Art, and artistic style, should be understood functionally.
To many of us, Cubism, for example, feels out of place in the public sphere, as though the attention given to it at a museum should be reserved for other art.
Cubism is cave art.
Picasso’s Guernica and its bull remembers Altamira’s prehistoric outlines.
Like caves themselves, it’s sepulchral and cathartic. Indeed, the Guernica itself is an interior: the sun in its sky is an electric light.
The only man in the Guernica painting is dead, his sword broken at his side. Every other human person (apart from a baby) is a woman. These aside, we have two animals, a bull and a horse.
The triad of dead man with broken sword, horse and bull, are the triad of the bullfight: the torero, his horse (toreros sometimes ride horses), and the bull. These correspond respectively to man proper, his ‘vehicular self’ or mind, and his ‘animal self’ or passions.
Picasso often painted himself as a bull, or else as a minotaur. I would argue that the Guernica presents us the dead “bull” Picasso, the disordered mind as a trampling horse, and the fallen man whose power (the sword) has reached its limit. All this goes on in a realm of interiority, a sunless place.
The world—multiplicity, manifestation, nature, possibility, space— is traditionally feminine. Here, it is represented by the painting’s several suffering women.
In Guernica, the Christ is dead with Longinus’ shattered lance, the sacrificial lamb (here a bull) is expiring, the triumphant horse is in agony, and his Bride is in disarray.
One downward-sweeping figure does hold a torch, however. A Magdalene, perhaps. A Sibyl in the darkness.
For again, none of this is taking place under the sun, where the town of Guernica was bombed during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). This is a scene of inner convulsion. The whole city is inside some covered place: it’s the fallen city of man, inside man.
The historical context represented by the violent chaos that ravaged Spain during the 1930s marks out the inflicting of suffering on the innocent—of non-combatants, of children—as the sign of a fallen humanity. This also highlights the painting’s Christological dimension: the innocent victim made to suffer.
Guernica is a figure for Jesus in the tomb—a cave where corpses shelter, where art is primitive, and where the hope of resurrection flowers even in darkness: for Picasso draws a flower above the broken sword.
We should add that the broken sword might be a psycho-sexual symbol for Picasso’s own regret at the behaviour of his bull—his animal self—in using women. The condition of the sinner who enters the cave—whose mind buckles like a horse and whose bull is readied for sacrifice—is one of regret. The experience depicted here is of ritual death and rebirth, and its trigger is guilt. Guernica is a confession, a repentance at having caused suffering.
I don’t say that Picasso’s art—or, specifically, his cubist work—should be central to a cultural aesthetic. It shouldn’t. But styles have functions, and abstract art can be an initiatic sketch; a suspension of critical focus; a leaving off of detail; a deliberate primitivism; and, if properly engaged, an aid in spiritual contemplation. There’s also something to be said here for integrating—of transforming—modernism (in art as in politics) within a broader, traditional understanding of man and society in their spiritual dimensions.
