Painting as Protest

What would be the best way to protest against a war? How could you
influence the largest number of people? In 1937, Pablo Picasso expressed his
outrage against the Spanish Civil War with Guernica, his enormous mural-sized
painting. Guernica conveys a powerful protest against war and is a plea for world
peace. If you look closely at the symbols in Guernica, you will see it shows the
pain and suffering war brings to the lives of innocent people, specifically those
who were bombed by Nazi planes in the town of Guernica, Spain.

Two aspects of Guernica that make it such a powerful tool of protest are
its size and color. Guernica is big, eleven feet tall and twenty six feet wide. It feels
like it wraps around you, making it seem as if you witnessed a terrible event.
Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. The lack of color makes this
painting sad and dramatic. In bluish gray, black and white, it looks like a
newspaper article. The newspaper would have been the first way people outside
of Guernica heard about the attack.

Picasso uses the bull as a symbol of the violence and destruction of war
in Guernica. Bulls are representative of Spanish culture and are often used for
fighting. Although the painting is chaotic, with jumbled, overlapping images, our
eyes are drawn to the bull with a white head and a dark body. The bull looks
calm, staring at us with both eyes, while the other characters are panicking and
looking off in many directions. It is the focal point.

Picasso also represents the violence and suffering of war through the
screaming, falling horse, just to the right of the bull. This represents the
suffering people of Guernica. Underneath the image of the bull sits a woman
holding a dead child, her head facing the sky. Her eyes are in the shape of tears.
There is a dead soldier beneath her. His body is broken apart and so is his
sword. The man to the far right of the painting seems to be pleading at the sky,
perhaps at the German planes above to stop the bombing. If you look closely,
you will see a flower and a candle, symbols of hope.
 Guernica is Picasso’s visual response to a massacre that destroyed the
town of Guernica and killed thousands of people. By showing the world this
painting, Picasso forced people to acknowledge the war. His hope was to
convey the suffering of the innocent people of Guernica so that they would be
moved to join him in protesting the war.