This final stage, so apparently spontaneous, was not reached without a great deal of labor: although from the beginning the three main figures were there, and although they nearly always ran bull, horse, lamp-holding woman, they and their attendant forms had to be shifted again and again to give each its utmost value and to realize the full potentiality of the whole. Some fifty studies, drawings, and paintings came before the main picture was firmly settled, with perhaps another fifty during and after the painting of it.
On May 2 the dead man appeared, a classical warrior: in this drawing the bull’s head and its whole body face away from the woman with the lamp and the horse’s head rears up against the bull’s hindquarters, while from the wound in its belly comes a little Pegasus: in another made the same day the bull is in motion, going away from the woman and looking back at the lamp, the horse has collapsed, and the warrior is turned with his head to the left. Still on May 2 Picasso painted a large version of the horse’s head, almost a mirror-image of the one he eventually used, but stretched even higher—the head of an old worn-out hack, with the out-thrust pointed tongue familiar from his earlier work.
Gradually other figures appeared, some to be retained, others discarded; and by May 9 the composition had reached something near to its definitive shape. At this stage the essential figures are the lamp-holding woman (she had disappeared for a moment) and the bull looking at her: the horse has completely collapsed by a cart-wheel; there are more dead or wildly mourning figures; and the fire on the right blazes higher than it does in later versions, while from the ruins an arm reaches up, its fist clenched in the Republican salute.
The next day he gave the bull a pleasant, rather stupid human face: but this he did not keep, any more than he kept the ladder that he at one time intended to set against the burning house with a woman carrying her baby down it.
Then on May 11 Picasso squared up his enormous canvas. There was just room for it between the walls at the end of the great studio, but although it stood right down on the floor it would not quite fit under the beams without being tilted; so for the lower parts he had to squat on the floor while for the higher he climbed on a pair of steps; and in either case he had to paint on & slanting surface. None of these things worried him in the least. Dora Maar’s photographs of the work in progress show the awkwardness of the canvas, the little heaps of newspaper that he used as a palette, the pots, the crushed tubes, and innumerable cigarette-ends—he always smoked heavily, and now under this almost continual strain he must have gone far beyond his usual number. Almost continual: for where painting was concerned Picasso was capable of extraordinary self-discipline, and in spite of the pressure to carry straight on he still drove out to Le Tremblay to paint his still-lives in that totally different atmosphere: without this rest it might have been impossible for him to keep his cool, incisive judgment throughout a month and more of most intensive creative effort.
The first of Dora Maar’s photographs of the full canvas shows the bull turned resolutely from the woman, the horse crumpled on the ground with its head arched convulsively downwards, and the warrior, an almost neoclassical figure compared with the rest, lying on his back with his right arm, enclosed in a narrow rectangle, raised in the Republican salute: and this vertical arm, seven feet long and reaching to the lamp, is one of the most important elements in the picture, while the lamp itself has a second vertical, like a distaff, running straight down to the horse’s leg. From the top of the lamp a diagonal slants down towards the bottom right-hand side of the picture, where it rises again in the burning house. On the left, though less distinctly, can be made out the answering side of the triangle and the corresponding rise. These remained constant, the firm underlying structure of the composition: but the next photograph shows a petaled sun behind the clenched fist, which now holds some ears of corn. In the third the sun has given way to a white pointed oval; the arm (already diminished in the last) has vanished, for the soldier, turned with his head to the left again, is now lying on his face.
The abolition of this vertical made an enormous difference to the picture—to its possibilities—and after some important but less vital changes Picasso all at once seized upon the opportunity offered him by the central gap, to which he had no doubt been feeling his way from the outset. The exact date of his final decision is not known, but it may well have been after a pause at Le Tremblay or when he had taken some hours off to add four etchings in the spirit of the painting to the “Sueñd y mentira.” With this free space at his disposal he was at last able to return to his earlier idea for the horse, rearing its head right up so that it stood as we now see it, one of the most significant figures in the picture once more: but this obscured the rear of the bull, whose tail was towards the woman. Picasso at once reversed the creature’s body, leaving its head as it was; so that now while the body faced the woman the horned head was sharply averted.
