Guernica Undergoes Another Thorough Exam at the Museo Reina Sofia

Monday, 21 July 2008 22:19

MADRID - A painting is a living being. And Guernica, also, has privileges. That is why it is treated, it is cared for and it is examined constantly. It is permanently looked after. The technicians at the Museo Reina Sofia are making the last check up. An x-ray that will help deepen into its wounds, its genes, the details of its life. Guernica’s has been a long one, stellar and intense, not like other paintings. Spanish newspaper El Pais had exclusive access to the last thorough exam done on the masterpiece made by Pablo Picasso. The last exam was made ten years ago.

It has suffered little damage since then apart from the normal passing of time. But the conclusion is clear: “It is stable under grave conditions”, says Jorge García Gómez-Tejedor, chief of the department of conservation and restoration at the Museo Reina Sofía, in Madrid.

Guernica is not just a painting. It is a symbol, a legend. A scream and an object more than sensible. The hopes of the new head of the museum, Manuel Borja-Villel, are that the painting has many powerful attractions to the museum. Guernica is a magnet. It irradiates the energy of great icons. It represents a whole emblem of which a whole new discourse has to be prepared, which this cultural representative has started to elaborate.

Guernica is a monumental painting by Pablo Picasso, depicting the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 250 and 1,600 people, and many more were injured.

The Spanish government commissioned Pablo Picasso to paint a large mural for the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition (the 1937 World's Fair in Paris). The Guernica bombing inspired Picasso. Within 15 days of the attack, Pablo Picasso began painting this mural. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour brought the Spanish civil war to the world's attention. Guernica epitomizes the tragedies of war and the suffering war inflicts upon individuals. This monumental work has eclipsed the bounds of a single time and place, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace.

Guernica is of remarkable size, solely black and white, 3.5 metre (11 ft) tall and 7.8 metre (23 ft) wide, a mural-size canvas painted in oil. Picasso's purpose in painting it was not to create the non-representational abstraction typical of some of his contemporaries, such as Kazimir Malevich. Guernica presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness without portraying their immediate causes. The choice to paint in black and white conveys the chronological nearness of a newspaper photograph and the lifelessness war affords. Guernica depicts suffering people, animals, and buildings wrenched by violence and chaos.

The overall scene is within a room where, at an open end on the left, a wide-eyed bull stands over a woman grieving over a dead child in her arms. The centre is occupied by a horse falling in agony as it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. The shape of a human skull forms the horse's nose and upper teeth. Two "hidden" images formed by the horse appear in Guernica. A human skull is overlayed on the horse's body.

A bull appears to gore the horse from underneath. The bull's head is formed mainly by the horse's entire front leg which has the knee on the ground. The leg's knee cap forms the head's nose. A horn appears within the horse's breast. Under the horse is a dead, apparently dismembered soldier, his hand on a severed arm still grasps a shattered sword from which a flower grows. A light bulb blazes in the shape of an eye over the suffering horse's head (the bare bulb of the torturer's cell.) To the upper right of the horse, a frightened female figure, who seems to be witnessing the scenes before her, appears to have floated into the room through a window. Her arm, also floating in, carries a flame-lit lamp.

From the right, an awe-struck woman staggers towards the center below the floating female figure. She looks up blankly into the blazing light bulb. Daggers that suggest screaming replace the tongues of the bull, grieving woman, and horse. A bird, possibly a dove, stands on a shelf behind the bull in panic. On the far right, a figure with arms raised in terror is entrapped by fire from above and below. A dark wall with an open door defines the right end of the mural.

There are stigmata (the supposed marks on the hands of those who have "suffered as Jesus") on the hands of the dead soldier. Picasso was not religious, although he was brought up in the predominantly Catholic Spain, and these symbols are not to be interpreted as Christian identification. This, instead, reflects the idea that all of us suffer often without cause. Here Picasso is using a well recognisable image to demonstrate how we are all like Christ, in that we all suffer and eventually die.

Interpretations of Guernica vary widely and contradict one another. This extends, for example, to the mural's two dominant elements: the bull and the horse. Art historian Patricia Failing said, "The bull and the horse are important characters in Spanish culture. Picasso himself certainly used these characters to play many different roles over time. This has made the task of interpreting the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very tough. Their relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in a variety of ways throughout Picasso's career."

When pressed to explain them in Guernica, Picasso said, "...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are."

Guernica was initially exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. The Pavilion, which was financed by the Spanish Republican government at the time of civil war, was built to exhibit the Spanish government's struggle for existence contrary to the Exposition's technology theme. The Pavilion's entrance presented an enormous photographic mural of Republican soldiers .

While living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, Picasso suffered harassment from the Gestapo. One officer allegedly asked him, upon seeing a photo of Guernica in his apartment, "Did you do that?" Picasso responded, "No, you did."

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