Alk War in Art When Essay

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The viewer is not directed to mourn the bodies that cover the ground, but rather celebrate alongside the victors, who charge forward carrying guns and swords. Instead, the piled corpses are merely a means to an end, a soft topping to the pile of rubble that is apparently necessary to secure Liberty and allow her to take charge.

The contrast in theme is particularly strong because the style of either artist does not immediately feel conducive to their apparent goal, but upon closer examination . While Delacroix is decidedly more "realistic" than Picasso, the realism of his corpses does not direct the viewer to sympathize with them, but merely adds some sense of gravity to central image of a glowing Liberty directing "the people" onward with a rifle and French flag. Thus, while one might imagine Delacroix's "realism" would instill some sort of thematic or ideological realism into the painting, it actually does the opposite. Similarly, one might initially imagine that Picasso's abstraction and skewed perspective would not be ideal to represent the brutal reality of the bombing of Guernica, but in fact, the horror of the event actually becomes more tangible through the impossibly twisted faces, awkwardly jutting limbs, and misshapen heads of his corpses.

Both paintings deal with the aftermath of a revolutionary movement, but interpret that aftermath in decidedly different ways. The bombing of Guernica was ultimately the result of a Fascist coup against the Spanish government, while the July Revolution was a revolt against the ruling Bourbon monarchy. While the French revolutionaries and the Spanish Fascists have quite reasonably been viewed with dramatically different levels of condemnation or celebration, the contrast between the two paintings is interesting because it forces one to consider how society legitimizes violence committed by popular demand while condemning violence committed by groups or individuals viewed as illegitimate or otherwise unpopular.

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Liberty Leading the People is a nationalistic, ostensibly democratic painting which celebrates the violence committed in the name of liberty, and the fact that the painting essentially celebrates this violence should be problematic for anyone who can understand the decidedly anti-war position of Guernica.

By comparing and contrasting Pablo Picasso's Guernica with Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, one is better able to understand and appreciate how the violence and horror of war, something which nearly everyone opposes in the abstract, comes to be legitimized and even celebrated when viewed through the lens of nationalism and popular demand. Both paintings deal with the aftermath of internal military conflicts, and use strikingly similar imagery to portray this aftermath, but they take decidedly different approaches to their topic. Guernica forces its viewers to confront the almost arbitrary, brutal savagery of war and the effects it has on human beings and their bodies, while Liberty Leading the People either celebrates death and the destruction of human beings or else disregards it, depending on how generous the critic is willing to be. While both paintings offer important insights into the public and private reactions to their respective topics, viewing them together forces one to reconsider the standards by which violence and war are legitimized and even celebrated......

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