Word: guernica
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blue, heat radiates from the brown. Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a lengthy series that lasted some 30 years and ended after the death of Franco and the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Spain, are best seen as an American pendant to Picasso's Guernica, though with different imagery. Black in the hands of some painters-a Manet, a Goya, a Matisse-is a color, not an absence of light; and el negro Motherwell, as the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti called it, sometimes acquires a walloping chromatic power...
...Guernica, a village of 10,000 souls, has a small munitions factory and barracks on its outskirts. Guernica is also the traditional capital of the Basques. To this town Spanish sovereigns, including Ferdinand & Isabella, went to swear by the stump of an ancient oak tree to protect the ancient privileges of the Basque people...
...harrying terrified peasants through the fields, sending them sprawling in their own blood. Over 800 men, women and children were killed. The munitions factory and barracks, untouched, were later seized by advancing Rightist infantry. Said Catholic Canon Alberto Onoindia of Valladolid Cathedral: "I saw the bombing and burning of Guernica, one of the terrible crimes of this...
...works of art for which the word masterpiece-exiled for the crime of elitism over the past decade-must now be reinstated. It is the largest exhibition of one artist's work that MOMA has ever held, or probably ever will. It contains pieces ranging in size from Guernica, Picasso's 26-ft.-wide mural of protest against the fascist bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, to a cluster of peg dolls he painted for his daughter Paloma. Paintings, drawings, collages, prints of every kind, sculpture in bronze, wood, wire, tin, paper and clay...
Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's body is more like collaged newsprint than hair...