Guernica

“The monumentality of Michelangelo and the High Renaissance cannot exist in our age, for ours is one of disillusionment, despair, and destruction. Guernica is a monument to destruction – a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of genius. Not only Gernika, but Spain; not only Spain, but Europe, is symbolized in this allegory. It is the modern Calvary, the agony in the bomb-shattered ruins of human tenderness and frailty. It is a religious picture, painted, not with the same kind, but with the same degree of fervour that inspired Grunewald and the master of the Avignon Pietá, Van Eyck, and Bellini. It is not sufficient to compare the Picasso of this painting with the Goya of the “Desastres”. Goya, too, was a great artist, and a great humanist; but his reactions were individualistic – his instruments irony, satire, ridicule. Picasso is more universal. His symbols are banal, like the symbols of Homer, Dante, Cervantes. For it is only when the widest commonplace is infused with the intensest passion that a great work of art, transcending all schools and categories, is born; and being born, lives immortally." Herbert Read