1/22/2017

Guernica Pablo Picasso (Pablo Ruiz Picasso) Malaga, Spain, 1881 – Mougins, France, 1973 Date: 1937 (May 1st-June 4th, Paris) Technique: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 349,3 x 776,6 cm Category: Painting Entry date: 1992 Observations: The government of the Spanish Republic acquired the mural “Guernica” from Picasso in 1937. When World War II broke out, the artist decided that the painting should remain in the custody of New York’s Museum of Modern Art for safekeeping until the conflict ended. In 1958 Picasso extended the loan of the painting to MoMA for an indefinite period, until such time that democracy had been restored in Spain. The work finally returned to this country in 1981. Register number: DE00050 On display in: Room 206.06 An accurate depiction of a cruel, dramatic situation, Guernica was created to be part of the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris in 1937. Pablo Picasso’s motivation for painting the scene in this great work was the news of the German aerial bombing of the Basque town whose name the piece bears, which the artist had seen in the dramatic photographs published in various periodicals, including the French newspaper L’Humanité. Despite that, neither the studies nor the finished picture contain a single allusion to a specific event, constituting instead a generic plea against the barbarity and terror of war. The huge picture is conceived as a giant poster, testimony to the horror that the Spanish Civil War was causing and a forewarning of what was to come in the Second World War. The muted colours, the intensity of each and every one of the motifs and the way they are articulated are all essential to the extreme tragedy of the scene, which would become the emblem for all the devastating tragedies of modern society. Guernica has attracted a number of controversial interpretations, doubtless due in part to the deliberate use in the painting of only greyish tones. Analysing the iconography in the painting, one Guernica scholar, Anthony Blunt, divides the protagonists of the pyramidal composition into two groups, the first of which is made up of three animals; the bull, the wounded horse and the winged bird that can just be made out in the background on the left. The second group is made up of the human beings, consisting of a dead soldier and a number of women: the one on the upper right, holding a lamp and leaning through a window, the mother on the left, wailing as she holds her dead child, the one rushing in from the right and finally the one who is crying out to the heavens, her arms raised as a house burns down behind her. At this point it should be remembered that two years earlier, in 1935, Picasso had done the etching Minotauromaquia, a synthetic work condensing into a single image all the symbols of his cycle dedicated to the mythological creature, which stands as Guernica’s most direct relative. Incidents in Picasso’s private life and the political events afflicting Europe between the wars fused together in the motifs the painter was using at the time, resulting both in Guernica itself and all the studies and ‘postscripts’, regarded as among the most representative works of art of the 20th century. http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/guernica Sabatini Building, 2nd floor, Room 206 Aforo: maximum of 20 people Duración: 40 minutes Date and time: Thursday at 5:00 p.m. and Friday at 11:30 a.m. Meeting point: Connection between the Sabatini and the Nouvel Buildings. First floor Registration: no prior registration necessary For more information: please call 91 774 1000 Ext. 2034 / or write to: mediacion@museoreinasofia.es

Walk through the Retiro on the way to the Museo de Reina Sofia

And then tarry there

Another Retiro Scene

People Watching at the Retiro

Pastorale (Pastoral) Joan Miró Barcelona, Spain, 1893 – Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 1983 From 1923-1924, Joan Miró moved away from the precision of what is known as his “detailistic phase”, in order to radically change the direction of his output, pushing it more towards the proposals of Dadaism and Surrealism. The creative freedom that came with his new pictorial approach led him to experiment with a new language, the starting point of which was that most authentic of Surrealist procedures, Automatism. The sign is dissolved in the imaginary space to an extent that touches abstraction, while swirls, dotted lines and loose strokes arise out of the sparsely covered, pale background – a background which constituted the identifying sign for all his paintings of the time. The images that were so recognisable before have almost completely disappeared, making way for a different kind of representation, the ideographic language which would, from this point on, identify Miró’s work. The elements that define Miró’s mature output – structure, form, colour, rhythm – can already be seen in the work done in this decade, which would have a decisive effect on the evolution of Miró’s plastic poetics, as Pastorale (Pastoral) shows.

Visage du Grand Masturbateur (Face of the Great Masturbator) Salvador Dalí Figueras, Girona, Spain, 1904 – 1989 Date: 1929 Technique: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 110 x 150 cm Category: Painting Entry date: 1990 Register number: AS11140 Salvador Dalí Bequest, 1990 On display in: Room 205 This painting, the quintessential symbol par excellence of his sexual obsessions, has even been commented upon by the artist himself in the best known of his literary works, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, published in 1942. Salvador Dalí painted the picture in late summer 1929, after spending a few days with Gala, who had decided to stay with him in Cadaqués, despite the fact that her husband at that time, the poet Paul Éluard, had returned to Paris alone, unaccompanied by his wife. As has been noted by Rafael Santos Torroella, Visage du Grand Masturbateur (Face of the Great Masturbator) is an eminently autobiographical painting: the large head of the masturbator is one of various personifications of the artist, who appears in several simultaneous scenes in the painting, reflecting the spiritual and erotic transformation that Dalí had just gone through as a result of Gala’s appearance in his life. This disturbing composition also shows Dalí’s fantasies reaching a zenith, especially with regard to the motif of the grasshopper suckling the principal metamorphosed figure, since – according to Dawn Ades – Dalí had from early childhood always had a particular terror of the insect.

Endless Enigma Salvador Dalí Figueras, Girona, Spain, 1904 – 1989 Date: 1938 Technique: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 114,5 x 146,5 cm Category: Painting Entry date: 1990 Register number: AS11144 Salvador Dalí Bequest, 1990 On display in: Room 205 The paranoiac-critical method, created by Salvador Dalí, presented the manipulation of conventional images either by breaking up, or by decay, and added an equally important discovery: what are known as “paranoiac” or “double images” which are, in Dalí words, “the representation of an object which, without the least figurative or anatomical modification, is at the same time the representation of another absolutely different object.” These ambiguous images are perfectly discernible in paintings like L’homme invisible (The Invisible Man, 1929-1932), where there are at least six different types of these images, and Endless Enigma (1938). There are a number of precedents for these types of representations in art history, such as the Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s multifaceted figures of the 16th century, or the phantasmagorical visions of Hieronymus Bosch.

Garrote vil (Garrotte) Ramón Casas i Carbó Barcelona, Spain, 1866 – 1932 Date: 1894 Technique: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 127 x 166 cm Category: Painting Entry date: 1895 Register number: AS11076 On display in: Room 201 Ramón Casas had already practised the representation of crowd scenes in the 1880s, in works like Entrada a la plaza de toros de Madrid (Entrance to the Madrid Bullring) and Las regattas (Regattas). After a period dominated by his portrait and nude paintings, he returned to the subject of crowd scenes, among which Garrote vil (Garrotte) holds a preeminent position. Casas himself was present at the scene of this execution in Barcelona in 1893, but when he turned it into a painting, rather than dwell on the morbid aspects inherent in the theme, he emphasized the journalistic reportage side of the event. Casas did two preparatory studies for this work, in which the industrial chimneys of Barcelona can be seen in the background. The main motif is the crowd, who are depicted from a raised viewpoint, gathered around the scaffold, on which stand the executioner, the condemned man and the priests. Also present are the Cofrades de la Sangre (the Confraternity of the Blood of Christ) in their characteristic pointed hoods. Between the condemned man and the waiting crowd, Casas leaves an empty space, which adds to the drama and tension hanging over the scene’s main group.