Guernica stays in Madrid, possibly inspired by Hemingway movie
Picasso’s best known work, the Guernica, will not be moved to the Basque Country, as the Basque National Party had requested, EITB reports:
The Spanish Senate’s Committee on Culture on Wednesday rejected a proposal by the PNV to amend the law regulating the Reina Sofia National Museum of Art, in which the Basque nationalists requested that Picasso’s painting of Guernica be moved to Euskadi. The Commission rejected the proposal by 22 votes to 3 in favour, meaning that the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid will not be contemplating the possible tranference of Picasso’s work to the Basque Country.
In related news, a renowned Spanish director of photography, José Luis Alcaine, claims to have discovered Picasso’s main source of inspiration for the images of the painting in the Hollywood version of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1933). Read more in El País, or the essay by Alcaine in Cameraman; for a still-by-still comparison click here; read Martin Minchom’s hypotheses on the work’s sources here and here.
The still-by-still comparison of the movie and the images seems quite profound. The complilation of all of them serves to demonstrate the chaos and hectic nature of the piece as a whole, much as the movie does as well
I agree that this connection between the Hemmingway film and Picasso’s Guernica is alarming, but it seems like the similar themes can be found in nearly any war film. Chaos, fire, and dead bodies are all very common to any war. This is not, in any way, discounting Minchom’s striking discovery though.