| Artist: | Picasso, Pablo |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Weeping Woman | |
| Date of Work: | 1937 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Pre-WWII | |
| Movement: | Surrealism meets Expressionism | |
| Medium: | Drawing on Paper | |
| Subject: she grew out of the "Greek Chorus" of Weeping Women in Picasso's 1937 anti-war painting, "Guernica." Though she may weep as one of Franco's victims, she is not merely a victim; her tongue lashes out like a weapon, voicing her protest of the Spanish Civil War atrocity, a dress rehearsal for WWII in which Franco, with the help of Hitler, bombed the innocent town civilians of the Basque city, Guernica. The Weeping Woman becomes Picasso's way of voicing his own protest. Style: Picasso uses everything he knows: cubist angularity and shifting perspectives; surrealist biomorphic distortion in the shape of the eyes; and an expressionist outpouring of emotion and angst. Note the tracks of her tears which cut down her face like gashes. Context: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was started as a right-wing military takeover by General Franco, who claimed he was willing to shoot half the Spanish people to get his objectives. Guernica was a small, ancient town in the Basque region that had long stood for democracy. On the guise of trying to cut off the port shipping town of Bilbao, Franco set the nearby civilian town of Guernica as a military target; the truth was that Hitler wanted to test his best fighter pilots and new aircraft to see if they were ready for blitzkrieg (total war, no civilians, no prisoners). Without any warning, bombers with German pilots wearing Spanish uniforms flew over the city and started dropping heavy weapons on the unsuspecting town during market day when all the women and children were out. The planes chased down the peasants who fled into the fields. The heavy saturation bombing went on for 3 and a quarter hours in the late afternoon. When they left, the town was in ruins. Franco then tried to cover up the atrocity, shifting blame to the people of the town itself and to the Communists, who were not involved at all. Picasso, back in Paris, heard the news and was outraged. He had a commission to do a major mural for the Spanish pavillion at the World's Fair in Paris, which would open that summer. Within five weeks he completed "Guernica," an 11'6" x 25'8" painting, to make the public aware of what had happened. If ever painting had a chance to impact on history, this was it, and he used every style he had to drive the message home. Universalizing the subject, the painting stands as a testament of the horrors of war and as an outraged response to man's inhumanity to man. The Weeping Women are the painting's legacy, keeping its message alive long after the atrocity at Guernica would have been forgotten as just another 20th c. war story. We end where we began, thus, with a scream. | ||
