Right now I’m interning for an NGO based in Liverpool Street that has this peculiar tradition called “the brown bag lunch.” The basic concept being you get your lunch, packed up in a brown paper bag, and settle down around a table whilst one of your co-workers presents and leads a discussion on their chosen topic.
I’m told I might have to do one. A hot cross bun for anyone who can guess correctly what I’m thinking of doing mine on...
Clue: begins and ends with the same letter.
Yesterday’s topic was Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and the Geneva Convention. Not as random as it might sound initially as just down the road from the NGO’s office is Whitechapel Gallery which previously hosted Guernica when the canvas travelled to London in 1939 as part of a tour around European capitals sponsored by the Spanish Republican government to protest Nazi barbarism in the Spanish Civil War.
Guernica depicts the German carpet bombing of the Basque town of the same name during the Spanish Civil War on April 26th 1937. The bombardment lasted three hours, virtually obliterated the town and cost up to 1,600 civilian lives. Guernica was chosen not just because of its strategic location but also because of its Basque population; the Basques were exceptionally disliked by Franco’s fascists because they were stalwart devotees to Spanish republicanism.
A brown hued tapestry copy of Guernica was commissioned by American philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller, the creation of which was personally overseen by Picasso. The tapestry was subsequently donated by the Rockefeller estate to the United Nations in 1985 where it was hung in the entrance to the Security Council – an imposing reminder to world leaders of the horrors of war and a call to pacifism.
The tapestry is currently on loan to Whitechapel Gallery whilst renovation work is taking place at the UN and is the central part of Polish artist Goshka Macuga’s installation The Nature of the Beast. I was oblivious to the tapestry’s arrival until the “brown bag lunch.”
There are so many amazing aspects and angles to Picasso’s Guernica. It’s such a juicy work for one to sink the teeth of interpretation into. I offer a few of my own observations below, interspersed with others better known.
The stark contrasts of black and white, interspersed with shades of grey provide a heady metaphor concerning the contrasts of war and the stark reality of aggressive force juxtaposed with the suffering of innocents.
The horse and the bull are not just two signatures of Picasso but also two symbols of Spanish culture discernible from the traditional bullfights. Here the symbols of Spain are superimposed over one of its most horrific images of war – we are seeing the destruction of Spain itself. But also the depiction is an inversion of the usual conclusion of the bullfight; here the bull stands intact, almost triumphant, whilst the horse writhes in agony, its insides seemingly spurting out of a pierced gut.
The Bull, which is sometimes seen as a minotaur, is the only calm ‘being’ in the painting and yet its hybridism – part bull, part man or perhaps a bull, perhaps a man – but certainly possessing human eyes, makes it an unnatural creature, out of place in the pandemonium occurring around it and makes the creature almost repulsive.
Look at the bull’s left eye and it’s almost centrally placed – like a Cylcops’ – perhaps a metaphor for myopic tendencies.
The bull, or rather bulls (see below) tranquillity in the face of war and chaos, the bulls’ not being reigned in nor defeated by human action inverts the traditional classical depiction of man and bull, wherein man or new polities symbolically emerge from the bull’s death.
Think of the Iranian deity Mithra slaying the primordial bull from which to form the world. Theseus slaying the Minotaur thus emancipating Athens from Minoan Crete’s vassalage. There are other numerous examples...another blog perhaps.
Look closely at the horse’s front leg, the one bent at the knee onto the ground. You’ll notice the kneecap forms the nose of a second, hidden, bull’s head traceable in the angles of the horse’s leg and underbelly. Look even more closely at the horse’s nose and top set of teeth and you’ll discover a hidden skull.
Beneath the horse is a dead body; the left hand of which has a gaping wound, the stigma, and the right hand clutches a broken sword that suggests the German’s use of disproportionate force as well as the futility of war. A flower grows out of the shattered sabre, a silent and natural monument perhaps to the dead.
Over in the far corner is another Biblical image, that of a wailing mother holding her deceased child. Perhaps an inversion of the traditional depiction of the maternal Virgin Mary holding Christ the Child upon her knee – here corrupted whereby maternal instinct becomes motherly anguish. It could even be an inversion of the Pieta the renaissance Italy depiction of the Virgin Mary cradling Christ’s corpse, as depicted by Michelangelo.
Similarly the hope epitomised in the living depiction of the infant Jesus is here denied, as the child – the hope of a new generation – has been killed in infancy.
Between the bull and the horse one will notice a barely discernible bird completely enshrouded in darkness. Some claim it to be a dove, in Guernica peace is black and is obscured by the shadows. The light bulb’s filament appears to be an evil eye and its proximity to a candle suggests it hasn’t been depicted for lighting purposes. Rather it is a play on words that Picasso is after the Spanish for light bulb “bombilla” is close to “bomba” (bomb).
There are three characters in the painting’s far right all appear to be women. It has been argued that these three ‘women’ represent the three graces of classical mythology: charm, beauty and creativity. All attributes that are notably absent in both Guernica, the painting, and Guernica, the event.
The figure holding a lamp with a shocked or panic stricken expression is supposed to be an allusion to the Statue of Liberty, the candle here replacing Lady Liberty’s torch. The figure’s shocked expression nods to the disgust of enlightened nations to the atrocity. This figure has no tongue perhaps suggesting the silence of said disgust. The other two graces likewise lack tongues and perhaps talks of the victims’ death-imposed silence.
The figure seemingly reaching towards the heavens is bare breasted and naked, a hint that she was interrupted during some process. Picasso apparently used to pin a sheet of toilet paper to this character to emphasise her “toilet interruptus”.
Guernica’s most powerful aspect, on a personal level, is not just the stark colouring and frozen sense of panic or even that here is an atrocity caught in such a vivid state of occurrence that no photo could ever reproduce, but also because Picasso’s style, as well as the painting itself, were so suited to protesting the atrocities of Fascism who considered such an art form ‘degenerate’ but completely ignored the fact that the act which inspired the artwork was far worse than ‘degenerate.’
The painting is a pacifistic and powerful anti-war statement and it was for this reason that the tapestry was covered up with blue drapes on the occasion of Colin Powell’s press conference at the UN after his momentous “Let’s invade Iraq speech”.
You know...when he sat there...with a fake phial of anthrax...and said it was enough to kill
everyone in the room...and you wondered if he’d brought it to demonstrate, or threaten everyone to agree...
The excuse for the drapes “it interfered with the cameras’ lighting!
!!!
The best story about Guernica is perhaps the most famous associated with it. One day a Gestapo agent came to visit Picasso in Occupied Paris and pointing at a photograph of Guernica asked “Did you do that?” to which Picasso replied “No, you did.”
© Ara Iskanderian 29/5/2009
Next post should be up on Sunday.
