During the summer vacation, CCTV News launched a series of micro-videos "Take Children Closer to The World Famous Paintings", we hope that through the appreciation of the world's famous paintings, enrich the children's aesthetic experience, so that children can learn to love beauty and love life in the process of feeling beauty.
The painting presented today is Picasso's Guernica.
Learn the story behind Picasso's Guernica
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Reporter | Birch Tang Ye
Camera | Lei Hao
Interpretation of paintings
Guernica
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
oil painting
In 1937
349.3cm x776.6cm
The National Gallery of The Reina Sofia, Spain
Picasso, one of the world's greatest artists of the 20th century, is almost universally known.
But Guernica, Picasso's pinnacle, is not as well known to everyone as his name suggests.
Guernica is the anti-fascist manifesto of the world of painting, created by the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in 1937.
In this painting, Picasso uses Cubist and Surrealist styles to expose the Nazi bombardment of innocent civilians in the Spanish town of Guernica, reflecting the deep catastrophe brought by war and people's desire for peace.
At first glance, "Guernica" is not a "good-looking" work, the picture is composed of black and white and gray, and the whole painting is full of tragic atmosphere. This is the painter's indictment of the atrocities of war, sympathy for the human catastrophe. All images transcend time and space and contain the sound of indignant protest.
A total of six human figures and two animal figures are depicted in the picture.
Part on the left side of Guernica
At the far left is a crying woman with a dead child in her arms; at the bottom of the picture lies a man, his body torn apart under the horse's hoof, but his right hand is still clutching a dagger, symbolizing the warrior who defends the country.
Part on the right side of Guernica
On the right side of the picture there is a woman who is being engulfed in flames, and another woman who is desperately trying to escape, so that one leg is far behind, and they are all people who have suffered in the war.
Part of the upper side of Guernica
The woman who poked her head out of the door was holding a candle symbolizing light.
Part of Guernica
Wounded cattle and roaring horses have a strong destructive significance, symbolizing the iron hooves and atrocities of fascism.
Picasso employed a variety of styles and techniques to expose complex scenes of fascist atrocities in semi-realistic, cubist, allegorical and symbolic images. Although it is some geometric figures, with a wide range of lines and complex meanings, the audience can understand that its strong touching point is no less than a realistic masterpiece.
Pablo Picasso
In January 1937, Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish Republic to create a decorative mural for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Exposition. But on April 26, 1937, the Germans bombed the small town of Guernica in northern Spain, and guernica was razed to the ground as most of the young men in the city went to the front, most of the wounded and killed were women and children.
What Guernica looked like after being bombed
When Picasso heard of this from the newspapers, he immediately decided to create a work for the event, and he temporarily modified the murals created for the Paris World's Fair to indict the inhuman atrocities of the fascists and express their sorrow for the sacrifice of the people of the motherland.
A replica of the painting now hangs at the entrance to the UN Security Council's conference hall as an expression of the UN Security Council's determination to maintain world peace.
<h1>"Picasso is always young"</h1>
Born in Spain, Picasso has long been engaged in artistic creation activities in France, and is one of the most creative and far-reaching artists in the contemporary West, the founder of the Cubist School. His painting style throughout his life was changeable and eclectic, and posterity used the phrase "Picasso is always young" to describe his varied artistic style.
Picasso was a prolific painter. According to statistics, his works total nearly 37,000, including: 1,885 oil paintings, 7,089 drawings, 20,000 prints, and 6,121 lithographs. He has a strong influence on the art history of the twentieth century, and people call him "a rare genius in the history of human art".
In 1897, Picasso was only 16 years old... No way, who made Picasso a genius
1905, The Boy with the Pipe, Picasso's 24-year-old work. At sotheby's auction in 2004, the painting sold for $104 million. Picasso of this period was still groping for his own style.
1907 Avignon Girl, Picasso's 26-year-old work
In 1907 Picasso began the most ornate transformation of his artistic style with the creation of The Maiden of Avignon, and soon after he founded Cubism.
His view in this period was not to depict the outward form of objective objects, but to introduce objective objects into painting, thus synthesizing the representation of figurative objects themselves with the structural forms of representation abstraction.
Cubism is Picasso's greatest contribution to the world. The great influence of Cubism on our lives is far greater than the impact on the fine arts itself. The textile industry, the construction industry, the design industry, etc. have all been greatly impacted by their thinking, and there is something with a sense that we are accustomed to today.
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<h1>Picasso: "Father of the Dove of Peace"</h1>
In 1950, to commemorate the World Peace Congress held in Warsaw, Picasso painted a white dove with an olive branch, and the Chilean poet Neruda called this bird the "peace dove", and since then the dove has been recognized as a symbol of peace, in which Picasso pinned his desire for peace, so he was also known as the "father of the peace dove".
△1950年《Dove of peace》
Later, at the World Peace Congress in Vienna in 1952, Picasso created a "Dove of Peace", showing that the struggle of the peoples of the world for peace has reached a higher stage.
△ 1952 "Peace Dove"
Picasso's penchant for using pigeons to express peace has a sad story behind it.
When Paris fell in 1940, Picasso was living in Paris, his neighbor was an old man who raised pigeons, and his sons and daughters-in-law died in the anti-fascist battle, leaving him and his grandson to live together. The flames of war nourished the young grandson's heart, and he thought that the white cloth tied to the bamboo pole used to summon the pigeons was like a small white flag of surrender, so he replaced it with a red cloth strip that looked like a flame of revenge.
The next day, however, when the child was summoning pigeons with bamboo poles tied with red cloth strips, he was spotted by the Nazis patrolling the streets, believing that the child was sending a message to the guerrillas, so they threw him out of the upstairs window and killed all the pigeons. The sad old man holding a dying white dove asked Picasso to paint it in honor of his grandson who died tragically at the hands of fascists, which is the prototype of the peace dove.
△ 1940 Peace Dove prototype
<h1>Museum Trivia: The National Gallery of Queen Sofia</h1>
Located in the heart of Madrid, Spain' capital, the National Gallery of Art is one of the largest and most modern museums of modern and contemporary art in the world, and it mainly collects works by Spanish "modern and contemporary avant-garde artists", including abstraction, Cubism, Modeling, Prophetism, Surrealism, etc., the most prominent of which are Picasso, Juan Gris, Miro, Dali and Julio Gonzalez.
Producer/Yang Jihong Editor-in-Chief/Li Zhe
Planner/Wang Yuan
Intern Editor/Lin Zeng