Picasso and War

In an article where some of the themes relate to our George Bellows exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, Alan Riding in the New York Times reviews "Picasso: Tradition and Avant-Garde." The Picasso exhibition runs through early September, and is uniquely installed in two major spaces: the Prado and the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid's principal gallery for modern and contemporary art.

This section of Mr. Riding's Picasso review is especially relevant for the themes in our Bellows show:

In the Reina Sofía, which recently added a modern annex designed by Jean Nouvel to its 18th-century quarters in a former hospital, it is "Guernica" that holds court. This vast oil was painted in Paris in May and June 1937, immediately after the April 27 bombing of the Spanish Basque city of Guernica by the German Luftwaffe caused widespread destruction and death.

A fierce denunciation of Nazi Germany's support for Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War, the painting was displayed in the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris and was sent on tour to raise funds for the Republican cause. When Germany occupied France in 1940, "Guernica" was in the United States. Because Picasso decreed that it could go to Spain only after Franco's death, it remained — except for some trips to Europe — at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 1981.

Accompanying the Reina Sofía's show are some 50 preparatory drawings for "Guernica," many of them depicting Picasso's famous weeping women (although no weeping woman actually appears in "Guernica"). But at the heart of this display, in what almost resembles a shrine, are four major works: "Guernica" faces Goya's "Third of May 1808 in Madrid: The Executions on Príncipe Pío," and Manet's "Execution of Emperor Maximilian" looks out at Picasso's "Massacre in Korea."

Picasso's protest against American killings of civilians in the Korean War borrows its composition from Manet's large painting, while the central figure in Goya's work — a man in a white shirt throwing his arms in the air in despair — also appears in a stylized form in "Guernica." Yet these considerations seems less important than the emotional impact of bringing these paintings together.

They are art, but they speak about humanity.

images: Musée Picasso, Paris, top; Kunsthalle Mannheim, bottom.
At top, in a Spanish retrospective of Picasso, his "Massacre at Korea" is being shown at the Reina Sofía with "Guernica" and other antiwar works, including, above, Manet's "Execution of Emperor Maximilian."