The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Pablo Picasso · an oil on canvas painted for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition · one horizontal field in black, white and greys · nine figures in three zones about a central triangle · about three and a half metres by nearly eight · Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid · May–June 1937 · in Spain since 1981, and no longer lent
Mode
History painting without the event; propaganda commission, lament and Cubist construction in one field
Mythos
The corrida, the Pietà and the slaughter of the innocent; the bull, the gored horse and the woman with the light
Phase
One instant; painted in Paris in May and June 1937, after the bombing of 26 April
Presentation
Oil on canvas, about three and a half metres by nearly eight; black, white and greys; nine figures in three zones about a central triangle
Register
From the mother’s scream at the left to the burning figure at the right; dread throughout, with no relief
Scale
One town on one day, one room open to the sky, nine figures
Governing Proposition
A market town bombed from the air is painted without the aircraft, the bomb or a single enemy: nine figures in black, white and grey, a room and a street folded into one space, a mother, a horse and a burning house under a bare bulb. The wager of the canvas is that the new war is known by what it does at home, that its killer need not be shown to be present, and that a lamp held out of a window, the old light of witness, can still be set beside the electric light that lights everything and sees nothing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
On Monday 26 April 1937, market day, the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by the German Condor Legion, with Italian aircraft. Picasso was fifty-five and working in Paris. Early that year the government of the Spanish Republic, then at war, had commissioned from him a painting for its pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, a building designed by Josep Lluís Sert and Luis Lacasa. The bombing reached Paris in newspaper photographs and reports. His first dated studies are of 1 May, five days after it. He painted the canvas in his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins and finished it in early June, some six weeks after the raid. Dora Maar photographed it in progress, and her photographs record large changes from one state to the next.
The canvas is about three and a half metres high and nearly eight wide, more than twice as wide as it is high: a frieze of some twenty-seven square metres. It is in black, white and greys, and nothing else. It holds nine figures. From left to right: the bull; the mother holding a dead child, her head thrown back; the bird on a table; the fallen warrior along the bottom, broken, a snapped sword and a small flower in his fist; the horse at the centre, pierced by a spear, its mouth open; the electric light above it, in a burst shaped like an eye; the woman leaning in at a window with a lamp; the woman lunging in from the right, one leg swollen and dragging; and at the far right a figure with arms raised inside a burning building.
Two structures hold them. The field divides, by the reading that goes back to its first critics, into three vertical zones like a triptych: the bull and the mother at the left, the horse and the lamp in the centre, the burning house at the right. Across the centre stands a pyramid. Its base is the warrior’s body, its apex the lamp and the light, and the horse fills it. The space is inside and outside at once. There are a tiled floor, a table, an open door and a ceiling light; there are house walls, a window, roof tiles and flames; and no line divides the room from the street. The frieze sends the eye from one end to the other and back, and the triangle keeps drawing it to the centre.
Movement II
At the left end the mother holds her dead child, her head thrown back, her mouth open, her tongue drawn as a blade. The child’s head hangs. It is the Pietà, a mother holding her dead child, set in a burning room, and it is the first scream the eye meets. She is one end of the frieze and the burning figure at the far right is the other. Take her away and the field tips toward the fire.
Above her stands the bull, frontal and still, its mouth closed, the one figure on the canvas that does not suffer. It comes from the bullring, and from Picasso’s own etching of 1935, the Minotauromachy, where a bull, a horse and a girl holding a candle meet. Here it is given no part in the action. What it means the canvas does not say, and Picasso would not. It has been read as the brute force of fascism, as the Spanish people enduring, and as the painter himself. The readings point in opposite directions, and nothing in the picture settles them. It is the one Spanish thing on the canvas; the town itself is present only in the title.
Between the bull and the horse, on a table, is a bird, small and hard to read as a figure. It and the flower in the warrior’s fist are the only small things in the field. The table, the tiled floor and the wall make this end a room, and that is the canvas’s first disclosure: in this war the dead are at home, a mother, a child, an animal on a table. Goya’s Third of May puts the firing squad in the frame with the men it shoots. Here nobody is shown doing the killing.
