Antigovernment Statements through Painting - 1114 Words

While Van Gogh shut himself off from the world first, in rural Provence, and second, in an asylum in Saint Remy, other artists have used their celebrity to draw attention to contemporary political events, and to speak out against, and challenge the establishment. As mentioned above, Warhol had made art from newspaper headlines, thus drawing attention to contemporary politics on race in America. However, among the best known of such anti governmental statements is Picasso’s painting Guernica, which represents a passionate attack on Spain’s fascist government by the Spanish artist living in Paris. It portrays a scene of the German bombing, in 1937, of Guernica, the Basque capital of Northern Spain, during the Spanish civil war, and became a universal symbol of the atrocity of war. The scene is set within a room where, at an open end on the left, a bull flails its tail as it stands over a woman grieving over the dead child in her arms. The subjects in this painting are s hown as innocent and helpless. The centre is occupied by a horse, which falls in agony as it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. The large gaping wound in its side is a major focus of the painting, reinforced by the human skull which overlays the horse’s body. On the open palm of the dead soldier in the foreground is a stigmata, a symbol of martyrdom derived from a stigmata of Christ. A light bulb blazes in the shape of an evil eye over the suffering horse’s head, reminiscent of the bare bulb