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Why Pablo Picasso's Guernica inspires memorials

2023-05-27T10:02:49.762Z

Highlights: "Guernica" was painted by Picasso in 1937 in repudiation of the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. In 1947, ten years after the work was completed, a conference was held at the MoMA to establish a definitive interpretation. In this painting the subject did not lose to the forms and these did not renounce politics. It worked for all positions, both those that defended the legitimacy of linking art with politics, and those that maintained its most complete autonomy.


The essayist, a great connoisseur of Picasso and political art, ponders the work: its visual detours open new paths to art and shape an architecture capable of changing consciousness.


Many times I have been asked why a Latin American researched Guernica. It had been painted by Picasso in Paris, between the months of May and June 1937, in repudiation of the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica, on April 26 of that same year, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. When I was doing my doctorate in the 60s, I reviewed a huge number of cultural magazines published in Latin America. They followed the intense debate that, in the context of the Cuban revolution and the Vietnam War, developed around the complex relationship between art and politics. Departing from the Moscow doctrine, and even from Maoism, the left-wing Latin American intelligentsia advocated the expressive freedom of artists and writers. The paradigm that was debated took critical distance from narrative, illustrative models that represented revolutionary heroes of positive deeds, and from any content or aesthetic form dictated by party organs. Artists were free, Fidel Castro had said in his Words to Intellectuals in 1961, as long as they did not attempt against the revolution. The problem that was analyzed was the form that corresponded to a freedom that did not renounce commitment.

While art exploded in experimentation (the Di Tella Institute was our great stage), put languages and disciplines in friction, and confronted the institutions of art, the left-wing theoretical debate (with quotes and texts by Galvano della Volpe, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Cardoza y Aragón, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Garaudy, among many others), sought to settle the relationship between art and politics, between art and revolution. The perfect case was Guernica. In this painting the subject did not lose to the forms and these did not renounce politics. It worked for all positions, both those that defended the legitimacy of linking art with politics, and those that maintained its most complete autonomy. Guernica constructed, with the theme, an artifact in which reality, although dramatic, was traversed by the configuration and internal articulation of the work. All heteronomy was therefore subject to autonomy.

The Massacre of the Innocents, oil painting by Guido Reni, 1611.One of Picasso's inspirations in the representation of the victims in his "Guernica".

Guernica was, in painting, the exact answer to a recurring dilemma for the Latin American intelligentsia. Internally, I wondered how it was possible that, in the midst of the budding local revolutions, when looking for a model for that transformed future, the example was found in a work done 30 years earlier. How was this possible in the context of extreme experimentation that occurred in those years with the languages of art, when the materiality of the work dissolved into performances and actions? How could the exact solution provide a painting as remarkable as it was traditional? I mean, a painting.

Guernica, a problem of interpretation In 1947, ten years after the work was completed, a conference was held at the MoMA to establish a definitive interpretation of Guernica. Alfred Barr, its director, was deeply disturbed by the last book by the Basque author Juan Larrea, in which he proposed a completely different interpretation from the one he had established from what Picasso had supposedly said in an interview with the young soldier and art critic Jerome Seckler, in 1944, during the liberation of Paris. . Larrea's interpretation inverted his own and also turned the painting into the latent incarnation of the Spanish Republic. It was almost a bomb. The conclusions of the symposium were that everyone could interpret what they wanted, since Picasso had not said much. For the artist it represented a group of animals and people who suffered in the face of violence. With his contradictory comments, which the world noted as interpretive evidence, Picasso contributed to a process of ambiguation of the work, central to accessing its extraordinary versatility. A work capable of acting according to different times and spaces, in the manner of a boomerang, to oppose different forms of violence.

The key, the deviation of history Although it has been established that the work began after the bombing of Guernica and that it is linked to it, the image is uncomfortable for the mission assigned to it: to denounce the enemy, portray the victims or give an account of the bombing of civilians that definitively transformed the paradigm that until then ordered the procedures of war. In this sense, the work is located near the monument, the memorial. It is more a commemoration of the facts, a representation that translated them into another key, than a document. If the bombing had been during the day, Picasso represented his victims in the darkness of the night. If it had happened in the streets, it was not clear on the canvas in what kind of space the events were happening. And what was even worse, Picasso only showed victims, he did not represent those responsible.

The work was closer to lament and the search for empathy from the multiplied images of pain, expressed with an abstractizing language, than to the denunciation against the enemy that would soon be launched on Europe. It was, in short, a painting with Picasso's usual themes: women and bullfighting.

For those who sought to confront those responsible for the massacre, the work was pure deviation. However, it is precisely this deviation that allows us to identify it as the starting point of a new paradigm based on the meditative power of the image. It is not clear what it represents. Only the title links it to a particular moment in history. They are wounded people and animals, fleeing in desperation. Women who squeeze their children with their faces distorted by panic. All that happens in a confusing space, with windows, lamps and ceilings on fire. We can identify animals and humans, fragments of architectures and other objects, but there is a powerful imprecision of the space in which all this happens. The image folds again and again, is ambiguous and, therefore, versatile. Elements, all, that produce distancing.

Plane of zigzag lines outside the Park of Memory. The diagonals are also multiplied in the museums of the Memory of Mexico and Santiago de Chile.

