©Pablo Picasso - Guernica 1937

Dream and Lie of Franco 1937 Great bather reading 1937 Dream and Lie of Franco 1937 Guernica 1937 Leaning woman 1937 Minotaur is wounded 1937 On the Beach 1937
Guernica 1937

Guernica 1937
349x776cm oil/canvas
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes

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From Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid:
An accurate depiction of a cruel, dramatic situation, Guernica was created to be part of the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris in 1937. Pablo Picasso’s motivation for painting the scene in this great work was the news of the German aerial bombing of the Basque town whose name the piece bears, which the artist had seen in the dramatic photographs published in various periodicals, including the French newspaper L'Humanité. Despite that, neither the studies nor the finished picture contain a single allusion to a specific event, constituting instead a generic plea against the barbarity and terror of war. The huge picture is conceived as a giant poster, testimony to the horror that the Spanish Civil War was causing and a forewarning of what was to come in the Second World War. The muted colours, the intensity of each and every one of the motifs and the way they are articulated are all essential to the extreme tragedy of the scene, which would become the emblem for all the devastating tragedies of modern society.
Paloma Esteban Leal