Guernicaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

When I was younger I would spend summer vacation at my grandmother’s house, eating all her food, playing all day and watching way too much TV.  When I wasn’t running around in her backyard, I would play with my Legos in my room.  If I needed more space to build or if I was playing with someone else, we would build our sets in the living room, which was full of old furniture, large, open windows, and many creepy paintings.  Among the posters and the prints was a huge replica of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

               I would always try to imagine what all these strange things in the walls were about, but Guernica always confused me.  I could make up stories about the other characters with bright colors and uncomfortable looking shirts, but these guys were a mess.  It was all black and white and flat and weird.  They looked like they were trying to eat each other, or that they were stumbling in the dark and tripping all over the place.  Their flat eyes and open mouths filled with rows of gaping teeth were terrifying, like a creepy old episode of The Simpsons. 

For all the art history courses and research I’ve done over the years, I can never fully remember the actual context of this piece at this moment.  But judging from the design, I think that confusion is what Picasso truly wanted.  That, and fear.