Interpretive controversies and history

Let's go back briefly to the initial reception of Guernica, when the painting was far from the consensus and approval it enjoyed in the 60s. Let us remember that neither the iconography nor the language of painting had excited the Basque government. According to an article published by El País in 1981, Picasso had said: "If President Aguirre asks for it, the painting is for the Basque people." The president would have declined. Difficult to confirm the certainty of the phrase and the facts. Apparently, different Basque representatives of the Pavilion of the Republic shared the contempt for painting. They even considered it pornographic.

As for critical reception, in 1937 Anthony Blunt (the famous triple agent, of the Cambridge group) had written that the painting was "disappointing", a "useless horror", lacking the optimism that an art that pointed to the future should have. But these reactions were quickly replaced by the agreements that the painting produced in Herbert Read, in the circle of Roland Penrose, in Christian Zervos, in Paul Eluard, and thus the adhesions of the intellectuals continued to be added.

In the work there are three processes of compression of history. On the one hand, that specific to the realization of the work that results from the more than 40 sketches made by the artist and the 11 shots of the process made by the photographer Dora Maar, his partner. The second process is guided by historical works that may have activated Picasso's imagination in the representation of the massacre; these range from Fire in Borgo, by Raphael Sanzio of 1516, to The Massacre of the Innocents, by Guido Reni, of 1611. Guernica would be, from this perspective, the culmination of a topoi (theme) that develops in the history of Western art. The third vector is the performance the story that this image produces. Each new act of violence activates it and projects it into the future.

The forms of memory

Since the 90s there has been a worldwide cycle of forms of memory. The search for truth and justice weaves an extreme post-war story.

The art explored the way to represent the violence of dictatorships, the processes of memory, the structures of memory. Monuments and museums of memory multiplied in connection with genocides, the Holocaust and dictatorships.

My hypothesis holds that Guernica can be analyzed as a paradigm of memory architectures. A meticulous study of the formal structure allows us to add elements from which to argue to what extent the work is inscribed not only on its ambiguity and iconographic complexity, but also on a particular compositional structure, whose central features we will see replicated in the architectures of memory.

Jewish Museum Berlin, by architect Liebeskind. The diagonals decide the entry of light and articulate the entire building.

Let's dwell on some of his compositional features. It is variegated, difficult to describe; It takes time to identify your characters. The formal decisions made by Picasso are not alien to this difficulty. The monochrome of blacks, greys and whites makes it difficult to differentiate between the background and the figures. The frieze shape in which they are arranged, occupying the entire foreground, intercepts the visuality of the planes. The lines weave the characters together. The diagonals cross the painting and configure on the work a fabric, a texture of directions that captures and delays our observation.

The time of identification, of decoding, is a time of transformation. It is the formal and perceptual structure of painting itself that establishes rhythms and reiterations. In certain works forms of mental percussion are produced: meditative structures. These involve repetitions, echoes, rhythms, which produce aftershocks, drumbeats, vibrations, present in meditation, prayer, political singing. It's about the power of repetition.

I would like the reader to retain the perceptual sense that I invoke and that I invite to observe in the painting to project it in the museographies of memory. Memory that involves and interweaves those of the holocaust, the Shoah, and Latin American dictatorships. I propose to think of Guernica as the starting point of the art of memory. A memory that was produced in layers, from 1937 to the present. Memory not as the ability to bring to the present a particular aspect of history, but as the process of transformation of the individual's consciousness. A particular spectator whom contemplation moves by transforming him into another. The works of the art of memory are, in a sense, meditative structures capable of mutating the individual, of sensitizing him.

Let us stop at the Museum of Memory of Chile or Mexico, the first dedicated to the memory of the dictatorship, the second to that of the Shoah. In both we identified two areas, on the one hand the one in which the evidence of the facts is presented: photographs, recorded testimonies, graphic material, journalistic, reconstructions. This is particularly visible in site museums, such as the former ESMA, a clandestine space for detention and torture. There you walk through a space in which the subtle marks are the footprint and the indications of the facts.

On the other hand, in the museums of memory, meditative strategies are introduced, articulated from a language that resorts to abstraction, a particular use of light and the insistent presence of diagonals.

These diagonals can be seen on the façade of the museums of Mexico and Santiago de Chile. In the Jewish Museum of Berlin they articulate the entire floor of the building. They propose options, paths to follow.

The diagonals also structure the route of the memorial that gathers the names of the disappeared of the dictatorship in Argentina in the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires. The monument is arranged as a zigzag, never a straight, unidirectional path. Touring the monument requires changing course, turning, moving our points of view. Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin develops these two programs in two tours. Below are the photos, the testimonies, the maps, the micro-stories that expand the archive of a victim, of a family. The evidence of genocide. Above the visually unstable blocks, which vibrate while we walk on a surface never planimeterical. These are performative instances that replicate the forms of memory, which is not one, which is not definitive but in process, open, continuous.

In the abstract and pyramidal structure of Guernica, in which angles and diagonals predominate, rests a geometry of memory, memory and history whose politics and conflicts cannot be ordered in a linear way. Guernica is not a literal painting. It is a field of forces that does not allow us to cancel the reflection on history. The work marks the beginning of a corpus of intensely developed works in contemporary art that we call meditative images: perceptual structures that condense emotions and provoke transformative experiences of consciousness. Of the individual conscience and of the citizen conscience.

Andrea Giunta is Principal Investigator of Conicet and Professor at the UBA. She was curator of the retrospective of León Ferrari at the CCR, 2004.

See also

Why is Pablo Picasso the pinnacle of the avant-garde?

Pablo Picasso's treasure of Pablo Picasso's beloved barber

Vertigo of global exhibitions: Pablo Picasso draws to infinity

Source: clarin

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