PICASSO'S GUERNICA: or why you should always see a painting in real.

Everytime I go to a city I try to make the most of its museums and art. It is not different for Madrid, where I went for a couple of days last week. And it's crazy, but I had no idea that I could find there one of the most important work of art of XXth century: Picasso's GUERNICA.

The painting is in the Museo de la Reina Sofia, which is near the Atocha train station. When I learned that Picasso's Guernica was there (I imagine it was in US, UK or France - I don't know why), I decided to make it my priority on my to do list. And I don't regret it.

                        [Source]

First of all, it is MASSIVE. It is not allowed to take a photo, but imagine the biggest wall in your house. The biggest! Well, it's bigger than that for sure! And suddenly, the significance and the meaning of the whole painting hit me in the face. And that felt good! 

What is fascinating about it and what I learned thanks to the museum is that the action happens simultaneously inside and outside. The new type of war going on in Spain in 1936 involved not only armies but also whole populations, who were not safe from attack and extermination. Death could come from any place and no one was safe. That's the first lesson from the painting.

Even though Picasso always refused to discuss the symbols used in his painting, we can assign meaning easily to the bull, with its dull and unforgiving stare, it cannot be anything else than the brute forces of man, the fascists soldiers dropping bombs on a defenseless village of Northern Spain.

                                      

In his shadow, we find a mother clutching the lifeless body of her baby. She cries to the sky, she is distraught, she is the epitome of suffering (Picasso, by the way, said that women were - in his opinion - a machine of suffering).

             

Spread along the floor, covering half the painting, there is a man, the only man of the painting, obviously dead with his arm cut off and his sword broken. 

Above him is a horse who is completely mad, probably hurt by the bomb (you can see his belly pierced by some kind of arrow or shrapnell).

                                

Above the horse, you can see a lamp. But is it really a lamp? When I said that the painting blurs the borders between inside and outside, this is exactly the point: the lamp is inside, but it could represent also an exploding bomb, as testified by the acute darts of light surrounding it. The light it shows has nothing comforting at all, it is threatening, it is cutting.

                                            

Then, in the right part of the painting, you have three more women. One is propping herself out from a window, holding an oil lamp to see what is happening. Aghast, she contemplates the carnage with a hand on her bosom.

Next to her, there is another one who - like a rhyme with the mother on the other side - is shouting, her face straight to the sky, and we can see a fire on the summit of a building. 

                                    

Below them, a woman looks like running in the street, in the same kind of astonishment and anguish as all of them, unable to take the full measure of everything that has happened to her village.

There is much, much more to understand from that painting, but that's just a rough guideline to help anyone to understand this picture and put to rest - once and for all - that Picasso was just painting absurdities. He was an artist who could see stuff no one else could and left absolutely nothing to chance!

Interestingly, there was as well somewhere in the museum a "pastiche/hommage" of Guernica by the artist Millôr Fernandes showing what - in his eye - was going on in the same frame, just ONE MINUTE BEFORE and this one, it was allowed to take a photo:

It's not always easy to fall in love with a painting on a magazine page. That's why we should always see a painting in its true form. This is the only way you can properly judge it and feel it.