Guggenheim Museum - Past Exhibitions - Picasso and the War Years: 1937-1945

Perhaps the most celebrated artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso has often been cited for the prodigious talent and keen enthusiasm that gave rise to a career spanning more than 75 years. Renowned for fundamentally reshaping the visual vocabulary of this century, from the early work of his rose and blue periods to the breakthrough innovations of Cubism and beyond, he left an indelible mark on the course of Modern art. Picasso and the War Years: 1937-1945 focuses critical attention on a brief but tumultuous period during which horrific events on the world stage affected Picasso's work to an extent rarely seen in the work of any artist since that of his 19th-century compatriot Francisco de Goya.

Born in Málaga, Spain in 1881, Picasso settled in 1904 in Paris, where he quickly became part of a circle of noted artists and poets that included Henri Matisse and Guillaume Apollinaire. Picasso would spend the remainder of his adult life in France, and it was his unique perspective as a Spaniard living in a neighboring country that informed his work during the period beginning with the Spanish Civil War through the Nazi occupation of France and its eventual liberation by Allied troops. As the political situation became increasingly fraught and war grew closer at hand, Picasso's long-held pacifist leanings gave way to his embrace of the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War and the anti-Fascist policies of the Popular Front in France as well as his commitment to the French Communist Party.

The monumental paintings Guernica (1937) and The Charnel House (1945) stand as sentinels of this apocalyptic era, respectively chronicling the saturation bombing of a small Basque town in Spain and reports of the atrocities in Adolf Hitler's concentration camps. With their severe grisaille palette and densely twisted forms, they capture with devastating effect the senseless brutalities of war. Their chilling immediacy and reportage make the paintings unprecedented in the artist's work, for Picasso rarely responded to contemporary events so directly. Just days after the liberation of Paris, he explained, "I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something
to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done."

Picasso's work from this period upends traditional conventions-infusing the outdated principles of painting and sculpture with new meaning and manipulating religious iconography in unorthodox ways-to create works that had a freshness and relevance for audiences inured to the hardships of war. In Picasso's hands, the vanitas and memento mori traditions of still-life painting, with their ruminations on human vanity and mortality, took on a contemporary urgency. A typical painting of this kind is Still Life with Blood Sausage (1941), in which the muted palette establishes a somber mood and evokes wartime deprivation. Recent interpretations of the painting emphasize its religious connotations, with the starkly lit table as an altar upon which the knife and sausage suggest violent sacrifice. Within Picasso's artistic framework, "a casserole too can scream," and his still-life paintings from 1937-45 draw upon a repertoire of skulls, candles, and flowers, abetted by other household props, to create an allegory of the war years.

The more than 75 artworks in Picasso and the War Years, including paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings, draw upon a highly symbolic language to create a moody and wrenching pictorial record of these years.

A recurrent theme in the artist's oeuvre is that of the seated woman, sometimes weeping and frequently identifiable as a wife or mistress. During the period covered by the exhibition, the Barcelona of his youth was bombed by German and Italian forces in March 1938 and fell to Francisco Franco in January of the following year. That same month, Picasso's mother died in Barcelona, and the artist was prevented from attending her funeral. Whether the haunting images he produced during that time, such as Seated Woman (1938) and Head of a Woman (Dora Maar) (1939), depict his mother, wife, mistress, or a purely symbolic female figure, they embody Picasso's view that "women are machines for suffering." In Picasso's work, the subject of the woman provides a vehicle for meditation on the emotional tumult of the period.

The influence of the wars, while rarely overt, lurks just below the surface of Picasso's works of the era. In confronting his role as an artist faced with representing such violence, Picasso realized he could never adequately address wartime's specific atrocities. He chose instead to pursue a highly personal yet evocative language of symbols and formal devices. In so doing, he created a compelling visual testimony to the times. - J. Fiona Ragheb, Associate Curator

This exhibition is proudly sponsored by

We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts and then National Endowment for the Humanities federal agencies, whose grants have made this exhibition possible.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Picasso and the War Years 1937 - 1945 has been organized by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The curators are Steven A. Nash, Associate Director and Chief Curator, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with Robert Rosenblum, Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

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