Disgressed

I seem to have been hearing a lot about Guernica recently: partly because of the exhibition at Tate Liverpool (which doesn’t include Guernica, but given the theme of  Peace and Freedom it is inevitably a looming presence), partly because of a couple of television documentaries. One of these in particular spoke of the picture with an uncritical reverence which prompted me to look at it again. I’m not a reflexive Picasso-detester, but he had his flaws and there is a negative side of the story to be told.  Guernica is of course iconic, and striking, and interesting: but as a war painting I think it’s a failure. It suffers particularly badly from two of Picasso’s main weaknesses: over-intellectualism and – I hardly dare say this because it’s so out of key with the consensus, but look at the paintings and see if I’m not right – a certain characteristic mimsy prettiness.

Over-intellectualism is a natural problem for all art which is abstract or not directly representational. Human beings respond emotionally to salient natural objects they can see; if the image has to be decoded in any way, it gets diverted away from the guts and towards the cold rational areas of the cortex, where the impact tends to be lost. In Guernica, the complex and rather scrambled composition tends to divert the mind into a frustrated effort to sort out the perspective, join up the pieces, and work out what is actually going on. Instead of engaging emotionally, we get drawn into trying to work out what’s in front of what or where the scene is set. And then there’s that light-bulb in the sky. I believe opinion differs over whether it represents a bomb or the sun – I don’t know whether the artist ever offered a view, but he might well have said it’s a light-bulb – but you know, either way isn’t it grotesquely out of place? It surely can’t be that Picasso thought a sketch of a light bulb would present the idea of an explosion, or of the sun, more vividly than drawing the thing itself? He thought that modern man is so used to light-bulbs they are now the most vivid available symbol of heat and light? Surely not (though that does catch a sense you sometimes get that modernist painters have always been producing art addressed not to the present but to a future, revolutionised, world which has never actually arrived).  Really the light-bulb seems like a little visual joke: but what’s a little visual joke doing in a painting of an atrocity?

The style is a simple, almost naïve one: but it’s an affected, stylised simplicity, as we could tell just by looking, even if we didn’t know that Picasso was fully capable of high standards of traditional realism. The result is slightly cartoonish, with patches of bathos: do the horse’s eyes really inspire feelings of sympathetic distress, or does their ludicrous googly quality get in the way a bit? And those smooth curvy lines incongruously suggest calmness and peace. I know Picasso has a reputation for being a brutal, virile shatterer of old conventions, but just looking at the pictures, I think he spent a lot of time fighting a natural prettiness. In some earlier paintings and later line drawings he just lets the niceness rip, and we get something that would make attractive soft-edged commercial artwork: at other times he seems impatient with himself and works on the ugliness with jagged shapes and black patches in a desperate effort to butch up a bit. The Demoiselles D’Avignon may well show, not a turning point in Picasso’s thinking, but his loss of patience with the way everything he painted came out looking charming and attractive. The dark secret, of course, is that this helpless prettification is a significant reason for Picasso’s tremendous popularity: no-one else is so easy on the eye. In fairness, this stuff may have looked stranger and more alienating to people who weren’t so used to it; these days misplaced eyes don’t look the brutal distortion they perhaps once seemed.

To my eye, thought evidently not to most observers, Guernica lacks a real sense of engagement. Perhaps it’s in part because Picasso wasn’t portraying a scene he had any direct knowledge of: he was not in Guernica and in fact had a comfortable war. (It seems the nearest he came to actual conflict was getting tetchy with the German soldiers searching his apartment.) It is possible to paint scenes you didn’t see with conviction, but in this case the painting lacks a certain sincerity; and it’s made worse by the way Picasso’s attention seems not to be fully fixed on his subject. What does that bull represent? A real bull living in Guernica, a symbol of infernal power, a manifestation of nature?  It doesn’t represent anything: Picasso just liked to draw bulls (something to do with lingering concerns about the effeminacy of his images?), and kept putting them in regardless. It’s hard not to feel that an artist who was fully engaged with the horror he was depicting would have put aside favourite subjects for the moment. Compare Goya’s war pictures, which are intent on rubbing your nose in bitter, specific reality: they seem to have just the truthful, direct and virile qualities that Picasso’s effort lacks.

That’s the case for the prosecution, which we need to hear if we’re to reach a fair judgement. Not that anything is going to shift the consensus, of course. Ever since it was commissioned by the Republican government, Guernica was fated to be a powerful political symbol, more or less whatever it looked like. Nothing was going to stop people reading into what I think is actually a rather cold picture the passion they feel ought to be there, and giving it a significance which I don’t think it could have earned on its own merits.