Movement III
At the exact centre is the horse, pierced by a spear, its mouth open on the same blade of a tongue as the mother’s. It is the picador’s horse, the animal that dies in the corrida, and it fills the triangle. Its body is covered in short vertical strokes, like the columns of a newspaper, and nothing else on the canvas is marked that way. The bombing reached Paris as print and photograph, in black and white. The canvas keeps that colour throughout, and at its centre it lays the news on the body of the horse.
Below it the warrior lies along the bottom of the field, broken, the one figure lying flat. In his fist is a snapped sword, and with it a small flower. He is the base of the triangle, and his sword is the only weapon in the picture, and it is broken. There is no aeroplane, no bomb, no standing soldier, no gun, no enemy face. The violence has no visible agent. The people under a raid from the air do not see who is killing them, and the canvas leaves its viewer where they were.
The bodies are not only shown wounded. They are broken into planes, a face turned to profile and front at once, so that the violence is done to the drawing itself. Each is reduced to a few contours that carry across seven metres: the horse’s head, the mother’s profile, the lamp-bearer’s arm. With no colour, the field holds by values alone, the white of the bodies against the blacks, and greys that make depth without perspective. The paint is laid flat and fast, and some passages, the floor and the architecture at the right among them, are summary. The surface is a mural’s, made for a pavilion wall and finished some six weeks after the bombing.
Movement IV
From the right a woman leans in through a window, and her arm, holding out an oil lamp, crosses half the field toward the horse. It is the oldest light in the picture, carried by hand and held toward what has happened, and the gesture is that of the woman at the tomb, come to see. Below her a second woman lunges in from the right, dragging a swollen leg, her face lifted toward the light.
Directly above the horse, beside the lamp, is the electric light: a bare bulb inside a burst shaped like an eye. It lights everything and sees nothing. The lamp is witness; the bulb is the light of the age of the aircraft the picture does not show, and in Spanish the words for bulb and bomb, bombilla and bomba, are near enough that the pun is often noted. The two lights stand together at the apex of the triangle, two kinds of seeing, and the fire at the right is a third. The space has no single source, and the field is lit by none of them.
At the far right a figure raises its arms inside a burning building, the flames cut like paper, an open door beside it. The house, which should protect, is on fire, and the room at the left has a sky with a light in it. The space holds everyone in and gives nowhere to go. Take the burning house away and the frieze tips, as it would without the mother. Between the two the eye travels from scream to scream, and back, and finds no place to rest.
Movement V
The canvas hung in the Spanish Pavilion in 1937, in the exposition that also held the German and Soviet pavilions. In 1938 and 1939 it was shown in Scandinavia and Britain, and in 1939 and 1940 it toured the United States. From 1939 it was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on Picasso’s loan, and it stayed there forty-two years. The Republic that commissioned it lost its war in 1939. Picasso made the canvas’s return to Spain conditional on the return of liberties there. He died on 8 April 1973, and Franco on 20 November 1975.
Between 1937 and the late 1950s the canvas was rolled, shipped and re-stretched many times, and it is fragile from those journeys. In 1974, at the Museum of Modern Art, Tony Shafrazi sprayed the words “KILL LIES ALL” across it in red paint, and the paint was removed. It arrived in Madrid on 10 September 1981 and hung in the Casón del Buen Retiro, an annex of the Prado, behind armoured glass. In 1992 it moved to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, where the studies are held with it. The museum has since refused to lend it, on the grounds of its condition.
