gernika, the symbol of liberties of the Basque people, was destroyed by the German aviation at the service of General Franco. For the first time in military history, an attack was aimed exclusively at the civil population in a deliberate attempt to cause as many casualties as possible. A market day was therefore chosen for the bombing. The demonstration of May 1, 1937, on the occasion of the celebration of International Labor Day, became a massive repulse to the attack of Gernika. It was attended by intellectuals and Spanish artists residing in Paris, including Picasso. That same day is dated the first preparatory drawing of Guernica. LEAFLET VIDEO
Room 1. the world is... ... (Area)
Even before Cubism, Picasso's art had been rooted in the reality of the room. Cubism itself was a hymn to proximity and familiarity, with its small world of objects pressed close to the picture plane, inviting our touch. Life was pleasure; life was intimacy; life was private property. The Cubist world, for all its strangeness, was made from nineteenthcentury materials. LEAFLET VIDEO
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1925 marks a turning point in Picasso's art. The Three Dancers, which Picasso later declared the best painting he had ever done signaled the irruption of wildness, darkness, and dismemberment into the world of the room. Agonized figures replaced liquor bottles and guitars. In the years that followed, terror becomes a constant theme – the terror inflicted on the women portrayed, who are so often wedged into armchairs like victims in a torture chamber, but also the terror provoked in by the women's staring, shrieking faces. LEAFLET VIDEO
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It did not take long, once had turned Picasso's art in the direction of the terrible, for his pictures to be populated by looming, threatening faces. The Centre Pompidou's is one of the earliest and starkest examples: the hopeless snarling creature, painted in black-and-white, taps its snout against the window pane, trying to enter the room. Picasso once said to Malraux: “When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair, it's old age and death, isn't it? Too bad for her.” LEAFLET VIDEO
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As 1930 approached, Picasso's creatures became more massive and self-sufficient, stepping out into a wider world. What should we call the strange beings that Picasso put in this space at the edge of the sea? Are they monsters? Perhaps – but what do we mean by “monstrosity”? Picasso believed that monstrosity – even the violent and threatening kind – was part of the self. It ought to be recognized and represented. Maybe the world would be a saner place, his art suggested, if it possessed a set of public representations of human fears, buffoonery, capacities for evil. LEAFLET VIDEO
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Sometimes in Picasso's work the space of the room is overtaken by nightmarish brutality. For much of 1934 murder and horror engulf the artist's sketchbooks: body parts on beds are reassembled into monstrous sculptures, deathly black swallows hurtle in through windows, Charlotte Corday slashes at Marat's throat. Picasso thought cruelty a basic human characteristic. The only episode of the Christian story he chose to illustrate was the Crucifixion. LEAFLET VIDEO
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Initially after agreeing to send a canvas to the Spanish Pavilion, Picasso work on a reprise of a favourite subject, the studio. Then came the bombing of Gernika. Picasso began again, finding his way towards a representation that would be public, yet also domestic: political, yet deeply familiar as a figuration of Spain. Now women took centre stage – not as models or monsters, but as active forces in the everyday world of war, mothers whose children bleed and die in their arms. LEAFLET VIDEO
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In Guernica, two central “themes” of the work Picasso had done during the previous decade – the fragile intimacy of a room's four walls, and the terrors that more and more put such a place of safety at risk – came together and assumed epic form. Just as fundamentally, Picasso struggled to find a new form for terror. He had to draw on all his previous imaginings of monstrosity, but somehow retune them to the key of compassion. LEAFLET VIDEO
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Picasso's attitude to death, like his attitude to the century he lived in, defies any neat summing up. Many witnesses testify to Picasso's unwillingness to face mortality, at least in practical and verbal terms. He died intestate. But his work is haunted by death – the skull is a constant companion. The death's head becomes an insistent presence in Picasso's art in 1939. It persists as a motif throughout World War II and into the first years of post-war recovery. LEAFLET VIDEO
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It took years for Picasso to escape from 's spell. The “Weeping Women” were 's sequel, and the portraits of Dora Maar that followed were essentially variations on the same theme. “An artist isn't as free as you might think. For me Dora Maar was a woman who weeps. For years I painted her in tortured forms, not out of sadism or because it gave me pleasure. I could only follow the vision that imposed itself on me. This was Dora's profound reality.” LEAFLET VIDEO
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Perhaps the greatest – and certainly the most grave – of Dora Maar's “portraits” is that done in the spring and early summer of 1940. It was painted in Royan, a small seaside town at the mouth of the Gironde estuary, to which Picasso had fled in September 1939. The date of the picture's completion, which Picasso wrote on the stretcher, is 19 June 1940. The Luftwaffe had bombed Paris's airports on 3 June. LEAFLET VIDEO
Archive (Area)
One writer said of Guernica that in it the world had been “changed into a furnished room, where all of us, gesticulating, wait for death”. Since 1937, generations of viewers across the globe have found the painting's image of terror indispensable – maybe even cathartic. This exhibition asks why. It is clear that Guernica's epic, compassionate treatment of violence moves beyond the dangerous fascination with the subject that had characterized much of Picasso's work during the late 1920s and early 1930s. But would have been possible without that previous fixation? LEAFLET VIDEO
Exhibition credits (Area)
Organizer by: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía With the support of: Musée National Picasso-Paris With the collaboration of: Acción Cultural Española AC/E Comunidad de Madrid ADIF Sponsors: RENFE Albertis. Curatorship: Timothy James Clark Anne M. Wagner LEAFLET VIDEO