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.