The image has outlived the newspaper photograph whose colour it took. It has been carried at protests from Vietnam to Iraq, and a tapestry after it hangs at the headquarters of the United Nations. What stays open is what its figures mean: the bull, the horse, the bulb. The title names one town on one day, and nothing on the canvas does. The killer is still not in the picture, and the lamp is still held out of the window toward the horse.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure alone, figure by figure. The mother and the burning figure are the two ends of the frieze: remove either and the field tips. The horse is the centre. The warrior, the one figure lying flat, is the base of the triangle, and the lamp-bearer and the electric light make its apex, the two kinds of seeing. The bull is the one figure that does not suffer, and is needed for that. Nine figures is close to the least the argument requires. What resists is at the margin. The bird on the table is small and hard to read as a figure, and could go with little loss; the door and the floor tiles are setting, not argument.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. In war from the air the dead are at home: a mother, a child, a horse, a bird, a woman at her window. And the killer is not in the picture: no aeroplane, no soldier, no gun, no enemy face. Goya’s Third of May shows the firing squad; here the only weapon is a broken sword in a dead man’s hand. That was true of Guernica, and it has held for every bombing since. The second disclosure is the two lights: the lamp held out of the window, the old light of witness, and above it a bare bulb that lights everything and sees nothing. Held below the top because much of the canvas is scream, which is mood, and the bull means nothing anyone can state.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The register is dreadful, and it recurs across the frieze: the mother’s head thrown back over the dead child, her tongue a blade; the horse’s open mouth at the exact centre, with the same blade; the burning figure at the right, arms up, in flames cut like paper; the lamp-bearer’s arm coming in through the window across half the field; the lunging woman’s face lifted toward the light. The grandeur is in the scale, bodies the size of the viewer at a frieze’s length. Held below the top because there is no beauty here and no relief, by design; some distortions read as caricature before they read as terror; and one canvas seen whole gives one long blow, not a sequence of them.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, from three sources that carry the structure. The corrida: the bull, and the gored horse, the animal that dies in the ring, here at the centre of the triangle. The Christian image: the mother and her dead child as a Pietà, at the left end, and the lamp-bearer as the woman at the tomb. Picasso’s own: the bull, the horse and the girl holding a light come from his Minotauromachy etching of 1935, where she holds a candle. A market town’s bombing becomes the slaughter of the innocent. But the particular is thin: nothing on the canvas is Basque or Spanish except the bull, and the town is present only in the title. The bull, its meaning withheld, is myth evoked at the edge.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the history painting of massacre and war: Goya’s Third of May and the Disasters, Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents, Rubens, Delacroix. Its rule is a legible event, with the act shown. The departure: neither the act nor the actor is shown; the space is not one place; the event is told in the language of Cubism and the Surrealist distortions of the 1920s, never before used for a public commission on a public atrocity; and it is in black and white, like the photographs and papers through which Paris knew of the bombing. The stake was real: a propaganda commission for a government at war, shown in the exposition of the German and Soviet pavilions. The tools were already Picasso’s own; the swerve is the use he made of them.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The monochrome is the colour of the news, which reached Paris in newspaper photographs and reports, and the horse’s newsprint hatching says so. Room and street are one space, so there is nowhere to go: the house that should protect burns, and the room has a sky with a light in it. The bodies are broken into planes, so the violence is done to the drawing itself. The frieze sends the eye from scream to scream and back. Made a naturalistic scene with an aeroplane overhead, it becomes a report of one afternoon in one town, and loses the absent killer, the trapped space and the light that sees nothing. Only the bird and the setting are slack.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: eighty-nine years of re-examination without exhaustion. The questions that stay open are questions of meaning. The bull: the brute force of fascism, the Spanish people enduring, or the painter himself; Picasso would not say. The electric light: the eye of God, technology, the bomb, with the Spanish pun of bombilla and bomba often noted. The horse: the people, or the Republic. The record of the making is unusually rich: the dated studies and Dora Maar’s photographs of the states let the genesis be followed stage by stage, as in Rudolf Arnheim’s The Genesis of a Painting and Herschel Chipp’s study. Held a step below because the central meaning is agreed, and most disputes turn on two figures.
