Guernica Pablo Picasso

During the early 1900’s, in the times of World War I, Spain had been under the rule of Miguel Primo de Rivera. Primo de Rivera went into power on September 13, 1923, and his dictatorship lasted for seven years, until his death in 1930. (Shlomo 65) And, in 1931, Spain “attempted to establish a parliamentary republic whose governments would reflect the outcomes of honest election.” (Jackson 272) And, through this republic, the government tried to establish democratic reforms to help the county deal with some problems they had been facing, such as the “long-standing political, economic, and social problems” (273). It wasn’t until five years after the republic was formed that the start of the Spanish Civil War broke out. The Nationalist rebels
Picasso was assigned by the Spanish Republican government to present a mural at the Paris Exhibition in the Summer of 1937. Even though Picasso already started a mural for the exhibition, he scraped it as soon as he heard of the tragedy that occurred in Spain, a country where he was born and raised. The mural he was working on before was not anything he was passionate about, so finding a new profound inspiration let his imagination run wild. The painting, Guernica, is very abstract and holds a lot of symbolism; symbolism that Picasso never really revealed the true meaning behind to the public. The mural is 11 feet tall by 25.6 feet wide, and he only uses a dark color palette of black, white, and grey to symbolize and add to the effect of darkness and suffering that occurred that day during the Spanish Civil War. Two of the main characters in his piece of work are a bull, which is off to the far left of the painting and seems to be causing all the rampage, and a horse in the middle of the painting who is showing expressions of fear and pain as it is screaming either for help or in pain. According to an art historian, Patricia Failing, "The bull and the horse are important characters in Spanish culture. Picasso himself certainly used these characters to play many different roles over time. This has made the task of interpreting the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very tough. Their relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in a variety of ways throughout Picasso's career." ("Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso.") Even though all the symbols in the painting Guernica have not been completely revealed, it is said that Picasso did reveal the symbolism for these two figures. Picasso used the bull “to represent the dark forces, while the horse stood for the Spanish people” (Wischnitzer 153). The painting also depicts at