364 - Meditation on Picasso's "Guernica"

Meditation on Picasso's "Guernica"
By Neil Hurley, S.J.

AFTER EIGHT HOURS of viewing Picasso's retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, I sensed a subtle presence in the masterpiece, "Guernica" that transcended the limited naturalistic themes of his oeuvre. It was the artistic rendering into Christ figures of several victims of the cruel bombing of the Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Considered to be the most poignant anti-war statement in this century, "Guernica" is understandably seen only as a symbolic expression of "man's inhumanity to man" and animal. The neighing horse, the panic-stricken faces, the disembodied hand with two broken swords, the human tongues in the form of spikes, the anguished dying mothers with their babes in arms, the infernal atmosphere of demonic darkness-all these elements coalesce to give exquisite expression to the artist's towering rage over the ineffable horror of modern warfare. Picasso's protest is seen earlier in his paintings of Christ on the cross and of bulls dying by the matador's sword.

To appreciate "Guernica" more fully, it is necessary to de-familiarize our conventional perception of a Picasso painting so that we see it as process and not as product-in isolation from his experimental cartoons, tentative line-drawing sketches and preparatory rough-cut drafts. The chronological sequence of the Picasso exhibit permits the observer to see "Guernica" as more than the consequence of several "warm-up" painting exercises for the giant wall "black-and-white" mural. One sees the earlier influences and styles which reassert themselves, at times thematically as in the representative family portraits or subliminally as, I submit, in "Guernica," whose Christomorphic quality is subliminal, though real if one sees his work with its antecedent ambiguous pagan, primitive influences.

Much of Picasso's 900 works of art are in different media-one senses the force of classical Greek (the minotaurs and centaurs), of Roman legends (the rape of the Sabines), of aboriginal masks and facial contours (the wood sculptures), and of the ancient Mediterranean civilization with its influence of Cretan, Etruscan, Sicilian, and North African art values. Picasso's plastic temperament was open to nonWestern traditions. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the

Neil Hurley, S.J., is a member of the Department of Communications, Fordham University. Formerly at Loyola University, New Orleans, he has written film criticism (Lina Wertmüller, Alfred Hitchcock) for THEOLOGY TODAY, and is the author of two books on film, Toward a Film Humanism and The Reel Revolution. A reflective observer of the Picasso exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which will also appear in Chicago and Los Angeles, Dr. Hurley probes the "Guernica" masterpiece, long the prized possession of the Museum but soon to be sent back to Spain. Paul Tillich liked to describe "Guernica" as the most "Protestant" of modern paintings.

365 - Meditation on Picasso's "Guernica"

continuity of human nature with the animal kingdom. We Westerners pride ourselves on being set apart from nature, as being the crown of creation. Picasso follows his creative instincts and dissolves this distinction by returning to pre-civilized, and therefore pre-Christian, founts of inspiration. In the "Desmoiselles d'Avignon," a watershed painting in art history, we have the breakdown of human form (what in German is called Formwidrigkeit). Picasso portrays the degradation of the human face into brutish empty countenances more like those of cows and horses. Even in his cubist period there is the hint that the gayest, most social experiences-playing the accordion, the clarinet, or flute-is an allusion based on a myriad of molecular units which at a great enough distance look macroscopically like something human, something vital.

I believe that Picasso's work receives a deeper significance if we appreciate his challenge to conventional Western modes of perception regarding the boundaries of nature, animal life, and humankind. We can then grasp better why his bordellos are zoos and his crucifixion scenes are virtually the same as his paintings of bulls dying in the Spanish corridas. Compare Picasso's many paintings of Christ on the cross with exhausted, near-death toros in the arena. In both instances the artist captures the interior point of view of the victims. This is his freshness of vision, his redoubtable genius-to put us inside the event while we see it from the outside.

"Guernica" is war as projected by a visionary who can see Christ as sent into an arena to fight valiantly against overwhelming odds in a contest doomed to failure. Most bullfighters leave the ring alive; no bull leaves the arena that way. Picasso takes a fatalist's view of Christ's encounter with evil. We Christians accept Christ's death through a faith perspective with the rosy after-glow of the Resurrection. Picasso's views clearly are not retrojected from Easter Sunday but rather inspired by a reported present at Golgotha on Good Friday. Thus in his naturalistic viewpoint, Picasso paints Christ with taut, outstretched arms, with a brutish up-turned head, mouth agape. He is seen as an animal-more like a dying bull than a sacrifical lamb.

366 - Meditation on Picasso's "Guernica"

If one walks from the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art exhibit, having studied the crucifixion drawings, and ascends to the third floor to view "Guernica," a "twice-born" experience occurs. One sees Christomorphic figures in the dying victims of the bombing even down to the bold interpretation of the breasts of a dying mother whose nipples are portrayed as nails. Did Picasso announce the advent of a post-Christian world where pagan influences and values would be reasserted? Certainly his provocative deformation of the human condition and its reduction to elemental symbols is a way that we Christians can harvest insights from those who do not profess our common faith. In a real sense, paganism and its sustained search for answers to abiding transcendental questions is the precursor to the dawn of Christianity, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out in The Everlasting Man.

"Guernica" is, indeed, a harsh piece of art. The advantage of seeing it in context cannot be underestimated. It has hung on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in splendid isolation. However, seeing it in a process-stream and not merely as a product is to see it anew. As a man of faith, I admit to the risk of projecting a subjective view not intended by the artist. Nevertheless, there are objective parallels between the work-drawings of "Guernica" and Picasso's antecedent oil paintings of bleeding bulls with mouths agape and the victim Christ in an agonzing death spasm on the cross. While it is true that Picasso never went beyond Good Friday in his religious scenes, his genius lay in rendering thematic the subtle symbolic connections which link violence in such seemingly disparate fields as modern war, death-defying contests of sport, and religious sacrifice. That he himself was not aware of this intent is beside the point since in art interpretation, one must learn to trust the work and not the artist's verbal explanation of it. Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" is a valuable meditation for Christians and a provocative prologomenon for a theology of the cross, relevant to a century known for violence and victimhood.