Then turning to the horse again he gave it a ridged, collage-like texture with light, regular strokes of paint: he took the soldier, dismembered and broke him as though he were in fact a statue, set his open-mouthed face to the sky, and strengthened the flower (all that remained of a woman in an earlier stage) so that it came to his sword-holding hand: lastly he gave the great eye which had been the sun an electric-light bulb for its pupil, and apart from some minor changes the painting was done.
This was well on in June. Shortly afterwards it was in its place in the Spanish pavilion. From the moment it was first seen “Guernica” excited admiration, dislike, astonishment, controversy, and explanation. And in fact it is one of the few of Picasso’s works where words do not necessarily leave the heart of the matter untouched, since it is one of the rare pictures of his maturity with an overt literary content, so that some part of its statement can, however roughly, be transcribed.
Admittedly, a great deal can also be said, and has been said, about its purely aesthetic aspect, about its possible sources in the mass of tradition upon which Picasso could draw, about its place in the history of art in general and of Picasso’s in particular; and much of this is uncommonly interesting, for in “Guernica” one sees something of the Picasso of the Blue Period, more of Picasso the strict Cubist, the extraordinarily accomplished draughtsman, the friend of the Surrealists, the painter of the Crucifixion and the metamorphic pictures, and the author of the “Minotauro-machie”: a kind of epitome of the Picassos of the last thirty years and more, since all his experience and all his discoveries went into the making of it. And although we are still so near the event that few but the very young can dissociate the picture from its emotionally-charged historical context, a very great deal has been written about its merit as a painting: I shall add no more than the observation that I agree with the majority in thinking “Guernica” a noble great picture, and that as far as I am concerned it purges with pity and terror.
But “Guernica” is also an allegory, making an entirely conscious use of symbol, and it is reasonable to ask how successfully and at what level this part of the “message” is conveyed. Here we are on slightly less subjective ground; for whereas if a man is asked, “Does this picture move you?” he can usefully answer only yes or no, he can make a far more meaningful reply if he is asked, “What does this picture say?”
Everybody is agreed that the essential statement is a denunciation of the crime of war, of mindless cruelty, hatred, the massacre of innocents; but beyond that opinions differ, many seeing “Guernica” as a specific indictment of the Spanish Nationalists and some of these decrying it as a mere piece of propaganda. Yet surely this is a mistaken view: Picasso did condemn Franco, and he made it perfectly clear in the “Sueño y mentira”; but in “Guernica” he lifted his protest to a far higher plane, making it a passionate and universal outcry against all war, all oppression. It would have been simple for him to multiply the fists clenched in the Republican salute: he abolished them. He avoided all specific mention of either side; and although the horse and the bull had their origins in Spain, as signs they t
ranscend the local reference.
They and the woman with the lamp were his chief symbols, and the apparent success of the allegory would seem to depend upon their interpretation by the world. They have been variously interpreted, generally in direct relationship to the Spanish war: for some the bull is Fascism, dreading the woman with the light, another version of the girl with the candle in the “Minotauromachie,” who is supposed to repel the monster, and the horse is the Republic; while for others the roles are reversed and the horse, surprisingly enough, is Spanish Nationalism. Others again have looked back to Picasso’s earlier work to elucidate his signs, particularly to his many bull-ring scenes; and they have been sadly puzzled by his ambivalent attitude towards both the bull and the minotaur, either of which can be now villain now hero—as recently as the “Sueño y mentira” it is the bull which confronts Franco, eventually goring him to death.
As far as the “Guernica” bull is concerned, however, we know exactly what Picasso had in mind. After the Liberation of Paris an American soldier, Jerome Seckler, called upon him and asked him, in effect, to explain his painting. The young man must have been as appealing as he was naïve, for although Picasso had been bored and distressed by this perpetually-recurring question for more than thirty years he took him upstairs, listened patiently to his voluble analyses of various pictures, including “Guernica,” and talked to him for a long while, very kindly and I believe without any of the perversity he often displayed when badgered. “I talked about the symbol of the bull, the horse, the hands with the lifelines, etc., and the origin of the symbols in the Spanish mythology. Picasso kept nodding his head as I spoke. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the bull there represents brutality, the horse the people. Yes, there I used symbolism, but not in the others.’”
