Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso  

Libby Forbes 

Name of work: Responding to war 

Year created: 1941 

Medium used: Oil paint 

To me this piece caught my attention as I find it quite rare to find something that represents war in the way this painting does. To me after reading the description already on what it’s about, the thought of war comes to mind in a different way, almost as if a it was a savage time in history. The dogs represent the soldiers at their prime time, no weapons just defending what they had, even if it wasn’t a lot. It communicated every man for himself situation. Theres not a pack it’s just two dogs seemingly defending scraps of food from whatever may be threatening them. 

The one thing I really liked about this was that Picasso didn’t want to go out and take pictures of the brutality like what most artists do, instead he interpreted war in his own mind . I personally find this piece to stand out more than any other war piece. All the others if you simply type into google come up with images of very detailed scenes of death and destruction, or even for that many 

 revolutions. However, without context this would simply look like 2 dogs that are angry, its far more than that.  

The colors seem to be sinister. The use of black and red are the main colors that correspond to darkness and blood / violence. The shading used is a nice simple way of shading, this is the same type of shading when I want to draw a piece that can get a message across without getting distracted. As this was painted during WW2, he wasn’t looking for something to depict like a photographer. I am assuming that from what he has heard and possibly even experienced he knows that war is something that changed people. We all know dogs for being fluffy and loving, rather friendly, I like how he made them the opposite in this case. May that be on purpose it still gave a message. Sure you might not think of it as war when you see it, but you think of some violence, there’s some killing going on, or the bones wouldn’t be there, there would be no reason for them to be there unless he was fixated on painting the war in a natural way to the wild nature of the animal. The line on this piece is very thin, it’s more of a fine painted piece, there’s no brush stroked to really indicate how he would have painted this, may it been taken his time on it or actually was fast and rough with it. For me I can’t see any brush strokes, so this tells me that he did spend a lot of time on this, as it did represent something with a heavy heart at the time.