The Violent and the Violated on the Same Canvas

 Violence bleeds with the stories of the violent and the violated. This observation cuts to the heart of one of the most profound and uncomfortable truths about violence: the complete narrative of violence must encompass both the hand that strikes and the face that receives the blow, both the system that crushes and the body crushed beneath it. To tell only half the story—to focus exclusively on victims' suffering or perpetrators' actions—is to miss the terrible human complexity that makes violence possible, sustainable, and repeatable across history.

Guernica, a massive black-and-white antiwar painting by Pablo Picasso, depicting a scene of chaos, suffering, and the brutal realities of war, with figures of a bull, a screaming horse, a fallen soldier, and grieving women, makes us see both the violator and the violated in war. In 1937, the Spanish town of Guernica was destroyed by Nazi bombers supporting Francisco Franco's fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 200 and 400 civilians in approximately three hours. Pablo Picasso, living in Paris and learning about it from the newspapers, spent the next month creating a 25-foot-wide canvas that would become one of the most powerful anti-war images in human history.

Guernica, 1937, Pablo Picasso; 11ft 5in X 25ft 6in; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.

Guernica begins, as we face the painting, at the right-hand end. There are open doors and from them run out a woman violated and mutilated, dragging her feet; another woman cries out in anger and sorrow with hands outstretched like a figure on the cross; and yet another woman pops out with a lamp, terrified, searching for dear possessions that are long lost, like the philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, who walked the streets with a lit lamp even in broad daylight. When asked for an explanation he had said, "I am looking for a human being." Here in the work, as she searches, we look on a struggling dove, the symbol of peace, vanishing into the darkness in front of the lamp.

In the middle of the large canvas we have a horse that is stabbed and struggling to move, and the warrior fallen and his weapon broken. An ancient psalm confirms, "The horse and the rider on which you put your trust are thrown into the sea." From the broken sword rises a plant and flower—our weapons of destruction and mass destruction must breakdown for an alternative world of peace and beauty to emerge. The texture used is like newspaper prints, pointing to Picasso confessing of his privilege of seeing and knowing violence and atrocities of war only through the daily newspapers.

The bulb in the centre burns so bright like a torture light; the harsh glare is shown as an unblinking eye. The electric bulb represents the new, destructive technologies of the twentieth century, such as the bomb and the bombers. Picasso may have played with the image and shape of the bomb because the Spanish word for lightbulb is bombilla, which sounds similar to the Spanish word for bomb, bomba; creating a clever double meaning that links it with destruction.

And to the extreme left we have a woman carrying a dead child looking up, demanding an answer. And that brings us to the image of the bull, the only figure that is standing erect. It has a face that is of half-man and half-bull, Minotaur, often figured in the works of Picasso, appearing in around seventy different artworks. The figure of the Minotaur dates back to Greek mythology: it inhabited a labyrinth and devoured innocent people. Picasso likened the Minotaur's muscular bull qualities to the bullfighting of his native Spain. Picasso's minotaur is a display of unconscious and uncontrolled desires. It had embodied him with his beastly desires. He had once said, "If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur."

The Minotaur is the only figure in the painting that is looking out as we look in—it is the personification of the violator standing accused. Primarily it is Picasso, who though a Spaniard, claimed and remained apolitical and silent when his country was going through fascist attacks, civil war, and the bloody bombing. Secondly it is the Spanish fascist regime, with its dictator, Francisco Franco, who curiously invited the Germans to come and bomb them. Finally, it is all of us watching others watching us and the victims of our conflicts and wars. Picasso’s Guernica is the aftermath of conflicts and wars anywhere, anytime; Gaza is a perfect contemporary example.

The rational, progressive, religious humanity that had produced universities, museums, philosophies, and parliaments had also produced the trenches to sit, hide and kill the other. Science that had given humanity penicillin, vaccines, painkillers, and anesthetics has given humanity machine guns and mustard gas too. Industries have turned violence and wars into profit-making businesses. Politicians use violence as a ploy to spread fear and retain control.

Postscript

Having said all these, believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. With the constant bombardment of news from the Russia-Ukraine war, Israel-Palestine war, other conflicts around the world including Manipur, Kashmir, and silent genocides that unfold right behind us, it is difficult to convince us of the above. Steven Pinker, a Canadian evolutionary psychologist, popular science author, a public intellectual and professor at Harvard University, unambiguously proves with data that violence is on the decline, whether it is about the waging of war, treatment of women, or even dealing with animals.

Steven Pinker gives multiple areas of decline of violence: humans have moved away from nonstate/anarchical existence to state societies, which he calls the 'pacification process'. There is a humanitarian revolution that has brought down homicides, tortures, and capital punishments. Slavery is abolished, and it is illegal all over the world today. There is a historic, unprecedented decline in interstate wars. After the great two wars in the first half of the 20th century, and the last atom bomb dropped in Nagasaki in 1945, contrary to the predictions, fewer states fight wars—which is called The Long Peace. And finally, the civil rights revolution put an end to or reduced the practice of lynching in most parts of the world along with violence directed towards women, children, and animals. Racist and patriarchal attitudes and atrocities are better checked and contained.

Though the intentions of violence: exploitation, dominance, revenge, utopian ideologies are still prevalent, Steven Pinker says that people have developed more self-control, empathy, moral sense, and of course reason. Yes. Violence is on the decline, but Pinker warns us that the decline is not guaranteed to continue automatically.

Written as editorial for Together national magazine.