"Guernica"

Pablo Picasso’s cubism was created to show all sides of an object at one time. It was intended to engage the viewer with the complete artwork. Guernica is a painting in which Picasso not only engages the viewer but also the viewer’s feelings and mind.

As you look over the painting, one of the first things you see is the mass confusion by the characters in the painting. A mass confusion that the people of Guernica, Spain must have felt when attacked by the German and Italian militaries. The second thing you noticed is the pain and anguish of the people in the painting. The first time I saw this painting was about fifteen years ago and I thought that the painting was so hideous that I could not look at it. But something about the painting called back to my emotions and I had to look again. It was almost as if the pain in the painting needed me to feel it. I still consider this a hideous work but it is also one of Picasso’s greatest because he not only captured the chaos of war but the pain of war. The light that is also an eye shows what Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was doing to it’s own people. They were spying into the intimate details of the people’s lives and controlling them through fear and pain. This painting shows the evils of all wars and should be something everyone should see and have explained to them. Picasso was not painting a picture here. He was putting the viewer inside the evil of war. War that had destroyed a family, a village, a country and even affected and was trying to destroy a world. It would be a great thing if all people understood the true evil of war. That war destroys not only evil but good and it leaves lasting pain, sorrow and loneliness. Unfortunately our leaders of today have not learned from Guernica the painting or the town.