Massacre in Korea

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Massacre in Korea
Pablo Picasso, 1951
Oil on plywood
110 × 210 cm, 43.3 × 82.7 in
Musée National Picasso, Paris

Massacre in Korea was painted by the Spanish master Pablo Picasso in 1951. The work is an example of his expressionistic style, and is drawn from Francisco Goya's The Third of May 1808, which shows Napoleon's soldiers executing Spanish civilians under the orders of Joachim Murat.[1] It stands in the same iconographic tradition of an earlier work "modeled" after the Goya, Édouard Manet's Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, from 1867.

As with Goya's work, Massacre in Korea is divided into two distinct parts. To the left of the canvas stand a group of naked women and children, who are situated at the foot of a mass grave. To the right are a number of heavily armed soldiers, who are also naked but equipped with "gigantic limbs and hard muscles reminiscent of prehistoric giants".[2] As in the Goya, the firing squad is rigidly poised, however Picasso treats their form with a touch of humour, as he often did when portraying armored soldiers in drawings and lithographs. The men's robot-like quality is so severely rendered that it verges on farce.

During this period, Picasso was moving from his earlier communist ideology. However, this work betrays a sympathy for the people who lived under the ideas he was rejecting. The painting is a protest against the United Nations and the United States intervention in the Korean War.[3]

At 43 by 82 inches, the work is less monumental than his Guernica, however it shares that painting's basic conception and expressive vehemence.[2]

[edit] Citations

  1. ^ Keen, Kirsten Hoving. "Picasso's Communist Interlude: The Murals of War and Peace". The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 122, No. 928, Special Issue Devoted to Twentieth Century Art, July, 1980. p. 464.
  2. ^ a b Boeck & Sabartés, p. 302.
  3. ^ Picasso A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, edited by William Rubin, copyright MoMA 1980, p.383
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