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A Critical Analysis Of Guernica By Pablo Picasso

2019 Words9 Pages

Pablo Picasso's painting "Guernica", named after a Spanish city, is one of the best portraits of war and death. Picasso was able to convey the message of agony in an amazing way using only the white, gray, and black colors. The painting shows different living creatures involved, humans and animals, each with a different symbolic meaning. He managed to manipulate the shapes and proportions of all his characters in the painting to draw twisted and deformed shapes, all with over-expressed facial expressions screaming out of pain. Starting with a general description of the whole painting, the painting shows a set of events with characters inside a room in a house. All the main characters in the first level of the painting are drawn using the white color, and as we go further in the painting we see the colors going darker from light gray to dark black. Starting with the contents of the room, from the left, we can see a woman crying out and screaming from agony, in her hands carrying her baby with his head down, mouth closed, and nose upside down. The baby looks like he is dead. The woman is screaming with her mouth wide opened ,her face positioned upwards, her tongue appearing sharp and vertical, and her eyes asymmetrical and twisted. Above the woman we can see a bull with a firm and strong facial expression. He is the only living …show more content…

He amazingly symbolized the struggle between the strong and the weak in such tragedies. Picasso knew how to manipulate all the figures and the exaggerated facial expressions of the characters to make the viewer feel the agony and the pain left by this vicious war, to warn them of all the harm they are dealing to the innocents. However, with all the damage, chaos, and destruction in the scene, Picasso still managed to show the people the hope for the future, of a better tomorrow because once again peace will raise and life goes

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