Notes: History

1. Guernica, Pablo Picasso, a mural-size canvas (11.5 feet tall, 25.6 ft wide), painted in oil. Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.

2. Notes: History Picasso painted Guernica created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country village in northern Spain. Ironically, Gurenica was bombed by the Germans (and Italians) on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Like Slaughterhouse Five, a novel about the bombing of Dresden by American and British forces in 1945, the painting emphasizes the tragedy and suffering caused by war, and particularly the horrors brought to bear upon innocent civilians. Unfortunately, although this anti-war painting brought the Spanish Civil War to the attention of the world, it did not stop wars, since only 8 years later, Dresden suffers a similar (if more all-encompassing) fate.

3. Notes: Painting Vonnegut tells us that his novel “is so short and jumbled and jangled…because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre….Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre….” (19). As a Cubist work, the painting reflects the “jumbled and jangled” structure of the novel: There is no left-to-right, three-dimensional perspective. Images overlap…. Death of culture (Dresden like “Oz”(148), which, after the bombing, looks like “the surface of the moon” ( ). Painting has broken bust (death of culture)….