Pablo Picasso Influence

Every piece of artwork has a driving force behind the making of it. It could be as simple as an emotional feeling at a certain point in an artist’s life, or it could be as complicated as the political events taking place around an artist. Some artworks have multiple influences on them. Guernica, an internationally recognized anti-war symbol designed and painted by Pablo Picasso, was produced in response to the immense devastation, chaos, and disgust of the Spanish Civil War, or more specifically the German bombing of Guernica, Spain, as well as traditional yet iconic aspects of Spanish culture, like bullfighting.
Way before Picasso began his work on Guernica, Spain was beginning its downward spiral that would result in the Spanish Civil War
He cared very little about politics and did not express much about his political views. Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to work on a painting for the upcoming Paris Exhibition. He knew about the intense situation in Spain but did not know about the Guernica bombing until a London Times journalist, George Steer, wrote a front-page story chronicling it. The reports were extremely graphic and were circulated around the globe. After reading the story, Picasso immediately thinks about the situation in Madrid; the Prado in Madrid had been hit by bombings as well. According to Schama, Picasso felt “personally assaulted” (Power of Art), a “sense of revulsion” (Hensbergen 3), and felt a responsibility to protect his Spanish heritage and his fellow Spanish artists, like Francisco Goya, whose art was in the Prado at the time of the bombings. On the subject of Guernica, Picasso said, “Guernica had gone cubist,” and he felt the need to showcase the results. With Guernica being the last straw for Picasso, he made it his mission to tell the truth about the scenes in Guernica (because Franco had tried to place the blame for the bombing as the work of Basque communists, and Picasso knew that that was far from the truth) and express his disgust with the people who “sunk Spain with a notion of pain” (Power of Art). So, he abandoned his commission for the Paris Exhibition and began work on Guernica, using images that “spoke to the horrors that humans have visited on each other for millennia” (Martin