Word: guernica
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Undoubtedly one of the great pictures of our day is Picasso's Guernica mural, just as he himself is one of the greatest artists of our time . . . But the fresh symbols that come forth from this masterly hand reveal the scars and shocks of our sad era, with not even the faintest hints of a new integration ... At times the emotion is so lacerating that the next step beyond would be either insanity or suicide, violence and nihilism; the death of the human personality. This is the message that modern art brings to us at its purest...
...were more than kind. "Extraordinarily powerful and moving," one wrote. Another praised it as being "in the pictorial language of a 20th Century painter who is aghast at man's inhumanity to man." Lebrun's technique is clearly 20th Century, since it derives from Picasso's Guernica-done in 1937. That tormented masterpiece has a less pretentious theme (the bombing of a Spanish town) and a saving element of compassion that Lebrun's lacks...
...timid or oldfashioned; it was a direct challenge to the aging moderns who have so long shaped French art. By its size, its dull coloring and its air-war theme, the picture was clearly intended to invite comparison with Picasso's famous canvas of the Spanish civil war, Guernica. Lorjou is no admirer of his elder. "Picasso is called a god," he storms. "In reality he is a monster...
Nonetheless, Lorjou had followed Picasso's symbolism, while challenging him in treatment. Like Guernica, Lorjou's Atomic Age features a horse and a bull; but while Picasso's horse writhes wounded, Lorjou's flies above the scene, whipped on by a skeleton. And while Picasso's bull stands threatening, Lorjou's is decapitated; the head sleeps on a striped pedestal, a plucked rooster between its horns. "Both Picasso and I," Lorjou explains, "went to the same source-Spain...
Modern art, like any other, reflects the preoccupations of its day. For example: bombing. Picasso's big, brutal painting, Guernica, successfully symbolized destruction from the air, and last week a first-rank sculptor was meeting the same challenge in bronze. Ossip Zadkine, 60, had been commissioned to commemorate the 1940 Nazi bombing of Rotterdam. He did it in terms of a single, fearful, upward-reaching figure...