During the same interview he observed, apropos of his political consciousness, “There is no deliberate sense of propaganda in my painting.”
“Except in the ‘Guernica,’ ” said Seckler.
“Yes,” he replied, “except in the ‘Guernica.’ In that there is a deliberate appeal to people, a deliberate sense of propaganda.”
Picasso’s own attitude towards symbols varied: at one time he said that it was the duty of the viewer to create them out of the material the painter provided and to interpret them. But if in the case of “Guernica” we take him at his word, accepting the bull as mere brutality and the horse as the people, then the allegory takes on a universal aspect. The crime is no longer committed by Fascists in a given incident in the Spanish war but by all brutal, evil stupidity in power, and the painting is a huge protest against the universal suffering that it causes. It can also be read not as a moral exhortation but as a despairing assertion that there is no victory, that both sides inevitably lose, leaving only a brute in a desolate, apocalyptic battlefield full of hate, devoid of decency, art, and humanity. And this reading is supported by the fact that when Picasso was painting “Guernica” he made some experiments with papier-collé: one of the collages was a tear of blood which he moved from one face to another, lingering longest on the bull as though it were a creature to be pitied equally with the rest. In the end he discarded the tear but he said to the poet José Bergamín, “We’ll put it in a box and we’ll go at least every Friday and stick it on the bull.”
It has been said that the symbolism of “Guernica” is private, obscure, even hermetic; that the message therefore does not and cannot come across, and that the widely-differing interpretations prove it. This would be a damaging criticism of an advertisement that extolled some product or some given course of action; but does it really apply to “Guernica”? Outside the exact sciences scarcely anything worth saying can be said except by indirection; by its very being a valid symbol acquires an almost sacred power, and even though it may be but dimly apprehended in a literal sense (who “understands” the Easter Island statues or the older African carvings, yet who is unmoved by them?) it is apprehended at some very sensitive level, unconcerned with common logic, that reacts with a primitive strength. The half-heard old Latin of the Mass, its literal meaning perhaps scarcely grasped at all, may well have had a more profound effect than the audible everyday vernacular words of the present ritual, with their sadly commonplace associations. And it may be said that as the truth and life of Picasso’s high Cubist pictures stem from their basis in observed reality, so the value of his symbols arise from their initial validity for him.
Another criticism is that propaganda enters into the picture; and that just as remarks are not literature so propaganda is not art, which has nothing to do with politics nor with morals. In view of Picasso’s own words it is impossible to deny that propaganda was intended: in his first fury he may well have meant as direct an attack on the Fascists as he had already made on Franco, but in the course of his painting he sublimated all particularity and all reference to immediate events.
As to the universality of “Guernica,” only the future years, the objective centuries, can judge; but those who believe in it, and the present writer is one, already have somewhat disconcerting allies in the Spanish government itself, which, far from feeling condemned, is doing its utmost to get the picture to Madrid.
Perhaps art has nothing to do with politics nor with morals: but it quite certainly has to do with the distinction between true and false. At a certain level the difference between aesthetic truth and falsity merges with that between light and darkness; and when those issues were presented to him, there was no doubt where Picasso stood.
Chapter XVI
WHEN Picasso traveled south in the late summer of 1937 he did not leave “Guernica” behind him. The theme remained, working in his mind, and in the next few months he painted, drew, or engraved a number of postscripts, either directly related to the main picture or in the same spirit. He had done this after the “Demoiselles d’Avignon”; but whereas in 1907 he had been concerned solely with aesthetic problems, thirty years later the whole framework within which painting or any other spiritual activity had any meaning was in question: the Spanish war was the obvious prelude to an even more appalling conflict: as Michel Leiris wrote with terrible prescience, “in a black and white oblong … Picasso sends us our mourning-letter: everything we love is about to die.”
