Underskog

T.J. Clark discusses Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937), in an effort to understand how a work of such enduring political resonance emerged from Picasso’s deeply private and ‘autobiographical’ artistic universe. The lecture looks at the step-by-step making of Guernica, taking advantage of the set of photographs taken by Dora Maar as the painting progressed. Two central concerns of the lecture are Picasso’s gradual progress toward a conception of space appropriate to the new character of modern warfare, and the difficult issue of male and female roles in a moment of panic and pain.