''The Charnel House'' (French: ''Le Charnier'') is a 1944–1945 oil and charcoal on canvas painting by Spanish artist
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
, which is purported to deal with the
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...
of
the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
. The black and white '
grisaille
Grisaille ( or ; french: grisaille, lit=greyed , from ''gris'' 'grey') is a painting executed entirely in shades of grey or of another neutral greyish colour. It is particularly used in large decorative schemes in imitation of sculpture. Many g ...
' composition centres on a massed pile of corpses and was based primarily upon film and photographs of a slaughtered family during the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...
. It is considered to be Picasso's second major
anti-war
An anti-war movement (also ''antiwar'') is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term anti-war can also refer to pa ...
painting, the first being the monumental ''
Guernica
Guernica (, ), official name (reflecting the Basque language) Gernika (), is a town in the province of Biscay, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain. The town of Guernica is one part (along with neighbouring Lumo) of the mu ...
'' (1937), although it is smaller than its predecessor and unfinished. The painting is housed in the
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
in New York City.
Background
This painting is considered to be an anti-war statement, yet Picasso was largely
apolitical
Apoliticism is apathy or antipathy towards all political affiliations. A person may be described as apolitical if they are uninterested or uninvolved in politics. Being apolitical can also refer to situations in which people take an unbiased pos ...
until the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...
. His art dealer
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler said that he had been the "most apolitical man" he had ever known. The Spanish Civil War caused Picasso to become more concerned with politics, which led to the creation of his first anti-war painting, ''
Guernica
Guernica (, ), official name (reflecting the Basque language) Gernika (), is a town in the province of Biscay, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain. The town of Guernica is one part (along with neighbouring Lumo) of the mu ...
'' in 1937. In 1945, Picasso asserted his political role as an artist.
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he's a painter, or ears if he's a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he's a poet, or even, if he's a boxer, just his muscles? On the contrary, he's at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery, or happy events, to which he responds in every way ..No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.
During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, Picasso lived in Paris, while it was
occupied by the Nazis. Despite their attempts to win over French intellectuals with offers of food and coal, Picasso was persistently defiant, stating that, "A Spaniard is never cold". The impact of the Second World War resulted in many of Picasso's artworks becoming more political, and he depicted the effects of the occupation in dark, grey hues. ''The Charnel House'' is considered to be Picasso's most political painting since he painted ''
Guernica
Guernica (, ), official name (reflecting the Basque language) Gernika (), is a town in the province of Biscay, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain. The town of Guernica is one part (along with neighbouring Lumo) of the mu ...
'' in 1937. It was inspired by a documentary about a Spanish Republican family who were killed in their kitchen. The subject matter had particular significance to Picasso, as he had lost many friends during the war. It therefore represented a memorial to the Spanish Republicans who lost their lives during the occupation of France. Over the course of the Nazi occupation, approximately 75,000 people were executed in the region of Paris. Many French intellectuals died during this period, such as
Robert Desnos
Robert Desnos (; 4 July 1900 – 8 June 1945) was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.
Biography
Robert Desnos was born in Paris on 4 July 1900, the son of a licensed dealer in game and poultry at the '' H ...
,
Otto Freundlich
Otto Freundlich (10 July 1878 – 9 March 1943) was a German painter and sculptor of Jewish origin. A part of the first generation of abstract painters in Western art, Freundlich was a great admirer of cubism.
Life
Freundlich was born in ...
and
Max Jacob
Max Jacob (; 12 July 1876 – 5 March 1944) was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.
Life and career
After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic ca ...
. Other artists managed to escape France to reach other countries, such as
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall; russian: link=no, Марк Заха́рович Шага́л ; be, Марк Захаравіч Шагал . (born Moishe Shagal; 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. An early modernism, modernist, he was associated with se ...
,
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
,
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painting, painter, sculpture, sculptor, and film director, filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually ...
,
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti (, , ; 10 October 1901 – 11 January 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived and worked mainly in Paris but regularly visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and ...
and
Max Ernst
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism ...
.
In the autumn of 1944, Picasso was reported to have stated, "I did not paint the war, because I am not one of those artists who go looking for a subject like a photographer, but there is no doubt that the war is there in the pictures which I painted then."
Description
''The Charnel House'' is a sombre painting of a jumble of figures beneath a dining room table. It represents a murdered family that appears similar to the piles of bodies discovered in
Nazi concentration camps
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as concen ...
at the point of their liberation. Picasso stated that the work was a response to the first photographs that were taken in the concentration camps. The black and white palette reflects the war photographs that inspired the painting. Picasso created the image between 1944 and 1945, using oil and charcoal on canvas. The painting measures 199.8 cm x 250.1 cm.
Echoing the composition of ''Guernica'', Picasso used
Expressionist
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
forms to convey the tortured images of the figures, using funereal shades of gray, white and black. The image depicts the contorted bodies of a man, woman and child, who are sprawled on the floor beneath a table that holds eating utensils. Soon after its completion, the work was described by
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. (January 28, 1902 – August 15, 1981) was an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of ...
, as "a
Pieta without grief, an entombment without mourners, a requiem without pomp."
While creating the painting, Picasso is known to have made changes to the composition, evidenced by photographs taken in 1945 that documented the progress of the work. These changes included the evolving facial expressions of the figures. Picasso outlined the structure of the composition, before applying charcoal to the picture. The final image is incomplete, showing exposed areas of canvas, however Picasso was satisfied with it and donated it to the National Association of Veterans of the Resistance in 1946. Later that year he asked for it to be returned to make alterations to the painting. He then kept it in his possession until 1954, when it was sold to an American collector.
