Art
(1) The French artist Georges Braque (1882-1963) once said. “In
art there can be no effect without twisting the truth.” While not all artists would
agree with him, Braque, who with Pablo Picasso originated the cubist style,
“saw” things from a different perspective than the rest of us, and he
expressed his vision in his paintings. All art is an interpretation of what the
artist sees. It is filtered through the eyes of the artist and influenced by his or
her own perceptions.
(2) Throughout history, artists have applied their craft to advance
religious, social, and political visual arguments. Portraits of kings and queens
present how the monarchs wanted their people to see them, with symbolic
tools of power such as scepters, crowns and rich vestments. Art in Churches
and cathedrals was used as a means of visual instruction for people who
could not read. Much modern art reveals impressions feelings and emotions
without remaining faithful to the actual thing depicted. While entire books are
written about the meaning and function of art, let’s examine how one
particular artist, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), created a visual argument.
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica
(3) Pablo Picasso, with fellow artist Georges Braque, invented a
style of painting known as cubism. Cubism is based on the idea that the eye
observes things from continually changing viewpoints, as fragments of a
whole. Cubism aims to represent the essential reality of forms from multiple
perspective angles. Thus, cubist paintings don’t show reality as we see it.
Rather, they depict pieces of people, places, and things in an unstable field of
vision.
(4) Picasso’s painting Guernica represents the essence of cubism.
During the Spanish Civil war, the German air force bombed the town of
Guernica, the cultural center of the Basque region in northern Spain and a
Loyalist stronghold. In only a few minutes on April 26, 1937, hundreds of men,
women and children were massacred in the deadly air strike. Two months
later, Picasso expressed his outrage at the attack in a mural he titled simply,
Guernica.
Who is Picasso’s Target Audience?
(5) Knowing the history of the painting can help us understand
whom Picasso was trying to reach. In January 1937, Picasso was
commissioned to paint a mural for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts
et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, an art exhibition to open in France in
May of the same year. Although he had never been a political person, the
atrocity of Guernica in April compelled him to express his anger and appeal to
the world.
(6) Before the mural went to display, some politicians tried to
replace it with less “offensive” piece of art. When the picture was unveiled at
the opening of the expo, it was received poorly. One Critic described it as “the
work of madman.” Picasso had hoped that his work would shock people. He
wanted the outside world to care about what happened at Guernica.
However, Picasso may have misjudged his first audience, In 1937, Europe
was in the brick of world war. Many people were in denial that the war could
touch them and preferred to ignore the possibility that it was imminent. It was
this audience who first viewed Guernica---an audience that didn’t want to see
a mural about warm an audience that was trying to avoid the inevitable. Years
later the mural would become one of the most critically acclaimed works of art
of the twentieth century.
What Claims Is Picasso Making in the Image?
(7) Picasso’s painting comprises many images that make up an
entire scene. It depicts simultaneously events that happened over a period of
time. The overall claim is that war itself is horrible. The smaller claims
address the injustice of Guernica more directly. A mother wails in grief over
her dead infant a reminder that the bombing of Guernica was a massacre of
innocent. Picasso also chose to paint his mural in black and white, giving it
the aura of a newspaper, especially in the body of the horse. He could be
saying, “This is news” or “This is a current event that you should think about.”
(8) It should be mentioned that Picasso created many version of the
images in the mural, carefully considering their position, placement, and
expression, sometimes drawing eight or nine versions of a single subject. He
thoughtfully considered how the images would convey his message before he
painted them in the mural.
What Shared History or Cultural Assumptions Does Picasso Make?
(9) The assumptions in any argument are the principles or beliefs
that the audience takes for granted. These assumptions implicitly connect the
claim to the evidence. By naming his mural Guernica, Picasso knew that
people would make an immediate connection between the chaos on the wall
and the events of April 26, 1937. He also assumed that the people viewing
the painting would be upset by it, In addition, there are symbols in the painting
that would have been recognized by the people at the time such as the figure
of the bull in the upper-left-hand corner of the mural, a long-time symbol for
the Spain.
What is Picasso’s Supporting Evidence?
(10) Although Picasso was illustrating a real event, cubism allowed
him to paint “truth” rather than “reality.” If Picasso was trying to depict the
horror of Guernica and by extension, the terror and chaos of war, all the
components of his mural serve as supporting evidence. The wailing figures
panicked faces, the darkness contrasted by jumbled images of light all project
the horror of war. Even the horse looks terrified. Overall, Guernica captures
the emotional cacophony of war. Picasso wasn’t just trying to say, “War is
hell.” He was also trying to impress upon his audience that such atrocities
should never happen again. In essence, Picasso was making an appeal for
peace by showing its opposite the carnage of war.