Pablo Picasso Bombing Of Guernica Analysis

Guernica, a village in Spain, was bombed with sixty-six tons of bombs that killed between two hundred fifty and three hundred civilians; the bombing of the rural village had no military value (Manzanares). German fighters swarmed the village, gunning down citizens trying to escape from the burning city (“Bombing of Guernica”). Pablo Picasso, inspired by this tragedy, painted a large, eleven-foot-tall mural entitled Guernica. In the painting, Picasso represented the horror of being trapped and helpless, much as the citizens of Guernica must have felt in the bombing and gunning runs.

The villagers were desperate to escape from the village, but had nowhere to go. In the painting, Picasso represents the civilians’ struggle to survive. The villagers …show more content…
Cultures have represented the sun as a god for years, such as Ra the Sun God. The sun in this painting has a diagonal line extending from its right all the way down to the bottom right corner of the page. The sun is built of sharp, angular rays coming from a harsh, eye-shaped core and a pupil of a lightbulb. This is a representation of the German bombers, which could see the entire town from their vantage point while the townspeople were confused, lost, and horrified as fire burst near them. Also represented in Picasso’s work is a house in the center-right of the image. The house has brick textures, but is overturned and sideways. The Germans’ bombing devastated houses and, more importantly, exposed citizens to direct danger. The overturned house represents the method by which they found all their targets: they bombed the area to open up homes, and then went in with machine gunners in fighter jets (“Bombing of Guernica”). In fact, this is represented through the floating head on the right side of the painting. Unlike all the other citizens’ faces, that head looks more composed and, because it’s floating, in control. The Germans’ air superiority allowed them to know everything about their victims and trap them. Picasso represents this human rights crime because of his portrayal of the Germans and their effect on the countryside village: overturning homes, displacing citizens, and …show more content…
The Germans used Guernica as a “testing ground for a new Nazi military tactic - blanket-bombing a civilian population to demoralize the enemy” (“Bombing of Guernica”). Picasso showed this through the bull. According to Paul Richardson, in Spain, a traditional (increasingly less popular) form of entertainment is the bullfight, wherein a fighter kills a bull trapped in a ring after a theatrical duel between the two. Of course, the bull has no real chance against the bull: it’s trapped in a ring with no weapons while the trained fighter has a sword and a dagger (“Bullfighting Is Making”). The bull in Picasso’s painting symbolizes this type of trap. The German Nazis don’t care about Guernica, but they are simply doing a live-fire test against a real village for a new military tactic. The village had no real military value, just as the bull had no real value to be killed besides as entertainment or an experiment. The other, prominently-featured animal in Picasso’s work was the horse in the center of the painting. Horses are typically one of the domesticated animals that does exactly what their masters want. However, this horse is in panic, leaping around but unsure of where to go. It’s in the middle of the action with light bouncing off its body in many directions, and looks scratched due to vertical marks on its body. Since horses