Many of the postscripts were the heads of women, weeping: and here again there was an essential difference between them and the pictures that followed the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” for not only were they directly connected with outside events but many of these distraught, pain-racked faces also referred to Dora Maar. She was very deeply attached to him, and he in his own way to her no doubt, although he denied it later; but she was a keenly intelligent woman, better informed about the state of the world than her lover and perhaps even more alive to the hideous consequences of the coming war. She had as great a capacity for elation and suffering as Picasso, though without his power of surmounting them, and like all intellectuals in those years she was unhappy when she looked beyond her own immediate boundaries: but in that particular couple there was room for only one tormented mind.
Yet this gives a picture of unrelieved distress, which is completely untrue. Anguish there was, with the Spanish war going from bad to worse, quite apart from the less tangible causes for unhappiness built into Picasso’s temperament: which perhaps made it inevitable that in speaking of his loves he should refer to “two bodies wrapped in barbed wire, each tearing the other to pieces.” But at the same time one has to reckon with Picasso’s astonishingly rapid change of mood, with his vivid pleasure in Dora Maar’s company—he could talk to her as he could talk to a man, and she was strikingly beautiful as well, a woman of his own world entirely, completely disinterested, wholly devoted to painting, above all to Picasso’s painting—and with the effect of the Mediterranean sun.
They drove down in the big Hispano-Suiza, together with Kazbek, an Afghan hound, the most recent in Picasso’s line: he had not been fortunate in his dogs these last few years, and Elft, Kazbek’s predecessor, had been retired to the co
untry for incompatability of temperament; but Kazbek, though neither particularly brave nor intelligent, gave Picasso great pleasure. Picasso’s relationship with his dogs was of a particular kind: in some ways he was extraordinarily close to them (as he was to cats, owls, and doves), in others strangely remote; while at no time was there any question of whose convenience came first. After the early mongrels they were nearly always animals of a given race, or thought to be so, of little use apart from their looks, the intelligence of their forms, their presence, and a certain fidelity, while for his part he would often leave them for long periods or abandon them entirely. Yet when they were together there appeared to be the closest bond, the painter and the dog communing on the same level. It was a contract unlike other contracts and perhaps it satisfied most of his creatures.
Their destination was Mougins again, where Eluard and Nusch were already installed; and either on the way or during an early excursion Picasso stopped at Juan-les-Pins, where he painted a very happy picture of boats on the shore with the French flag flying bravely in the middle.
Happiness glows in much of the remaining work of 1937—in the splendid sunflowers at Mougins, in the charming portraits of Dora Maar, of the infinitely stylish Nusch and other friends—and there is tranquillity at least in the portrait-etchings of his old friend Vollard and some smaller pieces: perhaps also in the strange December drawing of a distorted minotaur sitting on the strand, his breast pierced through and through by an arrow, while a calm sea-maiden, not unlike Marie-Thérèse with flowers in her hair, holds a glass up to his amazed and dying face. The drawing has been interpreted as the death of Picasso’s sexual drive, and although the evidence of at least three more acknowledged mistresses and two children makes the suggestion seem a little strange, the drawing may still be the expression of a release of some kind, for this was the end of the minotaur: he never appeared again. It was a cheerful holiday in many ways, with quantities of friends at Mougins and along the coast. Matisse was at Nice: Picasso often went to see him, and their relationship took on a new cordiality. They were made to be friends, and in later years they did in fact come much closer to one another. Had their friendship matured when Picasso was in his twenties or thirties life might have been happier for him—certainly less lonely—and he might have absorbed something of Matisse’s serenity, to say nothing of his good manners, which (though bourgeois no doubt) are thought by many to ease the strain of daily contact, leaving more energy for work: but from the first they had been pitted against one another and the tension had been much increased by friends who carried unconsidered remarks to and fro, sharpening them on the way. It is true that there were plenty of cracks such as “In comparison with me, Matisse is a young lady” on Picasso’s part; and the discipline he observed in drawing would sometimes abandon him in the heat of argument, so that Matisse, an extremely sensitive and naturally very well-bred man, came positively to dread the wounds that Picasso could inflict, and to avoid the possibility of conflict. Yet their mutual respect never wavered for a moment; and while Picasso would not allow anyone else to attack Matisse, Matisse never attacked Picasso at all.