Guernica is, ostensibly, a history painting. That does not mean it owes us airplanes, particularly as a work of Modernism, but rather that it should disclose, at least in feeling, what should not be forgotten. Perhaps paradoxically for a history painting, Picasso paints victimhood as an isolated, idealized concept, not as the effect of a cause. But this is how Modernism would need to enter the genre, to have a stake in depicting the past that the caveat of meaning-through-materiality had outwardly foreclosed. And the challenge would necessarily be more complex than colossifying Cubism. The painting would have to persuade its audience it depicts what was, airplanes or not.
My essay seeks Guernica's rhetorical appeal as a modern history painting. For the moment I will leave aside Goya's half-buried dog, but I should explain my start. Perro Semihundido lays the end of the world at humanity's feet by depicting it on the face of a doomed domesticated animal. If for no other reason, this brings the Goya into a tactical kinship with Guernica. To the extent that an artist might want to break his audience's heart, or show it the world through fresh eyes, this is a proven strategy. But on the list of things a history painting of the bombing of Guernica should depict, airplanes should have been higher than horses. But Guernica is Picasso's attempt at reconstituting history painting. Whatever his Modernism would express about painting history, it would reject the idea that the canvas must display what real space contained. In any case, what Guernica gives us for its history of a bombing is, at its center, a horse: I ask why. |
