Word: guernica
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...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...
...Doldrums. The Civil War in Spain settled Picasso's doldrums. Passionately Loyalist, he painted Guernica for the Spanish government building at the Paris World's Fair. The mural, done entirely in black, white and grey, symbolized the bombing of a Spanish town by German planes. Brutally ugly, it mixed classical analogies with a suggestion of crumpled newspapers and memories of the bull ring. Goya himself never painted a darker evocation of war's horror...
...Picasso had fled to the south of France. Shortly afterwards he decided to return. "Simple Nazi soldiers used to visit me," says Picasso, who was considered too valuable to molest, even though Resistance leaders sometimes met at his studio. "When they left I presented them with souvenir postcards of Guernica...