Score: 9.2 / 10
On view since 1937, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas showed that the language of the modernist studio could carry a public tragedy, and that a history painting could do without the event. The reach in painting is partial: this was in a sense the last great history painting rather than a new beginning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: on view in New York from 1939, its bulls and horses entered Pollock’s drawings of the late 1930s and early 1940s; the large field and the black-and-white canvases that followed are in its debt; the century’s later anti-war painting, Golub’s among others, looks to it; and it became the emblem of the bombing of civilians, carried at protests from Vietnam to Iraq.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival so far is demonstrated, and the axis weighs what the work is built to bear. It has outlived its occasion, a war lost in 1939; its patron, the Republic; the regime it opposed, and its own exile of forty-four years, ended on Picasso’s condition that liberties return first; the attack of 1974; and its use as propaganda, now and then, by every side. The surface is free of its moment. The title names one town on one day and nothing on the canvas does, and the image serves wars Picasso never saw. What holds it is physical. Rolled, shipped and re-stretched many times between 1937 and the late 1950s, the canvas is fragile and is no longer lent. The paint of 1974 was another hand’s and is not charged.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged as command of oil on a canvas of mural size, in monochrome. The making is load-bearing. Every figure is reduced to a few contours that carry at seven metres: the horse’s head, the mother’s profile, the lamp-bearer’s arm. With no colour, the field is held by values alone, the white of the bodies against the blacks, and greys that make depth without perspective. The triangle and the frieze interlock, so that the eye neither rests nor escapes. The speed is credited only because the result holds: nine figures across the whole field, finished some six weeks after the bombing and revised through every state. The cost: the paint is laid flat and fast, and some passages, the right-hand architecture and the floor among them, are summary. The surface is a mural’s.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bull at the left, still and frontal, and the burning figure at the right, all upward motion. They obey one law. Every form is a flat plane cut by hard contours, in the same three values. Human and animal share one anatomy of pain: the mother and the horse have the same blade for a tongue. Room and street fold into one space by the rule that folds a face into profile and front at once. The range runs from the dead to the witness, from the lamp to the electric light, and it holds. What resists is in two places: the horse’s newsprint texture, a second law used once; and three lights in a space with no single source.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held, in one field: the family, in the mother and her dead child; the animal world, the bull, the horse and the bird suffering beside the human; the state and war, in the fallen soldier and an enemy not shown; technology, in the electric light and the fire from above; the home and the town, in the table, the window and the burning house; the sacred, in the Pietà; consciousness, in the lamp-bearer’s witness and the lunging woman’s lifted face. The triangle and the frieze place each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is that this is one instant and one place in nine figures: no history before or after, no labour, no city beyond a few walls, no natural order beyond the animals.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.4, then The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 9.3. A form that is the instrument of the knowledge, in the colour of the news, a room that is also a street and bodies broken in the drawing itself; a departure from the history painting of massacre that leaves out the act and the actor; and a canvas that carried the studio’s language into a public tragedy and became the emblem of the bombing of civilians.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2, the single canvas and the single instant: nine figures in one place, with no history before or after and no world beyond a few walls. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.9, held by the bird on the table and the setting, the few parts of the field that could go with little loss.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Unconcealment at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis it governs falls below 8.9, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it stands — oil on canvas, painted in Paris in May and June 1937, now in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid — and of how it was made and where it has been. No image or written source for the painting was consulted. Commissioned early in 1937 by the government of the Spanish Republic for its pavilion at the Paris International Exposition; at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on Picasso’s loan from 1939; in Madrid from 10 September 1981, in the Casón del Buen Retiro until 1992. The preparatory studies and Dora Maar’s photographs of the canvas in progress are evidence of the making and are not scored. The wear of rolling and travel, and the paint sprayed on the canvas in 1974 and removed, are not charged to the painter; they count only as facts of how the work survived. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the exact dimensions, the number of studies and of photographed states, the day the canvas was begun and the day it was finished, the make-up of the paint and the later conservation, are not given. No words of Picasso’s are quoted; the only words quoted are those sprayed on the canvas in 1974.