ART CRITIQUE: PABLO PICASSO’S GUERNICA

Pablo Picasso, a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet and playwright, who
spent most of his adult life in France, had created Guernica –the world’s greatest anti-
war painting. It is said that the artwork serves as an avenue for Picasso to show the
brutality of Spanish civil war.

Guernica, the title of the painting, was the name of the city in which the Nazi has
bombed during the war. Despite the painting being dependent on a real event, Picasso
was not hindered to use arts to flaunt his concrete opinions about the condition of his
country. He wanted to use the painting as a platform for the people to see how hostile
their government is and to make them realize that some people are just scared and
painfully destroyed to fight back the administration. The main goal of Picasso in painting
Guernica is to show how horrible their situation is during the battle.

Picasso has used cubism as its art movement with its disquieting representation
of space. The painting was not easy to read because of a braying horse occupying the
painting’s center, stumbling over its fallen rider sprawled below and was lit by spiked
rays of a light bulb above, and many more different aspects and objects overlapping
within it. The meaning behind the abstracted painting was not clearly stated by Picasso
however, because of its complex composition, it brought different views to the audience.
With this, the painting generated the most horrifying scene in the war specifically, how
the war made innocent individual’s lives, physically and emotionally, into a miserable
one. It was also depicted how the war had turn into a massacre one as shown in the
mother’s face with a tear in her eyes before her dead child. Despite showing the
situation of the Spanish civilians during the war, Picasso, through his painting, was able
to share his emotional views about the place where he has originally been raised.

As what other reviewers tell about Guernica, it is indeed the world’s greatest anti-
war painting ever made in the history. It has been surely made that this artwork would
be an avenue for the people to see and to remember how the Spanish civil war made
the lives of the citizens a horrible one.