Guernica by Pablo Picasso

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Guernica by Pablo Picasso “Gateways to Art” textbook pg. 545 This oil painting is black and white and is on a mural size canvas of about 11.5 feet tall and 25.6 feet wide. At the left hand side of the painting there is a bull standing of a woman who is crying out with a dead child in her arms. In the center of the painting there is a horse in pain with a spear poking out of him. The body of the horse appears to have markings on it. There is also a hidden image overlaying the horse which took me a while to find. The horse’s front leg with its knee on the ground outlines a bull’s head directly underneath the body of the horse. The horse’s kneecap looks like the bull’s nose. The bull’s tail on the left-hand side of the painting looks like it is on fire. On the far right side is a person with their arms stretched up with flames above and below him. I’m not sure, but it looks as though his right hand sort of takes on the shape of an airplane. Underneath the horse is a dead soldier who is still grasping his sword in his right hand with a flower growing out of it. Above the suffering horse’s head is a light bulb. To the upper right-hand side of the horse there is a female figure that appears to have floated into the room. Her right arm is extended and is carrying a lamp. If you look close enough you can see a dove behind the bull kind of flying up towards the sky. I believe Picasso chose to do this painting in black and white because it gives more of a gloomy tone and it also gives a greater emphasis on the many different shapes involved in the painting. Also, by painting his artwork on a large scale, I believe Picasso wanted to voice the pain and suffering of the citizens of Spain in a large way. I interpreted the dead child in the woman’s hands to symbolize how painful and unfair war is. Moving along to the center of the painting I see a horse with what appears to be
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