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Literary Analysis Of Pablo Picasso's Guernica

Decent Essays

Julius Byla
Hake
English 101
10/22/17
Picasso’s Guernica Throughout time paintings have been used to record events, communicate ideas or evoke an emotional response. Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica does just this. Guernica was created to bring attention to the Nazi bombing of the town of Guernica, Spain during the Spanish civil war in the second half of the 1930s. Its exhibition was used to provide relief and a call against the horrors of war. Through its visual elements and symbolic concepts, Guernica depicts the chaos and aftermath of the bombing of the city and the need to bring about change over the tragedies of war. Standing at a massive seven feet by twenty-five feet, this black and white painting depicts a massacre of the bombing of the town of Guernica. The composition of the work is a dimly lit space, the only light coming from an eye shaped light at center top of the painting and a woman holding a lantern next to it. From left to right, the scene contains a screaming bull beneath it a woman holding a dead child. In the center there is a mangled horse pierced by spear and below it, the mangled body of a fallen soldier. To the right are three women, one crawling towards the light, above her is a woman leaning out of a window holding a lit lantern and the other screaming while falling from a burning building. Guernica captures the brutal chaos of the bombing with its physical action and intended symbolism. Being black and white, the painting represents the somber

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