Guernica a Paint by Pablo Ruiz Picasso

Picasso: Guernica
“ I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” These are the words of the wise Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, a famous and talented artist in the 19th and 20th century. Many have crowned him the most influential artist of his time. Many of his works including Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Ma Jolie, and Girl Before a Mirror have set the tone for many artists to follow after. However, Guernica was one of his most famous of his pieces, painting a nearly perfect emotional picture of what was happening during these times of despair. Guernica, one of his many contributions to the art world, will be described first in purely formal terms, and then a comparison and evaluation of three different critiques will be made.
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born on October 25, 1881to Maria Picasso Lopez and father Jose Ruiz Blasco in Malaga, Spain. He was influenced in his early days by his father who was a painter and an art teacher. His first lesson was in 1888 and his drawing reflects a passion of his father, a fascination with bullfights. In 1891, Picasso moved with his family to Coruna where he enrolled in his father’s classes in ornamental drawing at the Escuela de Bellas Artes before progressing to drawing from figures and plaster casts and to painting from nature. In 1894, he experimented with more biting caricatures and satirical sketches in manuscript newspaper variously titled “Azul y blanco and La Coruna.” When he was 14 years, he began to study at the School of Fine Art in La Coruna. In 1895, he produced about 15 oil portraits (Petersen, 2005).
The years 1901 to 1904, Picasso predominantly used blue to express himself artistically. This was known as the blue period. His main themes were sadness and poverty. He met and fell ...

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...bulb. He became even more confused when Picasso uses wall, windows, and tiled roof to suggest an outdoor scene and also uses tiled floors, the table, and electric light which implies that the bombing ocurrs on the inside. This confusion mimics the chaos that happened on that fatal day when the “the force of exploding bombs had thrown the inside of virtually every house into the open air,” (2002, p. 99). Martin also believes that the short, vertical brush strokes on the horse’s body represent hair, newspaper, or the sum of the dead. The partially open door to the extreme right of the painting is believed to be an escape for Picasso to walk away from the painting and not keep changing the layout as he kept doing. Once the painting was completing, all the colors that Picasso was experimenting with had all disappeared except for black, white, and, gray (Martin, 2002).