09. War Years

1937 - 1945

Music Selection: Villa-Lobos - Guitar Concerto

Picasso painted three powerful, moving, anti-war paintings, the first of which is the most monumental and famous, and is in fact one of his most best-known works, , regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history: Guernica. Commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create a large mural for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. Outraged by the bombing and massacre of the Spanish town of Guernica by the German air force in the Spanish Civil War, and encouraged by Spanish poet Juan Larrea, Picasso made the massacre the subject of his commission. His partner Dora Maar documented the process of creating the painting.

Picasso fled from Paris before the outbreak of the war in 1939 but returned to the German-occupied capital in 1940 and remained in his Parisian studio for the rest of the war. During the war years Picasso created still lifes, portraits and nudes, and painted the second of his anti-war paintings Le Charnier (Charnel House) (February 1945) an oil and charcoal on canvas painting which is purported to deal with the Nazi genocide of the Holocaust. The black and white 'grisaille' composition was based primarily upon film and photographs of a slaughtered family during the Spanish Civil War.

The Massacre in Korea (1951) is the third in a series of anti-war paintings created by Picasso. The title of this painting refers to the outbreak of the Korean War.