Picasso’s Guernica (Gigapixel)
guernica.museoreinasofia.es
guernica.museoreinasofia.es
If you have the chance to see this painting you should, no website can do it justice (although this is a very nice try).
Guernica is one of the few that did. Perhaps because it's massive compared to other well known paintings.
So, I just want to say, I second your recommendation for seeing it in person.
One thing I have not seen discussed here is the fact that this painting was commissioned by the (Spanish) Republican government. Effectively, there is a degree of propaganda to the painting. No shade on the guy… my other favorite war crime painting is the executions of the third of may by Goya, and it was also a political commission.
A few weeks ago I was vacationing in the Basque country, and realized Guernica (the town) was a mere half hour drive away. So we went. Although none of the town in any way reminds you of the depictions of the painting (save for some memorials), I kept feeling the same eerie dread even as I walked through a perfectly normal, pleasant sleepy town.
I was similarly stunned by one of the Anselm Kiefers at the Bilbao Guggenheim. Some paintings can only be appreciated in person.
That early, before the tour groups have made it that far into the museum, you can actually get the entire space to yourself for >30 minutes and it's never left me not weeping.
Picasso also painted another great work titled "Korea" in the same vein.
War is an abomination, something we should all fight against.
This theory couldn't be tested until late 1930's, when everyone was trying variations on the "technique", adding things like explosives, incendiary, gas... and escalating the amount of bombs needed to cause the mythical collapse. I think the record was 5 million tons of bombs over Vietnam (170 kg of bombs per capita), still the collapse didn't happen.
Unsure about the tonnage, but the parallels to current events [1] and the illusion that a bombing campaign will suffice to end a war in a matter of weeks is rather eerie to me.
Germany played a part. Snark aside, v1's and 2's weren't exactly 'targetted'.
Guernica was in many ways something both the british and republicans made stand out for propaganda.
There have been far worse things in the spanish civil wars.
For example Cabra was bombed in a day of market with the intention of killing and without being any kind of strategic strategic objective, way further than Guernica from other objectives and with more dead civilians actually.
It is just less well known bc of who did it.
Wikipedia says "The airstrike was carried out in the mistaken belief that Italian mechanized troops were stationed in the village. Once over the target, the pilots mistook the market's awnings for military tents." (Carlos Saiz Cidoncha, 2006)
It had already started way before, right when armed forces started using planes, in WW1. (I was thinking even earlier, in Libya during the Italo-Turkish war of 1911, but I haven't found confirmation in a quick search)
Mine owners hired planes to bomb striking miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921
When Picasso was interrogated by an SS officer about his painting Guernica, “Did you do that?” Picasso replied, “No, you did.”
The combination of those in proper size context to the astounding thing on that wall was... I dunno, very hard to bear? Chills and goosebumps. Just being in the presence of such genius. [Edited to add: I forgot! Many of the studies are clearly over complicated and colorful. And then you turn to see what was the final result. IMHO It's the same with genius software, in a different medium. Prose too, but maybe that's more contentious.]
There is no digital screen representation that can remotely approximate the psychic impact physical proximity to genius creates. I've felt this with many other greats as well.
I've sat alone in 3 different Rothko rooms. Damn. It's all I can say. You have to do it yourself. Tip: pan your eyes slowly while sitting in different corners.
The reason why I mention this is because those sketchbooks were the first time I got an insight in the process of an artist, realising that a painting doesn't just come out of thin air, but requires meticulous planning. (or so I thought) That's when I realised that anyone can be an artist and it's not just a matter of talent. Seeing the Geurnica and those sketchbooks was a pivotal moment for me to finally pick up a pencil and learn how to draw. Joke's on me... (although I realize the way Picasso works allows you to skip the planning phase, which is just not possible in other painting styles)
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/...
Tongue-in-cheek aside, I do think I agree with you in that (1) art, as perceived by us human meatbags, is art because of the human element of it (if not in creation, then in perception), and that (2) AI absent explicit steering trends towards a rather bland medium.
But there’s art in everything from the blurry, out of focus, disposable film cameras, to a 5-year-old’s crayon scribble scrabbles, to the neon glitter themes we used to copy-paste over our geocities and xanga pages, and as frustrating as it is to our own sensibilities, an AI prompt “draw a pink elephant” isn’t all that different.
In addition, the communication doesn't need to be explicit or intentional. It can be communicating something antithetical to the artist's original intent like a blurry and out of focus photo. Or it can even be antithetical to the piece itself like a lot of modern art (Fountain[1] comes to mind). I'm also sure that the 5-year-old will happily tell you a story about why they scribbled what they did. I'm not diminishing any of those. But if all the person contributes is a prompt, the text of that prompt is the extent of their art.
The natural question to pose is, does that mean that when the person who pressed the shutter button in that camera, that button press was the extent of their art? Of course not; intent, sensibility, timing, understanding there's something special about what's in front of you, preparing a composition, orchestrating poses, framing to create a special composition, manipulating the medium via speed or exposure or etc to create an appropriate texture... all those and more can play a part, and the button press is just the delivery method.
