Word: guernica
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...Major Experience. MOMA's staff, especially its director of painting and sculpture, William Rubin, put a very high priority on preserving this feeling in the new structure. It was, Rubin argues, a key element in the intentions of modernism itself. Relatively few "classical" modernist paintings-Picasso's Guernica being an obvious exception-were carried out with the sense of public declamation that suffuses the great machines of an earlier age. The natural direction of modern art was inward. Barr had no doubt about that, and his belief in the necessity of intimate rather than ceremonial encounter has been...
...Hitler and Mussolini, struggled to defeat the Spanish peasants as they fought to save their democracy. During the Spanish Civil War Hitler had his chance to test his newly created weapons and for the first time in history, civilian dwellings were bombed. In his painting filled with twisted images, "Guernica," Pablo Picasso captures the anguish and the terror of the civilian bombings...
...Bodies on stretchers are jounced frantically toward the ambulances, and an arm waves at the camera to clear the way. Plaster clouds and torn clothes everywhere, the neighborhood blown out of its shoes. All in the same viewfinder: rescuers scramble in the chaos, a mother screams as if in Guernica, the stunned survivors move off with a slow, blank stare. The dead lie abruptly motionless wherever the latest outrage has deposited them...
...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...
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...