Guernica — IV

But what I don’t get is how, and why, Picasso’s Guernica came to be seen as a more powerful reaction to the coming of total war than this

photos of the devastation of war aren’t a reaction per se, but rather a representation. picasso’s piece is both. if you were to ask which is simply a more powerful image, i think most people would agree that the photos are.

Screaming horses, crying people, eyes of wild terror, the dead baby. One may project these onto the photos Brett posted, or not. Picasso does not give you choice. His skill, the scale (“Guernica” is BIG), and the subject, all are part of the power.

The painting, unlike the photos, is of people, and people respond to the suffering of people. As shocking as the photos after air raids are (and they are) they are not of people. We must add the people in our heads, based on knowledge and imagination.

All the photos I saw of air raids paled in contrast to the stories told by friends who “survived” the Dresden bombing, running, running into cellar restaurant to find piles of asphixiated dead, running past charred dead and dying people in the streets, two children running, their families lost…

…or when Michio Kaku told me of his relative (uncle?) who “survived” the Hiroshima bombing…

We are probably “wired” to react more viscerally to individuals in pain, to others with faces, rather than in the abstract. It is a human, perhaps a civilized, ability to be able to know understand harm to others at distance of time and space and at scales uncommon in a lifetime. Vesuvius killing Pompeii and the Lisbon Earthquake…huge and rare, and natural disasters, such things were in most of our history. In the past century we figured out how to do that kind of damage ourselves.

Even ancient gorgeous buildings bombed to ruins, even the awareness that people lived in – and many died in – these buildings, will not effect most people as strongly as will that dead baby in “Guernica”.

I think it’s a lot simpler than that. Picasso’s Guernica was exhibited at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, as the centrepiece of a building’s worth of pro-Republican information and propaganda.
I don’t think it started out as such a general anti-bombing painting, so much as a specifically anti-Nationalist, anti-Franco painting—a rather more popular cause in the era. After all, as Mayor Quimby might have said, those could be anyone’s bombs in the photographs.
Also, on ‘getting’ the painting: it’s not just pretty big, or imposing, it’s deliberately fucking enormous. That’s too easy to overlook, but it quite literally takes a whole room of the Reina Sofí­a.

Perhaps you are “irredeemably literal” — hard to be certain from one post.

For what it’s worth, great art IS more powerful than reality. The artist intentionally uses symbols to manipulate emotions. Color (or its absence), scale, faces — it all serves to evoke emotions. Photographs only manage to achieve that result far less frequently; usually, untouched photos of ruins can only convey the sense of devastation and loss (and often only if corpses are present). Otherwise, it’s just bricks and mortar, concrete and steel. They don’t bleed. They don’t scream. The don’t die.

Above all else, Guernica speaks to me of death. The photos you used above don’t.

Here via Orac, in case you were wondering.

(Came via Orac)

I think they are powerful in different ways. The photos show the actual destruction of physical things; the painting shows the destruction of humanity. What strikes me most about Guernica is to sit and think about the sorrow and anger in Picasso as he was creating it, the emotion behind every brush stroke. Even though it’s representational, it’s more human.

I have to admit, though, every time I see/hear of the painting, I think of a line from the short-lived animated series The Critic: “Take that, Guernica!”

I’ve been watching this debate with great interest from the sidelines. I, too, am always wary about generalizing from my own, subjective responses to works of art. A lot of visual art I simply don’t ‘get’ (even though I really wish I did).

So all opinions above are, of course, utterly valid. But, having seen the sketches in the Reina Sofia, I’d agree with Ronan. It really is a matter of emotional response rather than semiotic analysis. I suppose it appeals to an ‘act of faith’ or leap of imagination rather than a ‘reading’. Maybe that’s the key difference between painting and photography, IMHO – not that the latter is not also ‘art’.

But I think iconography is the key. When you absorb the extent to which ‘Guernica’ symbolizes the opinions, experiences and collective agonies (and I don’t use that term lightly) of a substantial sector of the Spanish population (even to this day), then it ceases to be ‘merely’ a painting. I was completely swept away by that culture for many years, so the painting has many additional layers of adopted resonance for me.

Maybe whether ‘we’ get it or not is not the issue at all. What matters is why ‘they’ get it. We could debate who ‘they’ are, of course. But I suppose that’s the point at which an artefact becomes a memorial/commemoration/emotional rallying point. Personally, when responding to ‘Guernica’ I’m now responding to a monument, not a painting. I don’t think, with any amount of effort, I could now strip it back to being ‘just’ a painting.

But hey – you military-ish myth-and-memory types know far more about those matters than me. And, of course, that’s the point of art – it is transformative, has no fixed meaning and we can debate it forever. Which is nice.

An image using realistic elements is not just an image; it is a narrative, a story plucked from the surface.

Hence we are moved by one photo of a dead child, but not another.

Sounds obvious, but in documentary it is an important issue. Not enough to record; it is necessary to record artfully.

One of my ‘favourite’ bombing images is this.

Tension and intention.

That is the thing, isn’t it. You do supply the narrative – just as the alerted viewer does the same to Guernica. Note that people say they get more from the painting if they have seen the sketches.

Particularly in a fast moving medium like television, knowing what the audience shares is very important. And is wrong again and again. i’m gone every time some breathless narration announces the beginning o fWW2 as if it is a surprise to the viewer.

Something else – Guernica is big. If you took your photos above and expanded them at very high resolution to life size, they would be completely crushing to the viewer.

And if you could add an image of that child alive with its mother, people would weep. Even though it is black and white.

I guess we could call this asymmetric. Somehow it is less ikky to use art to complain about other people being slaughtered when you weren’t there than to use art to encourage other people to be attendant on a slaughter when you weren’t there.

You can’t accuse Picasso of hysteria – indeed the fact that he wasn’t there makes the work less passionate. Because no-one who hasn’t run through the flames of a burning city can completely comprehend what it is like. And then I don’t believe you can reproduce it.

It is all beyond human communication, and maybe beyond comprehension for the people who were actually there.

Even my parents, who spent bits of the Blitz huddled in their family Anderson shelters, make no attempt to describe it. I don’t think they can. I don’t think they even retained it.

I have to admit that if I was forced to read war poetry I’d rather read Owen than Pope, but you could turn it round and suggest that Pope’s poetry is dismissed as being “bad” because it supports the “wrong” point of view, while Owen has been elevated to the canon because he has the “right” view. How do you objectively measure the aesthetics of poetry? If you can, are Jessie Pope haters applying the criteria honestly and objectively? I’m sure we could find some right-wing people who think that Picasso’s paintings are bad art, but again you’d have to suspect that political ideology plays a part in their judgement, and it could also be that people with different political opinions also have different criteria for judging the “quality” of art, even if the message isn’t obviously contentious.

It’s good point that anti-war art easily makes the transition from specific to general. The hypothetical right-wing critic of Guernica might say “you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be”. In a way that’s true. Several people have made convincing comments here about the emotional impact of the painting: you can tell that something terrible has happened. But what? There isn’t much internal evidence in the painting to tell us that it represents the bombing of Guernica in 1937. That all comes from context: you have to know that it’s called Guernica and know what famously happened at Guernica. If you showed the painting to someone who knew nothing about it, and told them it was called “Auschwitz”, would it have the same impact? Or an even greater impact? But what if it was called “The Harrying of the North”? Would connecting the image to something that happened in the 11th century and which most people have never heard of diminish its impact?

(btw it’s a good thing you linked to BODITT to explain who Jessie Pope was. The Wikipedia page on her is so spectacularly bad it’s quite funny!)