The use of a palette limited to black, white and grey is particularly notable in the composition of this painting. Picasso claimed that colour weakened the image and he therefore removed colour from his works in order to emphasise formal structure. His use of black and grey can be traced back to his
Blue
Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colour model. It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when obs ...
and
Rose
A rose is either a woody perennial flowering plant of the genus ''Rosa'' (), in the family Rosaceae (), or the flower it bears. There are over three hundred species and tens of thousands of cultivars. They form a group of plants that can be ...
periods and continued through to these later depictions of war atrocities. Picasso's obsession with line and form and monochromatic values is reminiscent of Palaeolithic cave paintings and European drawing. This predominant use of black and grey also featured in the works of Spanish masters, like
El Greco
Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos ( el, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος ; 1 October 1541 7 April 1614), most widely known as El Greco ("The Greek"), was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El G ...
,
José de Ribera
Jusepe de Ribera (1591 – 1652) was a painter and printmaker, who along with Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and the singular Diego Velázquez, are regarded as the major artists of Spanish Baroque painting. Referring to ...
,
Francisco de Zurbarán
Francisco de Zurbarán ( , ; baptized 7 November 1598 – 27 August 1664) was a Spanish Painting, painter. He is known primarily for his religious paintings depicting monks, nuns, and martyrs, and for his still-lifes. Zurbarán gained the nicknam ...
,
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (baptized June 6, 1599August 6, 1660) was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist of th ...
, and
Francisco de Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (; ; 30 March 174616 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and ...
, which influenced Picasso's art.
Picasso spent at least six months working on ''The Charnel House'' which has iconographic links to the graphic work of Picasso's Spanish compatriot
Francisco de Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (; ; 30 March 174616 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and ...
(1746–1828). Picasso's friend and biographer
Pierre Daix
Pierre Georges Daix (24 May 1922, Ivry-sur-Seine – 2 November 2014, Paris) was a French journalist, writer and art historian. He was a friend and biographer of Pablo Picasso.
As a young man, Daix was an ardent Stalinist. He joined the French Co ...
records that the title of the painting was not originally assigned to it by Picasso himself – the artist referred to ''The Charnel House'' as simply "my painting" or "the massacre"; nevertheless, in later years after the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
Picasso refused to retitle the painting once its identity as ''The Charnel House'' gained popularity, and it was first exhibited as such following Picasso's joining of the
Communist Party of Spain
The Communist Party of Spain ( es, Partido Comunista de España; PCE) is a Marxist-Leninist party that, since 1986, has been part of the United Left coalition, which is part of Unidas Podemos. It currently has two of its politicians serving as ...
in 1946.
Significance and legacy
William Rubin, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, said of the painting, "Its grisaille harmonies distantly echo the black and white of the newspaper images but, more crucially, establish the proper key for a requiem".
Clement Greenberg for ArtForum opines that, "''Charnel House'' is magnificently lyrical—and Picasso at his best is usually lyrical. And it is fitting that this picture should be lyrical, for it is an elegy, not an outcry or even a protest, and it is fitting that an elegy should chant rather than intone."
Adrian Searle for ''The Guardian'' commented that, "It is a deceptively complex and rich painting, with an amazing tension between the subject and the language used to depict it – the slaughtered family heaped dead under a kitchen table, their bodies intertwined. The more you stare at it, the more you get entwined, too.
In ''New York Magazine'', Mark Stevens opined, "''The Charnel House'' is yet another example of Picasso’s sublime intuition about how an artist must approach the century's horrors. Not long after he painted the picture, writers would argue that art must fall mute before the Holocaust – that no image could represent its meaning in anything but the most broken, partial manner. In ''The Charnel House,'' Picasso begins but does not presume to end the accounting of the Holocaust: His lines fade toward nothingness."
On the painting's significance, William Rubin, director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art said, "I saw ''The Charnel House'' as a kind of sequel, almost, to the larger subject of ''Guernica''. If ''Guernica'', inspired by the Spanish Civil War, raises the curtain on World War II, then ''The Charnel House'', done in 1945, lowers it. It can't fill the gap left by ''Guernica'', but it will play a role representing the collective-oriented Picasso, which is very rare."
Provenance
William Rubin for the Museum of Modern Art, purchased ''The Charnel House'' from the collection of
Walter P. Chrysler Jr.
Walter Percy Chrysler Jr. (March 27, 1909 – September 17, 1988) was an American art collector, museum benefactor, and collector of other objects such as stamps, rare books, and glassworks. He was also a theatre and film producer.
Early lif ...
for the equivalent of $1 million.
See also
* ''
Guernica
Guernica (, ), official name (reflecting the Basque language) Gernika (), is a town in the province of Biscay, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain. The town of Guernica is one part (along with neighbouring Lumo) of the mu ...
''
* ''
Dove
Columbidae () is a bird family consisting of doves and pigeons. It is the only family in the order Columbiformes. These are stout-bodied birds with short necks and short slender bills that in some species feature fleshy ceres. They primarily ...
''
*''
Massacre in Korea
''Massacre in Korea'' (French: ''Massacre en Corée'') is an expressionistic painting completed on 18 January 1951 by Pablo Picasso. It is Picasso's third anti-war painting and depicts a scene of a massacre of a group of naked women and children b ...
''
*
List of Picasso artworks 1941–1950
This is a list of some works by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, from 1941 on to 1950.
*1941 ''Dora Maar au Chat''
*1941 '' Tete de femme (Dora Maar)'' (in plaster)
*1941 '' Nature Morte''
*1942 ''Nature morte à la Guitare''
*1942 ''Bull's Head''
...
Works cited
*
References
External links
''The Charnel House''MOMA
{{DEFAULTSORT:Charnel House, The
Paintings by Pablo Picasso
Anti-war paintings
1944 paintings
Paintings about death
1945 paintings
War paintings
Political art
Works about the Holocaust
Unfinished paintings