At the beginning of May 1937, taking advantage of some snapshots published in the Parisian newspapers Ce Soir and Paris Soir of the Luftwaffe bombardment of the Biscayan town of Gernika, Picasso undertook the challenge of showing the effects of war through a pictorial immersion in the world. of the symbols of the bull-moon and the steed-sun illuminated by a sparkling light bulb, the only element of the new era that allows us to glimpse the old scene of destruction and death. Dora Maar photographs the first sketches. The images of the desolation caused by the planes invade a canvas of considerable size in order to fix the gestures and the cries of silence; Thus, a narration of horror is achieved as recognizable as the mannerist massacres of Antoine Caron or the apocalyptic scenes of El Greco, recovered in the middle of the 20th century by Ludwig Meidner.
Picasso, in line with Goya, fixes the desperate, broken and destroyed bodies to paint Gernika, delving into the territory of the symbolic that in 1937 was the privileged space of Chirico’s art or of Aragon’s literature and that he himself had cultivated. four years earlier on the cover of the surrealist magazine Minonature and perfected in the 1935 Minotauromachy: the triumph of Thanatos over Eros, where any initiate detects the descent vers le bas that Marguerite Loeffler-Delachaux says in her analysis of fairy tales.
There is no greater fascination than discovering in this pictorial reading of war what we believe to be the most judicious of the human being, the value given to peace arising from the triumph of justice. Moral conscience is born from the horror that overwhelms the viewer of this work carried out at number 7 of the Parisian Rue des Grands Augustins, where pencils, burins, brushes were spread out on the floor next to Maar’s cameras.
Understanding its symbolism, which it has, requires an evocation of the secrets of the world in the manner of Béroalde de Verville, that is, the revelation of the forces that prevail over unreasonableness over the sweetness of living, an argument that Picasso knew well through his old contacts with the Novissima circle with De Fonseca. Picasso thus penetrates the Orphic experiences that link mythological figures with beings from the natural world, such as the bull or the horse, loaded, however, with complex meanings that even allow us to deny that they exist, as Picasso himself once said.
It is about explaining the tragedy of a country through symbols that create a space for reflection on war, in line with Las Meninas by Velázquez, since its way of accessing the world is a distance from the mythical meanings to look at. better what is behind creative art as a myth, as Michel Foucault explained as a teacher at the beginning of Les palabras y las cosas.
Picasso describes the situation of a town after a bombardment, not only to record a mournful event in the Spanish Civil War, but also to deepen the meaning of the white night of icebergs and cruel snow that Mallarmè said in Herodías. This ambitious objective is what bothered Luis Buñuel and José Bergamín in part, who did not feel special affection for that painting, which they described as bombastic and excessively politicized. I would say that it is a painting that returns to the debate on the scenic effect of Salomé de Wilde and the sadistic force of the mutilated bodies, here not the head of the Baptist but the head of all the Spaniards, sacrificed to the tyrant with the flute voice and legionary cap .
Just as the Mannerists faced the destruction of universal harmony in the wars of religion, Picasso faced, with the help of Dora Maar, the defense of human dignity, devoting himself to the anti-fascist cause, with a hope nurtured in the depths of uncertainty. His painting, in powerful black and white, evokes the universe of darkness tending towards a dazzling confusion, and it is not for aesthetic interest (or it is not exclusively) but to refine the terrible realities of the game of the world, where those inner ghosts of His soul, tormented by an event in the war, is loaded with symbols of the monstrous war action, for example that horse pierced by its rider’s lance and gored by the bull.
A desire for perfection of the absolute lengthens the work by consolidating the description, by antiphrasis, of what he seeks, nothing other than peace, as a way out of evil. And that search for peace becomes his particular dragon, which he has to defeat in homage to his father, who in Malaga made him draw for long hours. And so, Picasso paid his debt with his inheritance and with himself when on April 20, 1949 he attended the World Congress of Partisans for Peace with a proposal: the design of a symbol capable of showing in a single line, simple but solid, the desire to sanctify everything that is recorded, the design of an image that had accompanied Aphrodite for centuries, and that she wants to share that day with the comrades gathered there, and thus presents in its powerful simplicity the dove of peace, the symbol par excellence of the second half of the 20th century.