Millions of photos per day are not art even if they show a pretty thing, and nobody has a problem with that. Even when we actively try to capture something special, most people will later look at their photo and say "it shows the place, but it doesn't communicate anything like what being there made me feel".
So in the same way, I think the interesting discussion will be not that AI images are not art. Millions of prompts per day will not be art, and nobody (except grifters) has a problem with that. But how can AI become another vehicle for people to produce interesting art? Perhaps there's nothing special there. But I hope people with the drive to explore and the need to communicate continue giving it a shot and prove or disprove the notion that "it's just a prompt".
Beyond aesthetic judgements of good/bad or intentional stance re: communication with others, there is such a thing as "process art" which could also be described as communication with oneself, or as kind of being locked into conversation with the medium, or with the universe. People will get distracted here and want to fight about whether Pollack is good, but I think that's missing the point. It just happens to be a very direct way of engaging with the dialectic tension of order / chaos that's incompressible, irreducible, and completely without substitute.. and that's just one of many dialectics you could explore.
Another self-communicative aspect of art is about exploring the limits and mastery of technique, where the details and result per se don't matter much. You can see this with a bunch of dorks building useless programming languages and doing amazing stuff with them, or see it with a smith at a forge. Someone will say this is about being a technician or a craftsman, but I'd say no, those activities typically have a practical purpose. Especially if you're doing this for the joy of it without even caring whether you're actively learning something you can apply elsewhere, then it's probably art.
What makes Pollock’s art “art” is the context in which it was created. It’s not like One: Number 31, 1950 would have the same reputation today if you sent it back a couple centuries in a time machine. It’s appreciated because it’s part of an ongoing conversation.
I'd say it's much more about intent than the process, there are plenty of "Artists" on instagram (in quotes because I would not consider them artists), who paint by hand, surely talented people, but their images convey nothing. They are clearly marketing/branding themselves, the instagram post becomes the actual final output...I don't know.
"Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us" - Picasso
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJLH7JAsBHA
I recommend all of his videos actually, they are great.
If anyone wants to do their own tiled images, creating the tiles is the hard part, and the image processing toolkit VIPS will do that bit for you.
Keep the hope up! I created OpenZoom in my early 20s, then interned at Seadragon, and almost 20 years later, I still want to make it a reality.
Let me know if you have ideas for use cases / applications!
Easy hosting: https://zoomhub.net
Collections: https://zoomhub.net/showcase/photography/nasa
Comparison viewer: https://zoomhub-compare-viewer-demo.netlify.app/collections/...
Aside from the subject matter I was not prepared for the size of the work. It is one thing to see on a monitor or handheld screen, and quite another to see it full-scale. It is a qualitative change, not merely a quantitative one. So while this high fidelity picture allows one to study technique, color, and changes he made while painting, I think it misses the point. I say this without having read much commentary or critique of the work, but I imagine Picasso was so overwhelmed by Guernica that he wanted any viewer to overwhelmed, too. So if they do move it, I hope it is in a similar setting - in a moderately sized room, on a wall not much larger than the work itself, inescapable.
As ridiculous as it may sound, if you plan on visiting, plan two outings: one for Guernica, and one for the rest of the museum. That room and work are emotionally exhausting, and at least for my wife and I the intensity of that wing required a cooldown period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Shafrazi#Shafrazi_and_Gue...
> Tony Shafrazian was born in Abadan, Iran, to Iranian Armenian parents
> In 2020, Shafrazi publicly supported Donald Trump for president.
If nothing else, the universe has a sense of humor.
> The varnish applied in 1962 served as a layer to protect the polychrome and the red paint could be removed without damaging the original.
> At the present time, macrophotographs show reddish micro-residues, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. In some cases, this has entered the fissures.
The reason why he is influential and not forgotten is that he took painting in an entirely new direction and was able to convey emotion and philosophical ideas (like in Guernica, for example) in a completely different way than what was typical at the time. In a lot of his work he strips things down and distorts them on purpose to show multiple perspectives, which isn't something that realism usually tries to do.
That shift also reflected the era he lived in - one where visual arts played a central role in the cultural conversation - making him a true part of the zeitgeist that is hard to imagine now when visual art feels less central and more inward-looking.
A lot of what feels cliche now started with him, it only feels commonplace now as his influence was so massive.
Imagine being born in 1850 when everyone got around on horseback and paintings were realistic portrayals of people, landscapes, religious figures in muted tones. Impressionism (Van Gogh etc) arrives and is considered radical, then in 1907 you see _Les Demoiselles d'Avignon_ with its bright colors and abstract depiction of cavorting prostitutes. It would certainly provoke a reaction. The 20th Century had arrived.
I hope it leads to interesting discoveries and more art to appreciate for you!