The Bombing Of Guernica By Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and a stage designer. Picasso was the most influential artist of the twentieth century and saw himself as a painter even though he sculpted as well. He has created many paintings, such as The Old Guitarist, The Weeping Woman, and Ma Jolie. Picasso’s paintings vary between symbolism, surrealism, and cubism. For example, Picasso’s oil painting, Guernica, was one of his masterpieces that uses symbolism. Guernica is a town in the Basque Provinces of northern Spain. In 1937, Guernica was bombed during the Spanish Civil War. German planes were in the skies over Guernica and immediately turned the peaceful town into “an everlasting symbol of the atrocity of war” (“The Bombing of Guernica”). Guernica was more like a test dummy for Hitler to practice Blitzkrieg, which is a term for “lightning war”, and it is a military tactic to cause disorganization to their enemies.
This painting shows the horrors of the war and has come to be a symbol of anti-war. This painting is a reminder of the tragedies of war. On the mural, there are several victims of the bombing, including men, women, and children. There is a figure in the foreground of the painting that appears to be a corpse and is on both sides by living people with their heads thrown back, also the figure to the left is a mother holding a baby who seems to have died as a cause of the bombing. This is a devastating thing to see in a painting that symbolizes so