Related Pity and Terror

Are there continuities between Guernica and the strange, often agonized vision of humanity that Picasso had set forth over the preceding decade? How did Picasso’s distinctive set of concerns, which at moments seem dark to the point of despair, inform his final picture of women and animals in pain? Curators T.J Clark and Anne Wagner, along with Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, explain the key elements of the exhibition.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is interviewed a few weeks before the opening of the exhibition tributed to him at the Petit Palais of Paris. Asked for which of his works or era he would choose to survive him, Picasso avoids responding directly, pointing out that each work is the result of a moment, a circumstance and a mood. Nevertheless, he immediately mentions Guernica (1937), as an example that illustrates his answer: behind the picture, there is a war. Picasso's Guernica, like the rest of his work, can not be explained from the interpretation of the signs or from the greater or lesser success that he obtains, but each work constitutes a page of a great notebook of memories and notes, his own biography, where the personal is inseparable from the artistic.

Interview with Pablo Picasso. In: Panorama, October 21, 1966.
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