Picasso: War, Combat, and Revolution

The current installation, which complements the Harvard course World Fairs, focuses on Picasso’s engagement with war, combat, and revolution. It explores Guernica’s core themes, the repressive Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, broader imagery of death, struggles of good and evil (represented by matadors, Minotaurs, Classical competition mythology), political and artistic revolution, and issues of desire and capture. Among those who faced Franco regime reprisals was Picasso’s friend Josep Rocarol. Book illustrations with African and other subjects (visual “primitivism”) had a seminal influence on Picasso in his early Paris years. These works include The Barbarian Dance and Salomé from 1905 and his transformative October 1906 figural studies. Studies based on this book imagery were foundational to his revolutionary March 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, subsequent Cubist interventions, and Guernica itself.