Experience and Emotion.
How it feels.
I spend a lot of time encouraging people to be honest about their feelings and thoughts concerning art. I promise them that there are no wrong answers. But the one comment guaranteed to bring out my sledgehammer is: "A child of five could have done that".
No.
They.
Could.
Not.
Picasso had spent years exploring the way in which familiar shapes could be fragmented. He was also fascinated by the way we see the human face. He was aware that we never see the human face as a standard portrait or simple profile. Instead we see eyes, or we see a mouth, or we see it changing rapidly from full-face to side-on.
In 1936 Picasso - a Spanish native - was living and working in Paris when Franco waged war on the Spanish Republican Government. Part of Franco's campaign was to invite Hitler's airforce in 1937 to bomb the Basque market town of Guernica. Picasso painted a vast canvas showing the horrors of the attack in which women, children, men and animals died. The painting includes a weeping woman holding a dead child.
The 'weeping woman' was a theme he re-worked many times, including the image at the top of this page. What we see is a woman gripped by grief and horror so intense that it goes beyond words. Everything about her becomes grief: her handkerchief becomes her tears which become her face. The sharply fragmented outlines point to a ripping deep in her soul. She is seeing things which no-one should ever have to see. Her lips are drawn back as if they will never be able to speak of what she is experiencing. Picasso has located her in that specific historic event - she wears her best hat for the market day on which the attack took place. And yet she also stands with all the other women who have gazed on unthinkable horrors in Srebrenica, Aleppo and elsewhere.
Picasso has captured an emotional experience in a way which words could not (why else create a painting?). But his painting does more than speak about the experience; it speaks for those who know it.
